A transition camp of Jewish migrations in Israel, circa 1950.
“Thus says the Lord God: This is Jerusalem. I have set her in the center of the nations, with countries round-about her.” - Ezekiel 5:5
This is part fifteen of the FAI Publishing series Center of Nations which examines the history of the modern State of Israel in the midst of an increasingly hostile world.
Israel’s victory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War changed the face of the Middle East. Arab states which had been denied political unity by Europe were instead united around opposition to a Jewish State. Independence also fundamentally changed the character of the Yishuv. Whereas Jewish immigration to the Land before 1949 came largely from Eastern Europe, made up of mostly Ashkenazi Jews, post-war aliyot brought Jews from across the Middle East and North Africa, including hundreds of thousands of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews from Morocco to Iran, as Arab states pressured their centuries-old native Jewish populations in the wake of the Zionist victory.
The Middle Eastern exodus began in the poor Arabian nation of Yemen, where almost 50,000 Jews called Teimanim (after the Biblical settlement of Teiman) had lived since ancient times. After the UN Partition Plan for Palestine was announced in November,1947, an anti-Jewish pogrom broke out in the Yemeni port city of Aden. At least 80 Jewish residents of the city were killed in the riot. After the war ended, the Jewish Agency, responsible for facilitating aliyah to the Land, arranged with the Yemeni government to begin repatriating Yemen’s Jewish population to Israel in the summer of 1949. Dubbed “Operation Magic Carpet” and also called “Operation Eagle’s Wings” (Exodus 19:4), American and British airliners lifted 47,000 Yemeni Jews from Aden to Eretz Yisrael on 380 flights over the course of fifteen months. The operation also included over 2,000 related Jewish tribes from neighboring Saudi Arabia and Eritrea, directly across the Red Sea on the Horn of Africa. The massive influx of migrants overwhelmed the small Israeli nation, filling the reception halls of army barracks, and prompting the construction of massive “transition camps” called Ma'abarot. Conditions in the camps were often squalid, although preferable to the poverty and violence of Yemen. Hundreds of young children died in the camps of malnourishment and disease, a phenomenon that would prompt investigations in Israeli society for decades. However, the risk of death did not deter the hopeful olim, as another 3,000 fled from Yemen to Israel in 1959. Jewish emigration from Yemen has continued, leaving only a handful of Teimanim remaining there today.
On July 5, 1950, the Israeli Knesset codified the government’s policy towards Jewish immigration in the Law of Return, stating, “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an olah.” By 1950, as almost 100,000 Jews streamed into the nascent Jewish State from all over Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, the issue of economic sustainability became paramount. A strict program of austerity was implemented, as the Israeli government calculated that it would cost more to house and feed the new olim than the entire revenue of the state. To facilitate the absorption of migrants from the transit camps into society, the government offered each individual an Israeli identity card, ration card, a mattress, a blanket, and up to $36 US dollars to leave the Ma'abarot. Thousands moved to the coastal cities, or to rural kibbutzim, seeking housing and work. 260 new settlements and over 78,000 housing developments were built in the decade after the war to accommodate the new arrivals. Other migrants stayed in the camps, many of which gradually evolved into settlements in their own right, as tents and shanties were replaced by permanent structures.
The next major wave of Mizrahi Jewish immigration came from Iraq in 1951. Iraqi Jews were also an ancient Diaspora community that stretched back to the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE. Baghdad was a hub of Jewish culture and learning which boasted over 50,000 Jewish residents when Iraq gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1932. Thousands more Jews were scattered across the northern Iraqi Kurdistan region, including Mosul. Jews held important positions in the Iraqi government and education system, including university professorships and bureaucratic posts. A majority of Baghdad’s Board of Commerce were Jews, as was Iraq’s first minister of finance. For centuries, Iraqi Arabs had considered their Jewish countrymen to be integral members of a shared society. But as Iraq achieved independence from Britain and came under the influence of Nazi Germany in the 1930’s, the state of Arab-Jewish relations began to deteriorate. A crop of ardent nationalists rose to power in the Iraqi parliament, while Hitler’s Third Reich positioned itself as a patron of Arab independence in contrast to its European rivals. Anti-Semitic propaganda was widely circulated, and Jewish members of the ruling class were systematically dismissed from their posts and marginalized in society. The cohort of pro-Nazi politician Rashid Ali led a coup against the British-aligned Iraqi monarchy in 1941, leading to the brief Anglo-Iraqi War. Iraqi Jews were accused of collaboration with the British, and after Ali’s short-lived government was ousted and the monarchy reinstalled in early June, a pogrom broke out in Baghdad during Sukkot. Called the Farhud, or “violent dispossession,” the ensuing riots claimed the lives of almost 200 Jewish residents in the city, while another 1,000 were wounded, and over 900 Jewish homes burned. Throughout the 1940’s, sporadic incidents of violence against Iraqi Jews continued.
After the UN Partition Plan for Palestine was announced in November, 1947, the Iraqi government passed legislation that forbade its 150,000 Jewish citizens from emigrating to Mandate Palestine. After Israel declared independence and Iraq declared war, Zionism became a capital offense. Iraqi Jews were denied positions in the government, Jewish entrepreneurs were legally restricted and boycotted, and hundreds of Jewish citizens were accused of sedition and thrown into prison with no evidence against them. Even Biblical Hebrew inscriptions were regarded as coded Zionist messages and their possessors framed as spies. As a result, Zionist aspirations began to make significant inroads, as Zionist pamphlets exhorted, "Jews! Israel is calling you — come out of Babylon!” A network of human smuggling was formed to ferry Iraq’s Jews into Iran in late 1948, where the friendly Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi allowed them passage to Israel. At its height, the underground movement was transporting more than 1,000 Jewish emigrants per day, taking millions of dollars in cash and assets with them. The exodus had a draining effect on the Iraqi economy, which led the government to revise it’s law of Jewish emigration in the Spring of 1950. Iraqi Jews would be allowed to leave the country for Israel on the condition that they liquidate all of their assets (including jewelry) and renounce their citizenship, taking only the equivalent of $140 US and several dozen pounds of luggage out of Iraq. Over 50,000 hopeful olim registered to emigrate in the first month alone, growing to 90,000 by the end of June. In response, the Israeli government contracted with a Middle Eastern airline to stage another massive airlift in March, 1951. In just six months, two-thirds of Iraq’s Jewish population — more than 105,000 people — were flown from Iraq to Israel via Cyprus in “Operation Ezra and Nehemiah,” named after the Biblical Hebrew leaders who led the Babylonian exiles back to Judea. In addition, over 20,000 Iraqi Jews were smuggled out of Iraq illegally. Although the Iraqi government eventually reversed course again and barred Jewish emigration in 1952, only 6,000 Iraqi Jews remained. Continual persecution during the reign of Saddam Hussein caused the Jewish population to dwindle further, so that today there are only four known Jewish residents of Iraq.
By 1953, the tide of Jewish immigration to Israel began to slow. Although 1,200 immigrants were arriving every month, almost 700 were also leaving the austere conditions in the transition camps for the United States and Europe. However, Arab nationalist movements across North Africa in the mid-1950’s began to increase the flow again, as Jews in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt began to feel the legal and social pressure to leave their nations of origin. Almost 250,000 Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews emigrated from North Africa to Israel by the end of the decade, leaving their host nations almost completely devoid of their former Jewish populations. In total, 850,000 Middle Eastern and North African Jews emigrated to Israel in the two decades between 1948 and 1967.
Although the Jewish populations of North Africa made aliyah in the 1950’s, there was still one major center of Jewish culture remaining on the continent. For centuries, several hundred communities of African Jews had been observing Torah in Northern Ethiopia. Known as Beta Israel, or “House of Israel” in their native language of Ge’ez, the Ethiopian Jewish community practiced a very ancient form of Judaism called Haymanot, or “faith.” Their presence in East Africa stretched back to the Davidic Kingdom of the eighth and ninth centuries BCE, during which their ancestors likely migrated to the African Kingdom of Axum while the Northern Kingdom of Israel was under siege from the Assyrian Empire. After the State of Israel achieved independence in 1948, the Jewish Agency took an active role in developing Jewish life among Beta Israel, constructing schools and synagogues in Northern Ethiopia. Although Ethiopia and Israel enjoyed close diplomatic relations in the 1950’s and 60’s, the threat of oil embargo after the Yom Kippur War in 1973 caused the Ethiopian government to sever ties with the Jewish State, isolating its Jewish community from their Israeli kinsmen. Soon afterward, the monarchy of Ethiopia was overthrown in a coup by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, leader of the Marxist Derg military junta, which enacted policies that forced the Beta Israel community to collectivize with non-Jews. Anti-Semitic violence increased dramatically as competition for resources grew, leading to the death of over 2,000 Ethiopian Jews and the dispossession of thousands more.
In 1977, former Irgun leader Menachem Begin was elected prime minister of Israel. Begin’s prioritization of the rescue of Ethiopian Jews was admirable, although highly controversial at the time, as there was a sharp debate in Israeli society regarding whether or not the Beta Israel communities were truly Jewish. The Israeli Knesset settled the issue that year by amending the Law of Return to include their Ethiopian brethren. Begin began testing the waters with Colonel Mariam. He sold arms to the Ethiopian government, and then requested that the dictator allow for 200 Ethiopian Jews to emigrate to Israel aboard one of the emptied cargo planes. Mariam agreed, but an ongoing civil war in the north and east of the country made plans for a large-scale aliyah untenable. Tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews fled from violence and famine into southern Sudan, where many encountered discrimination and persecution in refugee camps. Meanwhile, the Derg junta in Ethiopia criminalized Judaism and the Hebrew language, considering the Beta Israel community to be collaborators with rebel forces. As the situation became more dire in the early 1980’s, it became clear that a clandestine rescue operation was necessary. In 1981, a group of Israeli Mossad agents of European ancestry approached the Sudanese government. Posing as representatives of a Swiss travel firm, they offered to lease an abandoned Italian diving resort on the Red Sea coast named “Arous on the Red Sea.” For $320,000, they received a three-year lease, along with an exemption from oversight by the Sudanese ministry of tourism. For the next three years, the Israeli foreign spy agency ran a leisure resort in Sudan, and they ran it well enough to turn a profit. But the resort business was a cover for the true objective. While hundreds of tourists cycled through the resort for fine dining and scuba diving by day, the Mossad was secretly using the facility as a base to dispatch Ethiopian Jews to the refugee camps by night. In “Operation Brothers,” the local assets would smuggle hundreds of their fellow Beta Israel at a time, traversing across the desert to the coast. The caravans travelled only under cover of darkness on a two-day journey that ended at the beach. There the emigrants were met by Zodiac boats which ferried them to Israeli ships outside of Sudanese waters. Overseeing each transport was Yola Reitman, a former El-Al flight attendant and Israeli diving instructor, who was recruited by the Mossad while leading diving excursions in the Israeli resort town of Eilat. The rescue operations were a stunning success, aiding in the rescue of thousands Ethiopian Jews until 1984, when it was almost exposed by an Israeli politician’s offhanded statement to the press. Fearful of compromise, the resort operation was shuttered and all agents were evacuated in early 1984. Nonetheless, over 8,000 Ethiopian Jews had been successfully evacuated between 1977-1984. It was not the end of the Ethiopian aliyot.
In June, 1984, a representative of the Sudanese government came to visit Richard Krieger, Associate Coordinator for Refugee Affairs at the US State Department. Straining under a combination of economic depression, civil unrest, and the burden of a half-million Ethiopian refugees, the Sudanese government was looking to the United States for aid. Having been made aware of the plight of Ethiopian Jews in the refugee camps, Krieger deftly employed the Sudanese regime’s anti-Semitic prejudices, suggesting that the American Jewish lobby would need to be placated in order for aid to be granted. Allowing the United States to rescue Ethiopian Jews from the refugee camps, the diplomat claimed, was the surest way to secure and relieve the “burden” of Jewish refugees on Sudan. Krieger’s tactic worked. He flew to Jerusalem soon afterward to pitch the idea of another massive airlift to the Israeli cabinet, having secured the cooperation of the Sudanese government and US diplomats in East Africa. The cabinet voted to approve the plan, and beginning in November, 1984, Trans European Airlines flew 30 flights of Ethiopian Jews from Sudan to Israel via Brussels, Belgium. In a mere two months, over 8,000 members of Beta Israel made aliyah during “Operation Moses,” before the operation was exposed and the Sudanese government refused to cooperate further. Another 650 more Ethiopian Jews were secretly evacuated from Sudan on six American C-130 cargo planes during “Operation Joshua,” after the US Senate sent a classified, unanimous petition to the Regan Administration requesting additional support. Finally, in 1991, as Ethiopia was collapsing under the weight of civil war and severe famine, the Israeli government was exhorted to formulate “an emergency plan, for the protection and evacuation of the Jewish community.”
After paying the Ethiopian government 35 million US dollars to allow its Jews to leave, the Israeli Air Force coordinated the largest single-day human airlift operation in history. Dubbed “Operation Solomon,” it included six El-Al Boeing 707’s and eighteen Hercules transport planes, capable of airlifting a combined total of 18,000 people. On May 24, the massive armada flew to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, landing in the morning before beginning evacuations at noon. The malnourished Ethiopians were boarded onto transport planes with seats removed, in some cases reaching a capacity of 1,200 passengers on a single aircraft. Within 24 hours, all 41 sorties of transports carrying over 15,000 members of Beta Israel had returned to their ancestral homeland. IAF Commander Avihu Ben-Nun remarked, “Never before did so few pilots transport such a great number of people in such a short time.” The weary African olim were greeted in Tel Aviv by Prime Minster Yitzhak Shamir. Future Israeli Chief of Staff Benny Ganz would later reflect on Operation Solomon as “a turning point in my service which encompasses both my Zionist values and the meaning of our existence in this country.” Today, about 170,00 Ethiopian Jews live in Israel, where many first-generation Yishuv serve in the armed forces and in law enforcement.
As of the 2009 Israeli census, half of Israeli Jews are of Mizrahi and Sephardic origin, while roughly the other half are of Ashkenazi origin, making Israel a truly multi-cultural, multi-colored representation of global Judaism.
Gabe Caligiuri is the editor of THE WIRE, as well as an occasional contributor to other FAI digital content on the subjects of history and geopolitics as they relate to the Great Commission. Gabe and his family live in California.