ALIYA of BETA ISRAEL: OPERATIONS MOSES, 1984, JOSHUA, 1984-85, SOLOMON, 1991, & WINGS OF THE DOVE, 2010-13
Guy Christopher Carter
Historical Theologian | Worker in Refugee Resettlement #WomanLifeFreedom
The Israeli rescue of Ethiopian Jews begins with the Ethiopian rescue of future Israeli Jews.? Along with the ancient Jewish communities of Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and Yemen, the Ethiopian Jewish community had a very proud history going back at least as far as the 1st Century CE. ?I refer to an encounter on the road from Jerusalem to, ofd al places, Gaza.? This was an encounter between the Ethiopian imperial treasurer and the Apostle Philip as recounted in the NT Book of the Acts of the Apostles 8:26-40.? There the Ethiopian official in his luxury chariot was reading a scroll of the Prophet Isaiah, apparently doing fine with the Hebrew, but needing an intelligent an literate Jew to explain to him the identity of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53. ?I can sympathize with this gentleman, for many has been the time when, on finally deciphering a Biblical text in Hebrew/Aramaic or Greek, with the aid in those days of piles of lexica and scrawled notes, I finally had laying before me a text in English, without peeking at any of the published translations. But hese 1st draft translations of mine were rarely anything that could be called ‘plain English,’ for on reading and rereading my translation, even out loud for the cat, I would find myself left with left with the question, ‘But, what the hell does this mean?!’? The same holds for translations into Amharic, I am sure.? ?
Unless the scroll had been freshly purchased from a bookseller in Jerusalem, or received as a gift for the Empress from the Hasmonean King Herod, we may infer that the servant of Her Imperial Majesty had packed Isaiah in his luggage for the journey north.? This in and of itself would speak volumes [!] about an already existent Hebrew literary culture in already very ancient Abyssinia.? Little did the Ethiopian know that the hitch-hiker he was about to pick up on that desert road had been directed to that very spot by the Holy Spirit, possibly by means of something that sounds like the Star Ship Enterprise’s ‘Transporter.’? The Apostle Philip certainly got around, up in Samaria one minute, down on the desert road between Jerusalem and Gaza and giving his and the Holy Spirit’s take on Isaiah 53 to a new friend the next, on that same road where thoughts of ‘Beam me up, Scotty!’ may be on the minds of many a soldier of Israel with a grim task to perform this very day.?
Who was the ‘servant’ of Isaiah 53?? According to Philip, that Suffering Servant was the crucified and risen Rabbi from Nazareth, Yeshua ben Yoseph, whom Philip explained was Moshiach.? Opinions of course vary on this point, but that was Philip’s opinion, and the thought that this trusted ambassador of The Candace of Abyssinia took with him back to Aksum, the capital long before Adis Ababa.? And so it seems to have come to pass that Christianity received official acceptance alongside Judaism in Ethiopia, perhaps even before it was made the state religion of Armenia in CE 302.? One thing is certain, the Amharic Orthodox Catholic Church of Ethiopia, with close ties and cooperative missionary ventures with the Coptic Orthodox Catholic Church of Egypt, said ventures extending all the way south to Great Zimbabwe, was definitely up and running in time to contribute to the spiritual and military defense of Ethiopia against the 7th Century CE Muslim armies sweeping across formerly Roman Africa.? The Caliphate never gained a foothold there.
Fast-forward to the 20th Century and we find my mother hungrily watching Pathé Newsreels at the cinema, two of which she mentioned to me repeatedly.? I always think of her when I see them in documentary film footage.? One was the image of Mahatma Ghandi coming off hunger strike.? I can hear her saying still, “He looked so frail, yet he managed to smile and greet those around him with kindness, even the British,” she said of that great freedom fighter who never lifted his hand in anger.? And she remembered another freedom fighter from the newsreels, a king, and emperor, ‘The Lion of Judah,’ pleading before the League of Nations for the defense of his ancient country against Italian Fascist invaders who claimed to represent ‘Rome.’? “He was like Ghandi, also small of stature, but so erect and upright in his bearing, so regal.? My heart broke for him, standing there speaking at Geneva.? They all listened.? The Italians walked out.? ?The world did absolutely nothing.? They also showed pictures of his ancient army, foot soldiers and cavalry equipped with shields and swords and spears, against Italian bomber aircraft and artillery.”?
Very skilled at tearing a bronze age army apart with modern weaponry, the Italian Fascists were not as brilliant when it came to logistics.? ?Prior to WWII and without Nazi Germany and his future friend, Hitler, to pull his corpulence out of the fire, Mussolini eventually withdrew from Ethiopia further north, content to keep most of Tunisia, its Arab Bedouins and Berber townsfolk, behind barbed wire.? Seeing the sense of an Axis-controlled Mediterranean, Hitler did come to Il Duce’s rescue in North Africa and the Balkans, proving himself to be one of the great suckers of history.? The Italians returned to Ethiopia with the Emperor still in exile.? Even though fortified by German blood and steel, the renewed Italian occupation of Ethiopia fell to the British and the Emperor returned in May 1941.? Ethiopia and Ethiopian Jews saw that there was no time to waste in protecting European Jews whom Emperor Haile Selassie had permitted to immigrate to Abyssinia either for the duration of the war or en route to Eretz Israel.[1] ? You never knew when the Italians, or even the German, might come back.
The ‘Black Jews’ of Ethiopia (then called ‘Falasha,’ considered derogatory today) had suffered considerably under the Italians, as had all Ethiopians, but not in the systematic way that Jews suffered under German occupation.? By 1943, with news of the liquidation of the Ghettos of Europe and the industrial murder of Jews in Nazi annihilation centers, the Jewish community of Ethiopia mobilized and appealed to the Emperor to allow them to grant hospitality in their villages to more Jews escaping the Holocaust.? The first to arrive were 1,500 Greek Jews. More followed from other countries.? It would be good to know how many stayed and built a new life in a very old country, with the rest going to re-found Israel.[2]
The boundaries of modern Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan (now divided into the Muslin/Islamicist North and the Christian/Animist South) used to be included for the most part within historic Abyssinia with a Christian majority and a sizeable Jewish minority, near some of whose settlements Muslim minorities eventually moved.? This meant, tragically but predictably, that just like the Christian majority and Animist minority in South Sudan, the Ethiopian Jews would find themselves in jeopardy from their new Muslim neighbors, so, too, and perhaps even more so, the Jews of this ‘greater Ethiopia’ of yesteryear would find themselves in mortal danger from ‘Anti-Zionist,’ read ‘anti-Semitic’ forces which by no means included all of their Muslim neighbors who were of tremendous help in their rescue.
A civil war which is in many respects still ongoing resulted in total crop failure and famine in 1984 causing even more difficulties for the Ethiopian Jews in Sudan, and therefore not under the administrative protection of Ethiopia.? Ethiopia suffered as well, and many, both Christians and Jews, became for the first time semi-nomads in search of food.? ?Matters quickly reached a critical level with extortion and outright persecution of the Jewish minority under the perennial assumption that ‘the Jews are hiding wealth.’? Richard Krieger, Associate U.S. Coordinator for Refugee Affairs, negotiated with Israel, its intelligence service, the Mossad, and coordinated efforts with the CIA ?to fly the 8,000 Falasha out of Khartoum under the guise of a hadj pilgrimage using the same airline that customarily flew that route for that purpose.? Called Operation Moses, this was the first waive of Ethiopian Jewish immigration since the end of WWII.? Any resistance to the idea in Israel by those who asked whether the Ethiopian Jews were not only religiously by ethnically Jewish was quickly overcome by hard science and the simple expedient of DNA testing.? These refugees with their striking features were indeed as Jewish as bagels, if not more so. ?More could have been rescued in this action had it not been for a leak to the press which caused the Sudanese authorities in Khartoum to block further flights.[3] WTG, CNN or whoever!? ?
A smaller airlift, on which all 100 US Senators signed off, transported another 650 Jews from Sudan to safety in Israel from November of 1984 to early January of 1985 in USAF C-130 aircraft.? This all-American project, of course with massive Israeli coordination, was Operation Joshua.[4] ? Comparison with the Kabul Airlift of 2021 and the transport of nearly 90,000 people, of whom only 4,000 were military, is instructive.[5]
The third and largest exodus of Ethiopian Jews, of which perhaps the grandparents of those rocking young IDF soldiers depicted in today’s LinkedIn feed were passengers[6] came in the form of Operation Solomon, perhaps the best known and remembered of the Ethiopian Jewish transports.? In just 36 hours, from May 24th to 25th 1991, an all-Israeli operation with US diplomatic support using non-stop flights of 36 Israeli military and civilian aircraft transported nearly 15,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel, including eight babies who were born in-flight.[7]
Operation Solomon was not quite the end of the Ethiopian aliya, but it was the beginning of the end.? That conclusion came in 2013 with Operation Wings of the Dove, extending from December 2010 to August 2013.? PM Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the arrivals of August 2013 completed the aliya of Ethiopian Jews.[8] ?
In a September 1, 2013 article, The Jerusalem Post pointed out that the logistical challenges faced in bringing the Ethiopians home to Israel pale in comparison with present and future the social problems of education, housing and employment, with children arriving from Ethiopia and being schooled at the ‘absorption centers’ for new Israelis starting in Israeli schools with a marked learning deficit.[9]
Today, there are approximately 120,000 Israeli Jews of Ethiopian origin, known collectively at Beta Israel (‘House of Israel’).? One of them is Dr. Enanu Shula Mola, visiting professor of education and women’s studies at Brandeis University.[10] She has declared her determination to make positive change for her community within Israel as it faces some of the same challenges that communities of color face in the US.? Among these are comparatively low enrollment of Beta Israel youth in university education and, shocking to this reader, a problem with police brutality in Israel serious enough for parents to have to have ‘the talk’ with their sons, just as African American parents do. ??The Ethiopian Jews are by no means the only Jews from ancient communities in North Africa making their way in Israel.? ?Jews from all over the Middle East, the Mizrahim, mainly from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen[11] and the Sephardim, many of whom moved with the Arab-Berber invasion of Spain and who were driven out during the Reconquista either back to North Africa or to Portugal or the Netherlands,[12] are also part of he Israeli population, and have experienced some levels of discrimination, especially the Mizrahim, but not to the extent of the Beta Israel.? This kind of Jewish pluralism may seem inconsequential to outsiders, to those who don’t have to pay the consequences in the form of their choices in employment and housing or even in marriage, but Israel has one big equalizer that is especially in the forefront during these heavy days, and that is the Israeli Army (IDF), Navy (ISC) and Air Force (IAF).? ?All three of these branches of service include Jews, Druze, Muslims and Christians.? Defense of the nation and the sacrifice that takes will give the young women and men of Beta Israel, a community that held to its faith and tradition outside of Israel for nearly two millennia, a chance to show what else they are really made of in case there was any doubt.
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?Guy Christopher Carter, 30 October 2023
Worcester, Massachusetts
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[2] https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/when-ethiopian-jews-tried-to-save-european-jews-from-the-holocaust-578821
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Kabul_airlift By comparison with Operation Joshua, more than 250 US transport aircraft, including C-17 IIIs, C-5M Super Galaxies, C-130 Hercules, and all three refueling aircraft types were used in the Afghan military and refugee airlift in 2021.
[6] https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/lawrence-rogak-853958b_whats-black-female-jewish-and-carries-activity-7124549294321217536-r7n7?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
[8] https://embassies.gov.il/MFA/PressRoom/Pages/Completion-of-Operation-Wings-of-a-Dove.aspx#:~:text=Operation%20Wings%20of%20a%20Dove%20began%20in%20December%202010%20with,who%20were%20waiting%20to%20emigrate .