As Ramadan descends upon the Muslim world this week, millions of hands will reach for the same ritual fruit – the large, amber-fleshed, honey-sweet date that has become synonymous with the breaking of the fast.

In supermarkets from London to Dubai, from Toronto to Jakarta, the packaging will read “Medjool” – and the country of origin will say Israel, or California, or Jordan. It will almost never say Morocco. This is not a marketing oversight. It is the final act of a dispossession that began nearly a century ago, and it is time to correct the record with the precision it demands.

The date the world calls “Medjool” is, in fact, Mejhoul – an Arabic word meaning “the unknown” – and it is as Moroccan as the couscous, the caftan, or the Western Sahara. Its homeland is the Tafilalet Oasis in the province of Errachidia, the largest oasis in Morocco, a region that houses 151 of the country’s 453 registered date palm varieties and has cultivated dates for centuries before any modern state in the region existed.

As early as the seventeenth century, Mejhoul dates from Tafilalet commanded premium prices in the markets of England and Spain, establishing an international reputation that predates the founding of the United States, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and the State of Israel by centuries.

What happened next is not a story of natural market evolution. It is a story of botanical........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)