Correspondents' Correspondence
French Update Paris—With the approach of March 12, the date of the first-round balloting in France's legislative elections, the contest is shaping up as a lopsided three-cornered affair that has...
...Letters signed by an unknown Arab terrorist group claiming that the "poisoning" had been done by "Arab workers in the occupied lands" were then received in several European capitals...
...But in the areas I visited, fuel is not exactly the Number One topic of conversation...
...Without such an accord, it is widely agreed, the Union of lhe Left—a loose-knit alliance of Communists, Socialists and Left-Radicals—cannot win control of the National Assembly...
...On the whole, the attitudes I encountered suggest that the period of national relief, which began when Gerald Ford took over, is continuing under Jimmy Carter...
...Whatever the origin of the mischief this time, Israel must urgently concern itself with ways to protect its agricultural exports from sabotage...
...They can capitulate to the Socialists, or they can accept the responsibility lor depriving the left of the chance of ptevailing at the polK...
...And the fact that in our age the most irrational acts of terrorism are committed with evident impunity, it ought finally to be recognized, makes the worst rumors credible.—Eliahu Salpeter...
...It was all in a good cause, though: The idea was to convince the public that tam-pered-with oranges were easily detectable...
...some from Morocco, and one or two Cypriot lemons and grapefruit...
...French Update Paris—With the approach of March 12, the date of the first-round balloting in France's legislative elections, the contest is shaping up as a lopsided three-cornered affair that has the Socialists (PS) on one side and the Communists (PCF) and Center-Right coalition on the other...
...But once the trouble started, crackpots and pranksters apparently joined the "game...
...In the last legislative elections (1973) and the Presidential elections of 1974, the Center-Right was the beneficiary of these ballots...
...Carter wanted to de-pomp the Presidency and has apparently succeeded—to the point where he has removed a good deal of the surrounding mystery and grandeur, too...
...That is the figure the PCF has insisted it would have to come close to before it could accept a second-round withdrawal arrangement leaving only the Leftist candidates who scored highest the first time out in the decisive March 19 runoffs...
...For Israelis, the episode brought home the existence of still another vulnerable front in the economic war being waged against them by the Arabs...
...The most he would accede to, he insists, is a meeting for the purpose of ratifying a withdrawal accord and perhaps signing a statement of broad objectives...
...For in the very first days of the Great Poisoned Oranges Scare that hit Europe during the second half of January, every television network presented detailed instructions...
...we seem to be experiencing a calm not unlike that one that marked much of the Eisenhower era...
...The "anonymity" of the modern marketing route from raw material to supermarket shopping cart offers many opportunities for tampering with the edible merchandise...
...The Israelis decided, for the longterm good of their citrus exports, not to participate in the price-cutting campaign...
...The Center-Right, of course, has its own good reasons for hammering away at Mitterrand's party...
...And after years of turbulence, Americans are rather enjoying the change of pace.—Bob Schteffer The Fruit of Terror Brussels—There probably isn't a child in Western Europe now who does not know how to inject oranges with mercury taken from a household thermometer...
...I got away last week, traveling through several of the border and Southern states in an attempt to discover how Americans feel about themselves and about some of the more pressing domestic and international issues...
...The scare was on...
...The fierceness of the Communists' offensive against their erstwile allies is a measure of the desperation of their effort to capture 25 per cent of the first-round votes...
...Although the Israeli government was quick to see the affair as yet another example of mad Arab fanaticism, some European trade circles expressed doubt about the extent and the nature of the political motives involved...
...in Britain, at least, some youngsters admitted having injected oranges at a local fruit counter...
...Since public opinion polls give the PCI' little hope of reaching the 25 per cent goal, despite the intensity of its campaign, it is beginning to appear that the Communists have fallen into a trap that is largely of their own making...
...Surprisingly, my journey revealed a good deal of interest in developments there, especially in what the Russians and Cubans are up to...
...Or that not a single case of significant harm was reported...
...The traditional support that has always existed for Israel remains, yet in my judgment Sadat has made more new friends in America in the last few months than has Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin...
...We shall soon know whether they will again.—Norman Jacobs On the Road Washington—Every so often it does a reporter in this city good to get away for a while...
...It mattered little that of the tens of millions of oranges marketed on the Continent daily, just 14 or 15 were discovered to have mercury droplets inside them...
...The Knerg) Crisis...
...Although the latest polls have been somewhat encouraging, it expects the elections to be close, with the outcome very likely depending on the so-called sw ing vote, representing anywhere from 2-5 per cent of the electorate...
...Beyond such doomsday dangers, the orange scare should remind Western governments of some more immediate threats in the psychological domain...
...For Europeans, the most obvious lesson was the exposure of their food distribution system...
...To be sure, I was travelling in the South and mainly outside large urban areas, but I found considerable interest in the Egyptian President and the Arab cause—interest that I do not remember from a year ago...
...It was agreed, however, that even if the initial contamination was the work of Arabs, it was done—as Jerusalem pointed out from the very outset—in Europe: Had the injection taken place in Israel, the damaged fruit would have been spoiled by the time the ships carrying it arrived in Antwerp, Rotterdam or Hamburg...
...This is no secret to terrorists who might use chemicals more dangerous than mercury to poison foodstuffs less controllable than fresh oranges...
...It was instructive and frightening to see how easily a relative handful of contaminated—not poisoned—oranges could create a near mass-psychosis...
...Either way, the cost to their image and future will be heavy...
...The Israelis also found that their economic competitors were not above attempting to accentuate the "political" nature of the affair, in the hope that customers would buy their oranges instead...
...But another factor militating against a reconciliation is the Socialists' rejection of the Communist demand for a meeting of the two parties between the first and second rounds to settle differences over the Left's platform, the Common Program...
...With rotting stocks piling up in their warehouses, importers frantically tried to get rid of their Spanish, Moroccan and Italian fruit at cut-rate prices...
...the collective hysteria of medieval well poisonings is apparently closer to us than the passage of centuries might indicate...
...and that nobody could really be poisoned by metallic mercury, since it is a nonabsorbable, nontoxic substance...
...Recent reports that Fidel Castro has to use Soviet pilots to fly Cuban home patrols because so many Cuban pilots are in Africa seemed to have made a deep impression in most places on my itinerary...
...The Middle East...
...flic Communists thus confront a fateful choice...
...The kinds of questions that traveling reporters were often asked in the Johnson and Nixon days—such as "Why are you doing this to our President?—or, at the other end of the spectrum, "Why are you guys letting the President get away with all this...
...As public relations efforts go, Anwar Sadat's IV 'diplomacy has probably been one of the most successful ventures in recent years...
...The Carter Administration...
...Plenty of gasoline is available—although at higher prices than in the past, of course—and perhaps that is why many citizens view (he energy problem as less serious than the White House claims it is...
...simply did not surface...
...For better than a fortnight, sales of virtually all oranges dropped to almost nil...
...For the two have been blasting away at the Socialists a good deal more energetically than at each other...
...The uncertainty about the actual culprits, on the one hand, and the persistent nature of the scare, on the other, offer some important lessons to both the Israelis and the Europeans...
...The Center-Right propaganda campaign is therefore aimed at convincing the undecided that the PS is as dangerous as the PCF, and that a vote for the former is in effect a vote for the latter...
...Africa...
...These tactics have worked in the past...
...Now the polls indicate strong competition for them from the Socialists...
...Again somewhat surprisingly, most people appear fairly sanguine...
...People in Washington are still arguing about it...
...With reports of Soviet chemical warfare research again in the headlines as well, there is clearly a need to devise methods for protecting food supplies...
...Political observers here still find it difficult to believe the PCF will not relent at the last moment and avoid sabotaging a possible Union of the Left victory by entering into a withdrawal agreement...
...There was, in fart, little curiosity about the White House at all...
...What follows is several of my impressions, collected unscientifically, in relatively prosperous sections of the country...
...Socialist leader Francois Mitterrand has flatly refused this condition, asserting it would be impossible to reach an understanding on an updated Common Program in the 36 hours available between midnight March 12 and the deadline for posting second-round candidates...
...I did not find much hostility toward Jimmy Carter, nor, on the other hand, any intense loyalty...
...Or that the fruit affected included not only Israel oranges but more from Spain...
...The trouble began in Holland, where three children complained of stomach discomfort after having eaten some Israeli oranges and droplets of mercury were found in three of the remaining oranges in the bag...
Vol. 61 • March 1978 • No. 6
