The story of the Ethiopian aliyah illustrates this second stage of Israel-Diaspora relations, with the Jewish Agency at the center. I’m not peddling rose-colored history. Through the immigrants’ rights party Yisrael B’Aliyah, while leading various ministries, and at the Jewish Agency, I was involved in many initiatives to help Ethiopian Israelis overcome the problems they faced on arrival. Some of their challenges were typical immigrant heartaches. Many others resulted from the huge gap between material and social life in Africa and in Israel. Some of these problems were worsened by the racial prejudices of some Israelis.
The story of the Ethiopian Jews’ adjustment to Israel is a fascinating one, far beyond the scope of this book. Because this book concerns the dialogue between the Jewish people and Israel, this chapter examines the Ethiopians’ immigration, not their integration.
I first heard about Ethiopian Jewry through the static of the Gulag. When not in a punishment cell, a prisoner is allowed to read the official Communist Party newspaper. It’s an exercise in double-reading. Every Soviet citizen mastered how to decode the propaganda. You read the words, then read the real meaning behind them.
Toward the end of 1984, I read a long article filled with the usual rhetoric condemning Zionist aggressions. This time, Israel had committed a new crime. Apparently, the Zionist soldiers had invaded Sudanese airspace, landed in the airport, and started kidnapping peaceful citizens, claiming they were Jews with a particular name, “Falasha.” The Zionists concocted this ruse to recruit more soldiers for Israel’s insatiable military machine, which needed more people as cannon fodder.
I was thrilled. I understood that a miracle was taking place. Israel probably had found some long-lost tribe of fellow Jews in Africa and was bringing them home.
When I came to Israel, I heard about Operation Moses, which airlifted eight thousand Ethiopian Jews from Sudan via Brussels to Israel during seven intense weeks in 1984. Many of those Jews, some barefoot and all dreaming of Israel, had walked thousands of miles to reach Sudan.
On our first trip to northern Galilee together, Avital and I stumbled onto a yeshiva near Mount Meron, which included some Ethiopian Jewish students. Watching the students, black and white, learn together reminded me that the black-and-white images I first had of Israel in 1967 couldn’t compare to the bold, vivid, colorful Israel I was experiencing. Having spent my childhood seeing Soviet propaganda posters depicting false images of blacks and whites together thanks to Communism, just to embarrass the Americans, it was thrilling to see them together in reality, thanks to Zionism.
The truth about the Ethiopian exodus was more romantic than I had imagined in prison. I felt like I was reading an African version of Leon Uris’s great Zionist novel, Exodus. The members of Beta Israel, the House of Israel, were a lost tribe spun off from the Jewish people. Some trace their origins to Moses’s time, others to King Solomon’s, still others to the first century BCE. They remained cut off for thousands of years. In their time-capsule-like traditions, you could see striking continuities in their kosher dietary laws, Jewish calendar, and prayers, with some variations. But they yearned for what we yearned for, that one word, Jerusalem, which would return us all home from exile.
Nearly seven years after Operation Moses, rumors were flying about another mass airlift. I decided that, if it was happening, I had to be there. I called the Jewish Agency’s chairman of the board, Mendel Kaplan, early Friday morning, May 24, 1991. I asked him to get me on one of the planes.
“You don’t work for the Jewish Agency. I can’t take you as an agency employee,” Kaplan explained. “But register as a journalist. If you get press credentials, I’ll get you a spot.” I called my editors at the Jerusalem Report. They approved it instantly. Jewish Agency representatives told me to be ready to be picked up at home that night around nine.
I explained excitedly to Avital that we should start our Friday night Sabbath meal early, because I would be flying out shortly after kiddush, the blessing over the wine. She, too, was excited, saying, “It’s pikuach nefesh,” the Jewish principle allowing you to suspend the Sabbath prohibitions to save a life.
Somehow, as we spoke, she realized that I was going as a journalist. Her face fell. “What? That’s chilul shabbat,” violating the Sabbath. “Journalism is not essential. It doesn’t save lives. You must do something useful for it to become pikuach nefesh.”
I called Mendel Kaplan again. “Can I be a flight attendant or do some other work to help the Jewish Agency team?” I asked.
This time, Kaplan lost his patience. “Natan, you’re driving me crazy,” he bristled. “We’ve got a million moving parts on this thing. Call yourself what you want.” This way, I could honestly tell Avital I had permission to be a flight attendant.
That’s how I started my brief career in airline hospitality. I happily hammed it up on the flight over, fawning over the four Israeli journalists flying with me on the huge empty airplane. I insisted on serving them.
Thanks to American Jewish donors, the CIA, President George H. W. Bush, and other intermediaries, Israel and the Jewish people had bribed Ethiopia’s authorities to the tune of $35 million to hit the pause button on the country’s civil war. We also paid hundreds of smaller bribes. During that thirty-six-hour cease-fire, Israel would bring home 14,325 Ethiopian Jews.
Over the previous months, hearing whispers that they would be saved if they made it to Addis Ababa, thousands of Ethiopian Jews had trekked from their villages to the capital. The lucky ones came by car or horse. Most walked barefoot. Too many had their loads lightened along the way when bandits stripped them of their possessions. Too many had lost a son, a daughter, a father, a sister, an elder, or a baby amid all the violence brought on by civil war. Now they awaited redemption, from us.
Today, over a quarter of a century later, witnessing this exodus remains one of the most profound moments of my life, up there with the day I ascended from KGB prison to Israel. I have merged my feelings and memories about my own liberation with my feelings and memories of theirs. This is especially true as time passes. The story that I filed for the Jerusalem Report that spring captured the excitement of the moment. Much of what follows is adapted from that article.
Immediately after the Shabbat meal on Friday, May 24, I was driven to a military base near Ben-Gurion Airport. Soon after, for the second time in my life, I found myself virtually the only passenger on a huge airplane. Now, as then, there were only four people sitting around me. This time, they were colleagues, Israeli journalists, and we were bound for Ethiopia.
Five years ago, the four companions had been KGB men, my honor escort on the journey from a Soviet prison to freedom. In that moment of release, when, suddenly, after nine years of struggle and prayers, I was lifted from the darkness of the Gulag, I wasn’t told where they were taking me. But the sun, like the finger of God, pointed the way: it was a flight to freedom. They had taken away all my belongings—including my prison uniform, which had grown so familiar and comfortable—and given me ungainly and clammy civilian clothes. But I had at the last moment saved one item from the hands of the KGB guards: a little book of Psalms given to me by my wife, Avital, which was my companion in all the years of the Gulag. It kept me warm.
Through the triumphant psalms of King David, God was bringing me the joyous news: You are free and have won. You are going to the Land of Israel. In the coming hours, I would land in Berlin, be reunited with my wife in Frankfurt, arrive in Israel, and pray at the Western Wall. Throughout, I was surprisingly calm and confident—as is a person who has listened for the voice of God and relied on God and watches with rapture and without fear as events unfold, fulfilled according to God’s great, unfathomable design.
Now, five years later, as I flew in the dark toward Addis Ababa on an El Al plane whose markings had been painted over, I was suddenly seized by questions and doubts: Why was it so important to me to be on this particular flight to Ethiopia? So much so that I had insisted my editor send me, even on the Sabbath?
Why was I flying toward Ethiopia? Was it because I was intrigued by these Jews who were so different from me? Or was it to understand better the Israelis who were ready to put aside their differences, drop everything, and rush to the rescue of these people at once so remote and so close? Was it perhaps to recover a sense of the purity of the Zionist dream, which in the harsh light of daily life in Israel could sometimes seem more like an illusion?
Let there be no mistake: my first five years in Israel had been full and happy. But they were also years of descending from heaven to earth. The simple, clear lines of the struggle between good and evil had grown ever more blurred, and the cacophony of arguments and doubts made it more difficult to hear the voice of God.
Below, Addis Ababa greeted us with scattered frozen lights, a city under curfew. As I stepped off the plane, I was met by an astonishing sight: A human river in white flowed toward the aircraft. I stood, paralyzed, as the vast crowd streamed through the darkness. They moved unhurriedly. Everyone seemed to be supporting someone else: the men with biblical beards and patriarchal faces; the women in embroidered dresses, surrounded by children. The five-year-olds carried the one-year-olds on their backs. On every forehead, a sticker bearing a number, so that families would not become separated.
The crowd was contained by a rope to ensure that no one would be left in the darkness of the land where they had lived for thousands of years. Israeli soldiers in civilian clothes and Jewish Agency personnel waved flashlights to guide the people toward the airplane. But these were only intermediaries. There was no need to search for analogies. I felt as if God was leading the column, as in the exodus from Egypt.
During the years of struggle for the exodus from Russia, the evocation of the departure from Egypt sustained us Refuseniks, especially at moments of loneliness and dread. As I walked through the Moscow night with KGB tails following, or sat in front of a KGB interrogator who threatened death, or endured hundreds of days and nights in the cold of the punishment cell, I tried to remind myself of the larger picture: Your history did not begin with your birth or with the birth of the Soviet regime. You are continuing an exodus that began in Egypt. History is with you.
It was not always easy to feel this. Sometimes I had to mobilize my whole imagination, summon all my inner resources, to break through the wall of prison. Modern history also came to my aid: Entebbe, when Israel sent planes to rescue Jews in the depths of Africa. The great sacrifice of Yoni Netanyahu, whose picture was on my wall until my arrest, and the daring of those with him. This event was my personal guarantee that Israel would not forsake me, that I, too, would be rescued.
Now these two images fused. Toward us, across thousands of years, Jews moved in an unbroken line from Egypt. This time, I was among the Israelis standing by the empty airplane, in Africa, to bring them out. The whole struggle of the last two decades, of the last two millennia, flowed together until it converged in this one picture.
The waters of the Red Sea part. Two fighting armies stop their war. Ethiopian soldiers resentfully look on as buses of Jews speed through the empty streets and as one Israeli plane after another comes in to take Jews out. With the departure of the last plane, the waters join again, the heavens close, and the war overtakes the country once more. It took slightly more than half an hour to fill the plane’s two hundred seats with four hundred Ethiopian Jews.
I set to work as a steward, distributing water and bread. The Beta Israel were obviously hungry but were impressively serene. Each time our eyes met, they were smiling, responsive. Sometimes I held and patted one of the clamoring children so their parents could open food parcels. But this was a pretext. I simply wanted more communication and contact.
Clearly, this was their desire too. They were glad to share their children with me. Both sides looked for all kinds of tasks requiring exchanges. We were overwhelmed by our desire for intimacy.
Through all the events of that night, our passengers showed full trust in the messengers from Israel and were calmly confident despite the astonishing events overtaking them. Again, this implacable confidence in the future reminded me of my own state of mind in the plane that took me from Russia. As I had then, they now experienced a pure rapture and knew no fear.
They, too, left with almost no possessions. I had then two things that they did not: I had shoes, while many of them were barefoot, and I had my book of Psalms. But they themselves seemed like figures come suddenly alive out of the psalms. Their very journey was a psalm of rejoicing.
Their faith seemed to banish our cynicism. I remember somebody started talking politics, but the conversation went flat. It seemed profane in this holy Noah’s ark in the air, floating through the clouds.
As the sun rose, we started approaching Israel. The pilot brought the plane low so we could see the land. As he descended, there was some crackling, and the captain announced in Hebrew, “We are flying over Israel.” Quiet. Then the Jewish Agency representative announced in Amharic that below us was the Land of Israel, using their secret word, our word, “Yeruzalem! Yeruzalem!” They started yelling, screaming, crying, cheering. It lasted until after we had landed. This volcano of voices reminded me that one enchanted word connected Jews over thousands of years, from Addis Ababa to Moscow. That word was Jerusalem.
I realized that landing with these Jews gave me the answer to the question of what had impelled me to make this brief, eternal journey. This was the moment I had come for. Here, there was no black or white, educated or unschooled, cynic or idealist, left or right, believer or secularist, immigrant or old-timer. Here was one Am Yisrael, one people, returning to their land, whose applause, singing, and African ululating merged into one impossible and triumphant symphony.
When the first plane landed in Ben-Gurion airport, Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Shamir welcomed the new Israelis. Having choreographed this rescue brilliantly, Shamir said, “They are the remnants of a Jewish community that lasted for thousands of years, who are now coming back to their country.… They have come back to their homeland.”
Then, another surprise. The early 1990s were rough. Many Israelis had become cynical about Zionism, traumatized by the violence during the Palestinian riots, demoralized by our passivity when Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles hit us during the Gulf War, and dispirited by the aggressively uncharismatic Shamir. Zionism appeared to be a movement whose moment had passed. It had created the state, many concluded, then became an irrelevant relic.
Nevertheless, this day and a half electrified Israelis. As plane after plane arrived, Israelis flowed into Ben-Gurion Airport to greet the new immigrants, a group that now also included five new babies, born during the four-and-a-half-hour flight. Thousands of Israelis also cheered the four hundred buses crisscrossing the country, transporting these new Israelis to forty-nine absorption centers the Jewish Agency had thrown together practically overnight. The euphoria seemed to remind everyone what the state was all about. We took Davidian pride in watching Israel ingather exiles yet again. And we took Isaiahan pride in noting that Israel was the only democratic country actively welcoming black immigrants from Africa.
Joel Brinkley, reporting for the often-skeptical New York Times, wrote on May 26, 1991, “At the airport this morning, it was difficult to tell who was more joyful—the barefoot Ethiopians who cheered, ululated and bent down to kiss the tarmac as they stepped off the planes, or the Israelis who watched them aglow, marveling at this powerful image showing that their state still holds appeal, even with all its problems.”
That was the romantic part of the story. None of it should be underestimated or taken for granted. It began with the stubborn bravery of those Ethiopian Jews, some of whom paved the way back to Jerusalem with their bodies, even sacrificing their lives. It was orchestrated by the creative determination of Israelis, who honored their mandate to help Jews, wherever they were, and ingather exiles, no matter how different they looked or how unfamiliar some of their customs might have become. It needed the full mobilization of world Jewry, uniting Establishment types and activists, as in the good old days of our Soviet Jewry struggle.
But after the romance came the messy realities, which often test the loftiest ideas. Israel’s gallant 1991 rescue cleared the waiting list of Beta Israel. All Ethiopian Jews eligible for automatic Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return made aliyah by the end of the 1990s. The story of those heroes who stayed Jewish over millennia and willed their way home would continue now in Israel, presenting its own absorption challenges. But the Ethiopian Jewish saga continued with the Falash Mura, who sought to immigrate but didn’t fit the criteria specified in Israel’s Law of Return.
There are two paths to Israeli citizenship, beyond being born there. First, anyone can apply to become an Israeli citizen by following standard immigration and naturalization procedures, as in every other democratic country. Or, under the Law of Return, any Jew can immigrate automatically. The state was founded to be the home of every Jew. It’s not really up to the government. Every Jew has the right to decide to make aliyah and become a citizen of Israel.
Reeling from the confusing realities of assimilation and the ugly trauma of persecution in Europe, culminating with the Holocaust, the Knesset in 1970 followed Hitler’s rules to define eligibility for aliyah. The Nazis targeted anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, so Israel decided to accept all applicants with at least one Jewish grandparent too, unless they had converted out.
The poverty, hatred, forced conversions, thwarted dreams, and stormy realities of Jewish life over thousands of years in Ethiopia had created groups of people close enough to the Jewish journey to feel that they, too, had the right to come to Israel—even though they were not eligible under the Law of Return.
The Falash Mura were descended from one group of Ethiopian Jews who converted to Christianity, frequently under duress, starting in the mid-1800s. While most lived apart from the Jews, they never fully separated themselves either. At the same time, their Christian neighbors didn’t fully accept them.
Inspired by Beta Israel’s redemption in the early 1990s—cynics would say they were jealous of their escape from African chaos—the Falash Mura joined the effort to get to Israel. But those who were five, six, or seven generations removed from conversion, or who lacked a Jewish grandparent, were ineligible under the Law of Return. Legally, Israeli officials could not accept them.
Few Israelis had heard of the Falash Mura until Operation Solomon. Some Falash Mura could prove they had at least one Jewish grandparent and were eligible under the Law of Return. That was easy: they were in. Some had relatives among the two thousand or so who had made their way onto the airplanes in 1991. A few dozen had been rushed onto the last of the planes, despite having been rejected for immigration. While commanding the operation, Deputy Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak had seen these ineligible immigrants lingering in the airport. With the clock ticking, even after being warned that they couldn’t prove proper lineage, Lipkin-Shahak declared, “All aboard. We’ll sort it out at home. My mission is clear: I won’t leave any Jews behind.”
But many Falash Mura were left behind. Having trekked to Addis Ababa, there was no turning back for them. They stayed in the city, awaiting redemption. Inspired by the massive exodus, other Falash Mura streamed into the capital, abandoning their villages and giving up their cattle and their livelihoods. Finally, they arrived in miserable urban slums, ready to wait.
Many Ethiopian Jews who had made it to Israel resented the Falash Mura. They considered them fair-weather friends who had dodged Jew-hatred for generations since their ancestors converted. Some Beta Israel suspected the Falash Mura of informing on them over the years. These skeptics feared that, having discovered an upside to being Jewish, the Falash Mura now wanted to cash in on this diluted ancestral connection. At the same time, those who had come to Israel and had Falash Mura relatives argued passionately for their new home to let their friends and relatives come too.
The process of proving eligibility was laborious. This was not a country of standardized birth certificates and formal family trees. With few or usually no documents to rely on, Jewish Agency representatives and Interior Ministry officials would try contacting relatives or representatives from neighboring communities living in Israel for verification. More and more Falash Mura arrived in Addis Ababa. Fewer and fewer would take no for an answer. Rather than returning to their villages, they started living hand-to-mouth in an already poor, overcrowded city. It was a humanitarian disaster in the making.
The Jewish world’s experts in aiding physically distressed Jews stepped in, especially the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). The North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry proved to be Ethiopian Jews’ most outspoken advocate. These and other Jewish organizations helped the Ethiopians in immigration purgatory, whose lives had turned hellish.
Eventually, I no longer viewed the Ethiopian saga from my jail cell in the Gulag or my flight-attendant jump seat on a stripped-down El Al plane above Addis Ababa, witnessing legendary Israel-Diaspora cooperation. By 1997, I faced these complicated questions while chairing the Interministerial Committee on Aliyah, Absorption, and Diaspora Affairs, amid growing Israel-Diaspora tensions about what to do with those of ambiguous status who were left behind. High on the agenda were the compounds that had developed in Addis Ababa, housing 3,500 Falash Mura waiting for answers from the Israeli immigration authorities.
Our committee essentially heard two opposing arguments. The American Jewish organizations and Israeli activists in the field emphasized that these people felt Jewish. They belonged to our people. Many already had relatives among our new Ethiopian Israelis because the communities had intermingled and intermarried.
These people were living under desperate conditions. Time was working against us, we were told. Month by month, crime intensified, prostitution spread, worries about AIDS grew. As the anger, despair, and privation mounted, the gap these people would have to overcome between their old African life and new Israeli one would only grow. “Israel should bring these people home as soon as possible,” we kept hearing. “Enough bureaucracy. Make it happen.”
A second position, advanced most forcefully by Israeli officials, started with one undisputed fact: they were ineligible under the Law of Return. Each case had to be assessed individually. “If anyone can just come to Israel because they feel close to Israel or want to move here, regardless of lineage or conversion, we make a mockery of the law,” the officials warned. “Besides, look at a map. We could be overrun by millions coming on foot from Africa, fleeing all the misery there.”
We also considered the opinion of the former Sephardi chief rabbi and founder of Shas, Ovadia Yosef. Give the Falash Mura the benefit of the doubt, he advised. Following a teaching of Maimonides, rabbis historically had a bias toward accepting zera yisrael, the seed of Israel. They were happy to welcome back descendants of Jews who were forced to abandon their Judaism under the sword. Lost Jews returning to the fold, or those whose status was unclear, could undergo giyur le’chumra, a less rigorous conversion process. It still involved intensive study before a rabbinic court and ended with an immersion in the mikvah, the ritual bath. Once converted, they could receive automatic citizenship.
I consulted with government authorities, rabbis, and American Jewish activists. We reached a compromise that the Israeli government and the American Jewish organizations accepted. We would clear the compounds once. An accelerated process would handle one group after another. They would fly to Israel by regularly scheduled commercial air travel, not with another airlift.
Because they were ineligible under the Law of Return, the Falash Mura would enter under the usual entry law. Nevertheless, they would get the full new-immigrant benefit package. Once they finished the giyur le’chumra, which they could start immediately, they could become citizens. Israel would be circumventing the Law of Return as a one-time humanitarian gesture.
Addressing Israeli officials’ fears about setting a dangerous precedent, the American Jewish organizations vowed: No more compounds. The JDC and others would not reopen them and wouldn’t staff or fund any others. In the future, refugees would be directed back to their villages to apply for aliyah individually, then wait.
“Beware,” experienced Israeli officials warned. “Even ignoring all the family reunification headaches, watch how the number of Falash Mura will grow by leaps and bounds because you’re encouraging them.” More cynical Israelis warned, “You cannot trust these American Jewish organizations. They will keep pushing and tugging at the heartstrings.” Nevertheless, we were pleased with our Solomonic solution—as long as it lasted.
Two years later, on my agenda as interior minister was the growing problem of two large compounds. One smallish one was in Addis Ababa. The other, almost ten times larger at twenty thousand people, was in Gondar province. In 1997, just four months after the JDC shut down its Ethiopian operations as per our agreement, it started building that first Addis Ababa compound. American Jewish activists involved in the Ethiopian struggle had exerted tremendous pressure on the organizations to return. “JDC, as a humanitarian organization, cannot ignore the plight of hungry children,” Michael Schneider, executive director, explained. As more distant descendants of Jews emerged, more compounds were improvised, more applicants left their villages for the city’s slums, and more heartbreaking appeals were logged. Initial estimates of ten thousand Falash Mura tripled, to at least thirty thousand.
The American Jews’ demand was familiar: “Don’t waste time with your bureaucracy. Bring them as soon as possible.” In a typical appeal, the executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Rabbi Jerome Epstein, said, “The Jews have always been a people committed to mercy.… We have faith that the State of Israel will continue in this tradition and will manifest values that serve as a beacon of light to other nations.”
This time, even if I had wanted to continue airlifting everyone from the compounds to end the problem, I would not have received my colleagues’ support. I had no credibility left on this issue. The immigration officials’ warnings had proved to be true. And we had learned that American Jewish organizations would sacrifice any promise they had made to the government if they endured enough pressure from their members.
I decided to visit the compounds in Ethiopia. I couldn’t imagine making these difficult policy choices from thousands of miles away. I had to see the conditions these people endured. “No. Israeli ministers are not allowed to visit those compounds,” our Foreign Ministry warned me. “If you go it will mean that the state of Israel has a special obligation to these people. Even our ambassador to Ethiopia doesn’t visit.” Here was one more taboo I had to break.
I flew to Ethiopia anyway in April 2000. I visited both major compounds. I traveled to some of the villages these people had left. I sat in on several immigration interviews.
I have visited slums all over the world. In 1994, I was part of the team of international observers monitoring South Africa’s first democratic election. I chose to monitor the election in the South African prisons and the Soweto township. After seeing parts of Soweto, I left convinced I had just seen the most distressing slum I would ever see.
Some of what I saw in Ethiopia was worse. The villages these people came from were frozen in the Stone Age. Entire families were crowded into tiny, ramshackle one-room huts made of mud, dung, and straw. Many lacked windows. Even if these people were lucky enough to have a small coal stove, they often lacked money for the coal. Food came first, although they often lacked money for that too. Kids in one Addis Ababa school I visited had been fainting from hunger until the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry started feeding each student bread, one piece of fruit, one vegetable, and some protein every day.
Amid the dirt and smells and disease and hunger and misery, it was easy to understand why people would grasp at any chance to run away, to the compounds and to Israel. Inside the compounds, the JDC’s miracle workers brought order: sanitation, medical care, and three meals a day.
Amid all this chaos, the Falash Mura were starting their Jewish lives, coached by Jewish and Israeli activists. They were studying Judaism. They were learning Hebrew. The men were putting on tallit and tefillin—prayer shawls and phylacteries—while praying in the synagogue. They even mastered the art of baking matzah, unleavened Passover bread, within the eighteen minutes you need before the dough rises.
At the compound’s school, I spoke to some of the students in Hebrew. I watched the students say the hamotzi prayer over the bread they were given. I saw one “first grader” sitting patiently with the kids—he was twenty-six years old and anxious to learn.
When I sat in on one family’s immigration interview, the group of seven had grown by one since their previous meeting. The newcomer was a young girl who had just married into the family. She claimed she was eighteen but looked twelve. “This is typical,” the Jewish Agency representative told me. “She comes from a village with no Jews, not even Falash Mura. Once we accept her, look how easy it will be for the process to get out of control. She will be able to invite perhaps a dozen close relatives through family reunification. That’s why we have to be vigilant. But look at her, look at them. That’s also why it’s so hard to say no.”
“I hope we’ll succeed as quickly as possible in bringing all Jews to the Land of Israel,” I said, choosing my words carefully when I addressed about 1,500 of the Falash Mura in one camp. Most of the men in the crowd who cheered wore kippot; most of the women were wrapped modestly in shawls.
During my visit, a BBC reporter interviewed me. I was proud of what we were doing with Ethiopian Jewry. Israel was the only democracy welcoming African immigrants with such open arms. When I agreed to the interview, I thought, “The BBC is usually hostile. This time, finally, I will be on their good side.”
Not quite. “I understand,” the reporter said, “that you Israelis are ready to bring non-Jews from Russia because they are white and not ready to bring Jews from Ethiopia because they are black.”
I don’t like to lose my temper or let reporters see they’ve gotten under my skin. This time, I did both. I accused him of anti-Semitism. After all we did, and considering what nobody else in the world was doing, how could he still pick on the Jewish state? Even after our dramatic airlifts, and with the confusion about each person’s status, we still made exceptions for those who were not eligible to immigrate to Israel. Yet we were racist?
If anything, it was the opposite, I explained. Officials stretched the law to welcome these people to Israel. “No Russian or American or French applicants for aliyah who were ineligible under the Law of Return would have received such special assistance,” I said. “Russians who could prove their roots from three generations back and who tried hard to get permission to make aliyah were being refused constantly. And Falash Mura brought to Israel sometimes were even eight generations removed.”
“What are you getting so angry at me for?” the reporter responded. “I was quoting what American Jewish organizations say about you guys.”
Most “American Jewish organizations” were saying no such thing. But some angry activists who wanted to pressure Israel were. That was enough to diminish all of Israel’s good work. It was infuriating that, over the years, crying racism became the standard go-to argument among Israeli politicians looking for a quick headline when criticizing the government on this complicated issue. With this falsehood bandied about so loosely in Israel, no wonder American Jewish liberals and other Western critics overlooked Israel’s efforts and ended up crying racism too.
I returned to Israel. It was clear, even without resorting again to an “aliyah of compoundim”—compounds—that we had to process many more applications, much more quickly, in both Ethiopia and Israel. As interior minister, I secured extra funds for the Jewish Agency to hire more staffers. There was no magic bullet. Still, we increased the flow of immigrants from a few dozen a month to a few hundred. Eventually, we plowed through the list of seventeen thousand.
Between the time I visited in the spring of 2000 and when I started leading the Jewish Agency in 2009, more than twenty-seven thousand Falash Mura became Israelis. Nevertheless, another “final” list lingered, this time of 8,200. When I asked cabinet ministers, “Can we just finish this already? Can we just let them all in at once? After all, they are the last Jews in Ethiopia,” they usually scoffed, “You already brought us the ‘last 3,500’ twenty years ago. How many times can the last plane from Ethiopia land?”
While my Israeli colleagues dismissed me, my Diaspora friends kept lobbying me. Before I joined the Jewish Agency, and certainly after, representatives of the Jewish Federations of New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere kept the heat on about the continuing crisis. “We’re getting a lot of pressure from our donors,” they would say. That usually meant one or two influential people who really cared about the Ethiopian problem. Then the executives would raise their bigger concern: “Israel, which should be so proud of what it has done, is instead giving itself a black eye on this issue. Our people just don’t understand this,” they continued. “How can you turn away needy people—who have a Jewish connection—from the Jewish state? Isn’t that why Israel was founded? Some of our people feel that you treat the aliyah from Africa differently than the aliyah from Europe.”
They correctly saw me as their ally. I always advocated for an accelerated immigration process. But this permanent suspicion, contrary to all the facts, that the Israeli government was somehow prejudiced against Ethiopian Jews because of their skin color, irritated me. At a certain point, I started needling some critics in response.
“You believe they are part of the Jewish people,” I would say. “And you seem very concerned about them. Why don’t you take some into your communities?” I asked, ever so innocently. “Not one thousand, not one hundred, just take ten to set an example and show your sympathy.”
The reaction was usually a mix of surprise, confusion, and indignation. “Um, they aren’t asking to move to America. They want to return to the Jewish homeland, Israel,” they would often reply. “You’re a Zionist. You and Israel want them in America?”
“No. I want them in Israel,” I would respond. “But Israel didn’t want Soviet Jews going to America. Nevertheless, back then you made a big effort to welcome them.”
Their next argument usually was, “They will be absorbed into a different reality. If they move to Israel they will stay Jewish. If they come to America, many will stop being Jewish and embrace their black identity instead.”
“Isn’t that the kind of assimilation process many of the Jews from the former Soviet Union experienced?” I would continue.
Whenever I would get into one of these tiffs, my staff members would ask, “Why are you starting up with them? Do you really want them to lure Falash Mura to America?”
I didn’t. But I was annoyed by American Jewish activists’ insinuations that racism shaped Israel’s immigration policies. I wanted to turn the tables on them and have them compare their own attitudes toward Russian whites and Ethiopian blacks. We all needed to recognize that different communities at different times demand different policy choices.
True, it was messy. Israeli officials in the twenty-first century were applying the Law of Return, which reacted to the plight of European Jewry during the Holocaust, to a lost tribe in Africa, with its own 2,500-year history of persecution and survival strategies. American Jews were often thinking about their idealized vision of Israel, rather than about Israel’s legal constraints. We all lacked the mutual trust we needed—let alone a functional forum—to resolve these problems constructively.
Nearly three decades after Operation Solomon, the Ethiopian purgatory continues. It must end. It would have ended more quickly and elegantly if Israel and the Diaspora could always pull off the kind of miraculous cooperation that produced Operation Solomon. That May of 1991, Israel and world Jewry together exercised raw power to do the right thing. The Jewish world united to help Israel do what it was founded to do, to save Jews.
Since then, suspicion has grown on both sides. Some American Jewish activists have a gut feeling that racial considerations have influenced the Israeli government’s approach to the Falash Mura. They are annoyed that, instead of being the source of pride it was supposed to be, Israel has offended their liberal values. Meanwhile, many Israeli government officials resent that they are supposed to undermine the solid legal foundation for ingathering the exiles—the Law of Return—and move into murky legal and political territory just to indulge American Jewish sensibilities.
Today, the primary victims of this mutual mistrust are the Falash Mura waiting in Ethiopia. Those who get to Israel still end up waiting too long for permission. Others who have refused to take no for an answer just wait endlessly, expecting Israeli policy to change yet again.
This localized episode exemplifies the problems inherent in a mutually condescending relationship based on “we’re saving you.” In the crudest distillation of the conflict, Diaspora Jewish activists essentially were saying: “We give you all the support you need, how dare you embarrass us?” And Israelis essentially were saying: “We’re giving you a state—don’t make our work even harder for us.”
At this second stage of the Israel-Diaspora relationship, with both sides saving one another, each of us considered ourselves the senior partner and the other clearly the junior partner. The road to the third stage of mutual dependence, when we realize that we needed one another as equal partners, remained to be paved.