Long before the watermelon became a symbol of Palestinian defiance, another fruit bore the weight of struggle — the orange. Once, Palestinians imagined their future nation with a flag tinged with the color of Jaffa’s oranges, a symbol that reflects Palestinians’ deep connection to their land. But history followed a different path.
The Jaffa orange, once celebrated as the pride of Palestinian agriculture was stolen — its groves seized, its name rebranded, its origins erased. What was once a lifeblood of Palestinian trade and culture became an Israeli export, sold worldwide under a false identity. Yet, even in exile, the orange refused to surrender. In 1978, it reemerged poisonous. A guerrilla group of Palestinian workers transformed Jaffa’s most famous fruit into a weapon against the very economy built on their dispossession using a small — nonlethal — dose of mercury.
The story of Jaffa’s oranges is not just one of theft — it is one of rebellion. A rebellion that asks: if an orange can be made unswallowable if its history can be reclaimed even after erasure, then what else can we take back? Perhaps, the time has come to raise the orange once more, not just as a memory, but as a flag, a lesson in how the land and its symbols refuse to be uprooted.
Jaffa Oranges: A Settler-Colonial Harvest
Figure 1: Boys carrying Orange baskets in Jaffa. Pre. 1933. Source: Khalil Raad Collection, Institute for Palestine Studies - Library Archives and Special Collections
Palestine’s history is deeply entwined with oranges — specifically, the world-renowned Jaffa orange. As early as the 19th century, these oranges introduced the world to the richness of Palestinian soil and the agricultural mastery of its farmers. Jaffa became a center for orange production, with Palestinian farmers developing meticulous grafting techniques to perfect the Shamouti orange: thick-skinned, juicy, and nearly seedless. In 1937, Palestine had become one of the leading orange exporters to Britain, even surpassing Spain. Yet, as history has shown, the white man’s admiration for Palestinian excellence is often fleeting. It is celebrated until it threatens colonial ambitions. Then, it must be stolen, rebranded, erased.
The Zionist movement had long recognized the economic and symbolic power of the Jaffa orange, understanding that control over Palestine’s most lucrative agricultural export would provide both financial stability and a nationalist foothold. Zionist settlers deliberately targeted the most fertile lands, including the coastal plains where citrus groves flourished, as part of a broader strategy to establish Jewish economic dominance in preparation for statehood. Through land purchases, financial backing, low-interest loans, and agricultural training, Zionist institutions ensured that Jewish farmers had a financial and technological advantage over Palestinian growers backed by the long-term capital backing of Keren Hayesod — the financial arm of the Jewish National Fund (JNF).
Until the late 1930s, Jews and Arabs held comparable shares of citrus-producing land. Yet, Jewish-owned groves produced more than Palestinian ones — not due to superior cultivation, but through highly centralized marketing and well-organized cooperative movement that streamlined marketing and packing, whereas most Palestinian farmers sold their produce individually through around 270 different export agents, limiting their market competitiveness. For example, the Jewish Cooperative Society of Orange Growers Pardess, founded in the early 1900s, enabled Zionist growers to pool resources, standardize exports, and dominate international citrus markets, while Palestinian farmers, lacking access to similar financial structures, struggled to compete. In contrast, Palestinian groves relied more heavily on their own labor and indigenous cultivation practices.
Yet even with their technological advancement and centralized marketing, Jewish grove owners initially sought to continue exploiting Palestinian labor due to its lower cost. This practice, however, clashed with the Histadrut’s push for the “conquest of labor” — a policy aimed at enforcing Jewish-only employment in agriculture. By the mid-1930s, tensions arose between Jewish citrus grove owners and the Histadrut, as the latter sought to replace Palestinian workers despite the owners' economic incentives to continue employing them.
This economic encroachment mirrored the broader settler-colonial strategy: control the land by first controlling its resources. By securing a dominant share of Palestine’s most profitable agricultural sector, the Zionist movement laid the economic foundation for state-building while marginalizing indigenous Palestinian producers. In doing so, they transformed the Jaffa orange — once a shared symbol of Palestinian agricultural success — into a tool of settler-colonial expansion, embedding it within the mythology of the emerging Israeli state.
The Orange Sabotage and Its Legacy
Figure 2. Screenshot from Free Palestine Newspaper March 1978
In the early weeks of February 1978, forty-seven years ago, before the Boycott movement had become mainstream, a group called “the Arab Revolutionary Army” took matters into their “own Jaffa oranges,” injecting them with mercury to sabotage the Israeli economy. These oranges, now weaponized, rebelled against their captors in Israel and those who consume Israeli products uncritically.
Once kidnapped — torn from the trees that bore them, exiled from the hands that nurtured them — their grief slowly turned to anger. Their sorrow, concealed beneath polished, thick skin, began to harden. It metabolized into a weapon, a symbol of resistance and rage damaging the economic position of Israel.
The first wave of rebellious oranges, armed with mercury and steel, emerged in the Netherlands. More soon followed, marching their way into Germany, Belgium, and Sweden.
“The British army ordered its soldiers stationed in Germany to return suspect oranges to the Naafi.” Quote from Free Palestine newspaper, March 1978, p. 2
Western media rushed to condemn “orange terrorism.” Time Magazine called the tampered oranges “a shock to Europe,” and published that Palestinians “now send their freedom fighters to stab — if not with the sword, at least with the syringe — the harmless Jaffa orange.” In the Washington Post, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s government declared that they “would never permit the creation of a Palestinian state headed by orange poisoners,” calling the act “barbarism unparalleled in human history.” In the same article, the U.S. State Department condemned the act as “a particularly contemptible form of international terrorism.” Media outlets amplified stories of poisoned children to manufacture sympathy and outrage while erasing the colonial violence that had already poisoned the land, the economy, and the very history of the Jaffa orange itself. And of its children.
Yet, the group responsible for the injections — claiming to be a collective of oppressed Palestinian workers in the occupied territories — clarified their intent in a letter sent to eighteen European and Arab governments, as well as media outlets. They declared that the fruits had been injected by oppressed Palestinian laborers, emphasizing that their goal was “not to kill the population, but to sabotage the Israeli economy, which is based on suppression, racial discrimination, and colonial occupation.” The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), meanwhile, denied any involvement.
The article published in the Free Palestine newspaper in March 1978, remains one of the few Palestinian sources I have found that details the sabotage. The article reads:
“Whoever the members of the group or its real motives, the scare which it generated produced immediate confusion and a sharp fall in the sale of Israeli fruit… Police investigating the doctoring of the fruit discovered that the perpetrators’ claim that the fruit had been injected in Israel was untrue: most of the fruit was injected while in the shops where it was bought. Secondly, the type of mercury used was not particularly harmful in the doses used. Of 21 doctored oranges found in Holland, only six were Israeli. The others included one from Egypt, one from Morocco, and 11 from Spain.”
Following that, many incidents later followed, but this time the article states it was “carried out by boys, imitating earlier widely publicised incidents.” The article notes:
“For the Israelis, the scare could not have come at a worse time — right in the middle of the picking and exporting season. Citrus fruits represent about 6.7 percent of the country’s annual exports and around 23 percent go to the members of the EEC, the area affected by the scare. Earlier in the season, the foreign currency value of this year’s exports was estimated at $200m. So, [the] seriousness of the situation to the already weak Zionist economy can be judged from the announcement by the chairman of the Knesset economic committee on 12th February that since the first discovery of contaminated oranges, sales abroad had dropped by a third, and that if the decrease in sales continued, citrus exports this season could suffer losses approaching $30m.”
In 1979, Israel quietly removed the "Jaffa" label from its exported oranges, shipping them in unmarked crates to avoid diplomatic scrutiny.
Even in exile, Palestinian Jaffa oranges and unidentified workers whether abroad or in Palestine had forced a reckoning.
Figure 3. Screenshot from Free Palestine newspaper, January 1979
The Wrinkled Orange of Exile
After the Nakba of 1948, the orange became a symbol of all that was lost. It stood for stolen homes, uprooted groves, erased histories, and a nation forced into exile. Ghassan Kanafani captures this anguish in The Land of Sad Oranges:
"I watched the long line of cars enter Lebanon, leaving long behind them the land of orange... We were heaped up there, withdrawn from our childhood, away from the land of oranges… oranges that died, an old farmer once told us, if watered by strange hands."
As Palestinians mourned, Israel was quick to rebrand Jaffa’s oranges as its own. But Palestinians did not sit idle, and their oranges did not remain sad. Scholar Nasser Abufarha reminds us that Kanafani did not stop at mourning; he transformed the orange into a call for revolutionary action. For Kanafani, the orange marked not a final destiny but a moment in history, a reminder to Palestinians in exile of where they belong and where they must return. It was not meant to wither in exile. It, too, could fight back.
To place the orange back on the flag it belongs to through resistance, through breaking free from the hands of those who kidnapped the land. The orange was not meant to remain captive in grief. It, too, can rage.
The Palestinian Orange Flag: A Symbol of Palestinian Nationalism
In 1929, amid the anti-colonial uprisings in Palestine, the Jaffa-based Filastin daily newspaper invited readers to imagine a flag for an independent Palestine. Among the many responses emphasizing Arab identity and religious symbols, a flag featuring the color orange stood out. Jaffa’s orange groves, deeply embedded in Palestinian life and economy, became a marker of identity, pride, and resistance. The proposed flag reflected a growing national consciousness, where the land and its fruits were inseparable from the political aspirations of its people.
Though this flag was never officially adopted, its existence is a testament to how Palestinians envisioned their nationhood through the symbols of their land. The orange, once a fruit of trade and prosperity, later became a symbol of dispossession and resistance.
As the Israeli state hijacked Jaffa’s orange market and branded it as its own, Palestinians continue refusing to relinquish their connection to their groves, carrying the memory of oranges as both a wound and a rallying cry for liberation.
Figure 4. The orange and the “Cross in the Crescent”: imagining Palestine in 1929 Tamir Sorek
Too Palestinian to Peel: The Jaffa Orange and Erasure
Settler-colonial identity is fluid and fragile — built on theft, sustained by erasure, and constantly adapting and camouflaging to attempt and maintain indigeneity. Janna Gur’s account of Israel’s orange industry exemplifies this. She frames the decline of Jaffa oranges as a natural market shift, reducing a deeply political transformation to consumer preference. She acknowledges that Zionist settlers built their citrus empire on Palestinian land and labor but sidesteps how Israeli policies engineered the industry's collapse.
The stolen Jaffa orange, once the pride of Israeli agriculture, became too Palestinian to peel. Thick-skinned, resistant, stubborn — it does not separate easily from the hands that cultivated it or the soil that birthed it. In contrast, Israel’s newer citrus export, the tangerine, was rebranded as the “prince” of the Jaffa brand. Unlike its predecessor, the tangerine is effortless and obedient — thin-skinned, easily peeled, requiring no history, no memory. A fruit with no roots. Replacing the Jaffa orange with tangerine is not merely a shift in market trends; it represents the severance of Palestinian ties to the land, transforming the citrus economy into one that can no longer be traced back to its original stewards.
This pattern follows a familiar settler-colonial blueprint: First, extract the land’s resources to build a state; then, once secure, discard the symbols that expose the theft. By the late 1970s, after the Orange Sabotage shook Israeli markets, Israel quietly began phasing out the Jaffa label in global exports. Perhaps it was preemptive damage control, or perhaps the orange had become too difficult to swallow — its history too bitter, too insistent, too present. The very name they had stolen had become a liability, a reminder of the colonial history they had tried to bury.
Again, Janna Gur’s article on “The Rise and Fall of Israel’s Oranges” mirrors this erasure, presenting the decline of the Jaffa orange as a mere economic shift while ignoring the foundational role of Palestinian dispossession and colonization. The Jaffa orange — originally cultivated by Palestinian farmers long before Zionist settlement — became a powerful symbol of Israeli agricultural success, its branding erasing the Indigenous labor and expertise that nurtured the orange groves for decades.
She recalls how Jewish citrus farmers were once warned, “One bad orange will not just spoil the whole crate but imperil our reputation as the best orange growers in the world.” But the fear wasn’t about fruit — it was about the story. Israel’s obsession with the “perfect” product mirrors its fixation on a spotless national image — one where Palestinian history is written out of existence.
As the 1978 Sabotage tells us: the Jaffa orange refuses to disappear. Sticky, stubborn, and impossible to separate from the soil it came from. Yet today it remains on supermarket shelves under an Israeli label, its real story buried beneath layers of branding. But for Palestinians, it is still a symbol — not just of what was stolen, but of what refuses to be swallowed.
Resistance as a Language of Reclamation
Resistance is a rebellion against logic — a refusal to accept the world as it is. It demands creativity, imagination, and the ability to make the impossible material.
From cacti to olives, poppies to oranges, spoons to bulldozers, olive branches to keys, and watermelons to sticks — Palestinians have continually inverted the meanings of objects through creative, defiant, dignified, acts of liberation. They turn spoons into jackhammers, rocks into rockets, walls into rubble, oranges into balls of steel. They transform the mundane into battlegrounds of freedom.
Perhaps it is time to reclaim the orange flag as a statement. In the next protest, as watermelons wave through the crowds, let the orange rise too, telling the story of the sad yet rebellious oranges, and the story of a stolen land, stolen labor, and a resistance that refuses to be uprooted.
Every time you walk past an orange in a supermarket, every time you peel one open, remember: some fruits bear the weight of history, and some histories refuse to be swallowed.
And then ask yourself — if even an orange can rebel, what are we waiting for?
