IF YOU had been looking at those people, stuck for months in the slums of Addis Ababa, what would you have seen?
Would you have seen pathetic Ethiopians, who fled war in the countryside only to find misery in the city? Primitive illiterates, locked in 13th-century ignorance? Third World paupers, owning little more than the rags on the backs? Disease-ridden peasants, sick the malaria, eye infections, tuberculosis?
Would you have seen just another mass of black Africans, wretched people from a far-away continent, with their strange looks and strange language and nothing in common with — well, people like us?
Israel saw brothers and sisters. Brothers and sisters in trouble. And so with no fanfare, no debate, no need to be prodded into action, Israel's government unrolled "Operation Solomon." Reaching into the middle of a civil war 1,500 miles away, the Israelis, in less than 36 hours, airlifted more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to safety.
Is there any other country that routinely goes to such lengths to uphold the biblical injunction "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself"?
Earlier this year, when the Kurdish uprising ended in massacres and refugee floods, the United States, paralyzed with indecision, stumbled for weeks before finally sending emergency supplies and building refugee camps. (No one suggested that America might offer itself as a safe haven for Kurds fleeing the horrors of life under Saddam Hussein's tyranny.)
When Albanians craving freedom surged through the first cracks in their country's Stalinist isolation, all they got from neighboring Greece and Italy was sullen faces and a cold reception. Vietnam's boat people still risk death at sea to escape life under the Communists; the lucky among them end up on Hong Kong, imprisoned behind British barbed wire.
Not so Ethiopia's long-oppressed Jews, whose African roots trace back 25 centuries — to the marriage, according to legend, of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Between "Operation Moses" (a 1985 rescue mission that airlifted more than 10,000 but had to be halted because of media leaks) and "Operation Solomon," virtually all of them are now safe, in a homeland where they are wanted.
 On May 24, 1991, EL AL set an all-time record by carrying 1,087 passengers on a single Boeing 747 aircraft. This feat was part of Operation Solomon, an extraordinary mission in which Israel airlifted more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to safety. |
In a world that customarily has to be badgered and guilt-tripped into noticing refugees, Israel's rescue of the Ethiopians is dazzling and unique. Christians are under attack in Egypt and the Sudan; the world's powerful Christian nations have not come to their defense. Palestinian Arab refugees rot in demoralizing wretchedness all around the Middle East, as they have since long before the West Bank and Gaza Strip were "Israeli occupied;" their Arab brethren, blessed with vast lands and petro-wealth, are content to let them rot.
But when Jews are in danger in Ethiopia (or in the Soviet Union or Romania or Iraq or Argentina), Israel not only throws its gates open in welcome, but works every channel, overt and covert, diplomatic and monetary, to save them.
There are times, heaven knows, when the Israelis' stiff-necked insistence on doing things their way exasperates their friends and lands them in the diplomatic doghouse. But sometimes — the rescue at Entebbe comes to mind, and the destruction of Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, and the capture of Adolf Eichmann — that go-it-alone brashness combines courage and ethics with extraordinary effect.
In 1975, the United Nations voted to label Zionism — the national independence movement of the Jewish people — a "form of racism and racial discrimination." Which of the 72 nations that joined in that condemnation has ever shut its airport to commercial traffic in order to rescue planeload after planeload of penniless, powerless, pitiful refugees from squalid slums and refugee camps? In that act of conscience and responsibility, Israel stands alone.
Racism? Racial discrimination? "For the first time in history," wrote columnist William Safire after "Operation Moses" in 1985, "thousands of black people are being brought into a country not in chains but in dignity, not as slaves but as citizens." Six years later, Israel has done it again, opening its arms to thousands of additional Ethiopian immigrants. Meanwhile in the United States, which boasts of being a nation of immigrants, a powerful lobby fights to keep foreigners out — especially foreigners with dark skins who don't speak our language. In Texas, natives pull their cars up to the Rio Grande late at night, shining their headlights to help border guards catch Mexicans trying to cross into America in search of freedom and opportunity.
Had they tuned into CNN last weekend, those Texans would have seen crowds of white Israelis lining the streets, cheering as shuttle buses transported to shelter and safety the ragged black foreigners who had just become Israel's newest citizens. If a purer instance of racial harmony ever occurred, it has yet to be recorded.
(Jeff Jacoby is the Boston Herald's chief editorial writer.)
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