What is it with oranges?

Oranges may not be the only fruit, or orange the only colour but they are distinctly troublesome all the same. Much of my early life was spent picking over fruit, first in markets then in supermarkets, to avoid buying the products of apartheid South Africa or Francoist Spain. What is it about oranges that they would only grow in fascist soil? There was temporary relief when democratic oranges arrived from Florida; soon, however, Cesar Chavez and the United Fruit Workers revealed to us the appalling conditions under which Chicano farm workers toiled in California and there was little reason to believe Florida gang-masters were more humanitarian.

Following the death of Franco, Spanish oranges became edible and I could indulge myself on liberated fruit and later emancipated Outspans entered our home. But the need for careful inspection of labels did not stop, Jaffa oranges were still the problematic fruit of a discriminatory regime. For many years this was an individualised gesture of disdain for a state that granted me the right of return (how could I return somewhere I had never been - a right of return to Shepherds Bush at pre-BBC house prices, now that’s another matter ) but denied access to their homes to people expelled within my lifetime.

This is no longer an individual gesture. BIG -Boycott Israeli Goods – was organised to co-ordinate and promulgate the feelings of many others. Recently a group of us, of Jewish origin, formed J-BIG, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods, to demonstrate that there are many who will not support Israel – an apartheid state or worse.

Jimmy Carter was roundly attacked for using the A word to describe Israel. But Apartheid means, in strict terms ‘separate development’ and has Israel not called the wall it has built, deep within the West Bank, the ‘separation fence’. So Apartheid Wall seems an appropriate term – it looks far more like a wall than a fence so, again, this terminology is accurate. But the separation in Israel is in many ways worse than South Africa’s was. South Africa depended upon its Black labour force to keep its mines and farms running which made the growth of trade union activity a possible and effective means of survival and opposition. Israel has adopted a policy of relying less and less upon its Arab population, denying them work, free movement and the possibility of work based organisation. They have, instead, encouraged immigration of people who would qualify as Jews under the Nazi’s Nuremberg classification but do not under rabbinic tradition.

South Africa had no settlement policy, occupying the most fertile land within the Bantustans (of course, at a national level, the whites had already grabbed all the best bits) and garnering to themselves all the water resources. Israel’s settlements, established in violation of international law, eat into the West Bank like termites, insisting on no-go zones for the Palestinian populations around each gated community, and appropriating farmland and demolishing inconvenient houses.

It is not just the fruit, of course, but the very colour orange has been adopted by separatists and as the marker of racial and religious discrimination. Orange Order and Orange Free State are names to trouble any believer in human rights. The word itself seems to be a disease vector; Orange, in Provence, was one of the first towns in France to be run by le Pen’s National Front.

But why Israel, why now? Advocates of consumer, professional and academics boycotts of Israel are asked ‘why pick on Israel?’ Israel is not uniquely awful, and neither was South Africa: countries from Burma to North Korea to Sudan and beyond also treat their people with contempt and brutality. Israel is our problem, as was South Africa, in ways these other countries are not. Israel was created in response to Europe’s inability to live at peace with its Jewish citizens; Israel claims, despite geography, to be part of Europe, a participant in the Eurovision song contest and the EUFA football competitions. Israel has privileged economic and academic arrangements with the EU; Israel is the recipient of United States military aid at level that would have made Latin American dictators of previous decades green (or orange) with envy; and Israel is deeply implicated in planning America’s disastrous strategy in the Middle East, a strategy that has sorely damaged Britain and the other European countries that have become ensnared in it.

Many of the most febrile advocates of Israel’s expansion have been American and European recent immigrants. It was striking, when listening to the accents of the diehard resisters of the evacuation of the Gaza settlements, how many of these people fighting the Israeli army and police were fleeing the pogroms of Brooklyn and Redbridge. It was also striking how small the risks of violent response such people ran from their aggression, compared with the quotidian experience of Palestinian children and teenagers.

That is why I cannot buy a Jaffa orange, a Carmel avocado or a Palwin bottle (although I must admit the last is no hardship). In the last century we knew there was blood on the coal, these are blood oranges.

The irony is that orange as a colour is very difficult to wear with a pale complexion and only looks good against a darker skin. It is my hope that soon I can buy my fruit for taste and quality not as a small but continuing gesture of solidarity with an oppressed people.

Who knows you are a dog?

The loss of 5 million tax records has highlighted the degree of state knowledge about each of us. The collection of tax data is largely uncontroversial, even though its handling and the tax decisions made are not; however other publicly collected data is, in itself, far more problematic.
In Britain we live in a surveillance society. There are over 4 million CCTV cameras here, over one in five of all the world’s cameras, and this only one visible form of surveillance. We may look askance at the degree of social conformity demanded by Singapore but spitting out chewing gum is far more likely to be aught on camera in London. Surveillance has broad public support because it is widely supposed to improve the personal security of the ‘law-abiding citizen’: seen only as a threat to the miscreant and the hoody.
Hoods, with all the threat that the bare faced may experience in their presence are a rational and effective response to surveillance: hoodies are a fashion statement induced by cameras. The hoovering up of our unhooded images may seem no more problematic that the gathering up of our national insurance numbers along with our bank details. That is until the CD goes missing and our faces become tradable on e-BadaBing and are uploaded on to a Russian server.
It is striking that among a landscape populated by public IT procurement fiascos there are two outstanding successes: London’s congestion charge and Oyster systems. This poses the question of what is common between these two schemes; it may be that Transport for London have discovered an elixir that has escaped the sight of al other local and national government agencies. It may not, however, be totally paranoid to note that both these schemes had the (un)intended side effect of delivering high quality surveillance data to the security services: is it more important to have MI5 in your client team than TfL?
Mike Power of LSE described in ‘The Audit Explosion’ how the response to audit failure was the, frequently successful, demand for more and more audit – it was the demand for further audit that was successful, not the further auditing. We are now told that the appropriate solution to technology failure is more, and more expensive, technology. CCTV is of debatable use in reducing crime and disorder. It is more clearly implicated in the paradox of falling crime rates being accompanied by increasing fear of crime. Every CCTV camera reminds us the possibility of attack, and while giving surface reassurance, more deeply reminds us of the possibility of attack. So CCTV always increase fear of crime, regardless of their effect on crime rates and every camera increases the felt need for more cameras.
The belief in the efficacy of CCTV and advanced technology for crime fighting is systematically reinforced by TV cop dramas. This come in a number of forms, from the technology drooling of the CSI franchise—Top Gear for geeks—to the slightly seedy but tech savvy Spooks to the poor beat PCs watching hours of CCTV on The Bill. The result is the same, the techie always gets his (sic) man. The discrepancy between this vision of perfection and the miscarriages of justice that surface in the Appeal Court as a result of the unreliability of this evidence is less often noted.
There was a famous 1990s’ cartoon showing a dog at a computer saying, “In cyberspace nobody knows you are a dog.” The caption of any current version should state, “In surveillance space, everyone who wants to know knows you are a dog.”
I took a break from writing this to watch Newsnight. On it I saw the Secretary of State for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, John Hutton, explaining to an even more sceptical than usual Jeremy Paxman that the loss of the HMRC data made the ID register, which will stand behind the ID cards, yet more pressing. Biometric data would be the padlock that secured our identities, not the unregulated overflow pipe spilling our personal identifiers willy-nilly.
Eisenhower warned of the Military-Industrial Complex. That hasn’t gone away but it now has a child, the Surveillance-IT Complex. This devils spawn provides security for the shareholders, career prospects for the police and increasing vulnerability for the rest of us.