Strange Fruits

Dinner was finished. Because they had eaten so well, the four children of Mr. and Mrs. Frans Bergs in the southern Dutch town of Maastricht were granted a favorite treat for dessert: big, golden Jaffa oranges from Israel. Unexpectedly, the children complained about the taste. "When we took a closer look," Mrs. Bergs said later, "we discovered small, silver-colored globules inside." The children were rushed to a hospital to have their stomachs pumped; police summoned to investigate erroneously assumed that Mr. Bergs had tried to poison his family. But Dutch health officials began a nationwide search, and by week's end they had discovered 25 oranges from Israel that had been injected with mercury. More sabotaged Israeli oranges were found in nine West German towns.

The pea-sized pellets were not soluble mercury, which can severely damage the kidneys if ingested, but the metallic mercury of the kind used in thermometers --potentially dangerous to very young children but not to adults. Nonetheless, the tampered oranges were a shock to Europe, especially after it became known that they were fruits of political terrorism. In a letter to the West German government, an extremist group calling itself the Arab Revolutionary Army-Palestine Command claimed it had doctored the fruit to disrupt Israel's economy.

At least temporarily, it may have done so. In West Germany, which annually imports 140 million tons of citrus products from Israel, sales were halted while the fruit was checked out. In The Netherlands, supermarket managers put their Jaffa oranges in cold storage until the poisoning scare blew over.

For Israel, the rash of ruined oranges constituted both a new kind of Palestinian attack and a potential economic disaster. The $172 million annual orange export trade is one of the country's major sources of foreign exchange. Israeli growers insist that the injecting took place at shipping centers in Europe and not at the groves themselves; their hypothesis sounded more and more reasonable as first Spanish and then Moroccan oranges, which move through the same European distribution system, displayed the same mercury traces. The Jerusalem Post sarcastically attacked the Palestinians: "They now send their freedom fighters to stab--if not with the sword at least with the syringe--the harmless Jaffa orange."

Leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization were embarrassed by what appeared to be a propaganda boomerang against them. They disavowed the Arab Revolutionary Army and denied that Palestinians had had anything to do with the fruits of terrorism.

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