Business: Seeing Stars

Part of the price of doing business with the Arab world is that many oil companies for more than two decades have quietly complied with a worldwide boycott of Israeli products. But boycotts, like censorship, all too often take on absurd dimensions.

Witness the case of Mobil Oil Co. A London-based subsidiary, Mobil Marine Services, sent a letter to ships’ chandlers, ordering them not to supply Mobil tankers with “any products of Israeli origin, or seeming to have Israeli or Jewish connections.” Mobil’s caution stems from the fact that the boycott has been intensified of late by the fanatically anti-Israel government of Libya. Whenever a tanker enters a Libyan port, it is searched. If there is anything aboard that has been made or grown in Israel, the owner of the ship is fined or the vessel is seized. The Libyan government recently moved to new extremes, and so did Mobil. To the taboo list, the Libyan government added—and the company complied with—Jaffa orange juice canned in Norway or Canada and four products that have no Israeli connections at all: Brazilian beer and ginger ale, Trinidadian orange juice and Swedish matches. Reason: the labels of all four have six-pointed symbols vaguely similar to the Israeli Star of David. For example, Swedish Three-Star matches carry a trio of six-pointed symbols, and Brazilian Antarctica ginger ale has a six-pointed star on the label, though no one in the company can remember why.