May 13, 2019
Book Review: Mossad Exodus: The Daring Undercover Rescue Of The Lost Jewish Tribe
A Guest Post by Dr Harold Goldmeier
A Book Review of Mossad Exodus: The Daring Undercover Rescue Of The Lost Jewish Tribe, by Gad SHimron
A Book Review of Mossad Exodus: The Daring Undercover Rescue Of The Lost Jewish Tribe, by Gad SHimron
Some of my international university students just
returned from Ethiopia. The trip is optional for gap year students learning
about the Jewish People There is a backstory to the Ethiopian Jews returning
home to Zion that is more exciting and fraught with Israel’s good intentions
that continues decades later.
Their travel guide was one of my Ethiopian Jewish
former students who is now a serial entrepreneur living back in Ethiopia. “It’s
not like anything in any country I’ve seen before,” one young woman from South
Africa tells our class in Middle East politics. And the students joined
Ethiopians still living there in prayer with tallis and tefillin. The women
dress modestly. They eat kosher, observe the Shabbat, and study Jewish texts
with visiting rabbis, she told the class. But controversy rages in Israel
whether these remaining practicing Jews have any claim to Jewish lineage. Yet,
Israel is bringing them home to Zion because nobody gets left behind.
“Why don’t they bring the rest of (the Ethiopians)
to Israel,” asks another incredulous student? “There’s only a handful left and
they told us their relatives are already here. It’s really wrong what Israel is
doing.” Right or wrong, this student and other observers give short shrift to
the nuances and definitions of “who is a Jew.”
Rachel Sylvetsky, editor at Aurutz Sheva, on the
other hand, has the first-hand experience in this field. She explains the
situation to me like this:
“There is a vast difference between the Ethiopian
Bete Israel who walked through Sudan in the first aliya, one of whom I hired as
the first Ethiopian oleh rabbi in the Israeli educational system, and the later
falashmura who converted to Christianity decades ago for economic reasons. Israel accepted them anyway and they
underwent conversion as families because it was really 'return' not conversion,
but it was far from an easy decision.” Those remaining in Ethiopia are being
“returned`’ by Israel to Zion on humanitarian grounds and offered the
opportunity to undertake special conversions.
Israel’s seminal mission is to never leave behind a
Jewish refugee. It has fulfilled the mission triumphantly. There are 65 million
refugees worldwide in 2019, and not refugee one is a Jew without a country to
flee.
Israel’s Operations Moses, Brotherhood and Solomon
decamped nearly 100,000 exilic Ethiopian Jews in the 1980s and1990s. In
thrilling adventures, the kind of which books are written and Hollywood movies
are made, teams of Mossad agents, IDF members and civilians, with the help of
America and other countries, planned, organized and went deep into hostile
nations of Ethiopia and Sudan. Sudan sent armies in ‘48 and ‘73 to fight
against Israel. It was in Khartoum following the Six Days War the Arab Summit
rejected any peace with Israel. So, Mossad had to construct cover stories for
its Operations.
Nothing stopped the Israelis or the Jewish
Ethiopians. The forlorn walked across vast deserts to meet Israeli agents who
packed them into the largest airplanes on earth and transported others aboard
camouflaged ships. They bravely flew miles above and across unsuspecting
African countries and waterways sandwiched between enemy Arab countries in
their Return to Zion.
The stories about Operation Moses are engrossingly
told in Mossad Exodus (Geffen Publishing House, 2018). Former Mossad agent Gad Shimron is an author
with boots on the ground experience. The book is hard to put down. It is
gripping. Shimron writes like any great spy novelist fraught with background,
but these are true adventures. The reader feels the pain and angst of the
Ethiopians and the brotherly commitment of the Israelis. That’s why a Hollywood
movie based on the book is in production.
The inspiration came from newly elected Prime
Minister Menachem Begin. Begin beseeched the Mossad Chief, “I ask you to use
the Mossad to find a way to bring these dear Jews to Israel. Bring the
Ethiopian Jewry to me.”
The Jews in Ethiopia suffered from famine,
political and religious oppression, violence, and were under the suspicious
eyes of neighbors willing to inform authorities. The Israelis needed a cover
story. The Mossad purchased from Italians and remodeled a bankrupt tourist
resort on the sea as cover for the true mission. They refurbished an abandoned,
dusty airstrip. Both were staging areas to extricate the Ethiopians. There are
eight pages of pictures in the book giving gravitas and color.
There is plenty of gossip Shimron shares. He talks
about interpersonal relationships. There are swashbuckling characters. One has
the courage that borders on insanity. Field agents resent the big egos of their
bosses they find mendacious and petty. His Khartoum bar description and
encounters remind me of Bogart in Casablanca. “A couple of Hungarian musicians,
a pianist, and a violinist, provided musical ambiance in the bar, which boasted
the romantic name Sunset.” Then there are the peripatetic international
agencies representatives, charity workers, and Swedish nurses.
The reader learns from Shimron operations are
lurching works in progress despite planning to the smallest detail. Timing and
preparedness build teamwork. Practice turns behaviors into habits and instinct.
Then there are the unanticipated buggers making the
reader bite nails to the quick. Things turn bad for the most innocuous reasons
and nearly scupper the operations:
• Avoid
suspicious looking phone activity; it is best to stay in touch with
headquarters calling “from the outhouse.”
• Sand
dust eats away at mechanical devices causing trucks to breakdown.
• Food
storage and distribution equipment must be upgraded in the field or famine
lurks.
• Threaten
the mission to medevac a young girl with a high fever.
• Chase an
elderly woman who has run off into the desert fearful of the noise from the
huge airplanes.
• Do not
engage when a Sudanese unit fires a SAM missile at a Hercules transport plane
and another launches a high-speed chase after the Mossad.
• A
foreign aid worker starts talking in Hebrew to the agents and nearly blows
their cover. “I know you are Israelis…Only Israelis cut their salad vegetables
so thin.”
Shimron movingly writes, “I’m no longer objective
about anything pertaining to Ethiopian Jews. I admire them, their inner calm
and the stamina that enabled them to stand up to terrible hardships on their
way to freedom. It is the stamina of heroes. And their smiles and the sound of
laughter of Ethiopian children have a unique sound. I heard it for the first time
in that remote wadi somewhere in eastern Sudan.”
About Israel, “Our mission in Sudan was one of the
sorts that made the Mossad a legend in the spy world. What other country would
be ready to invest tens of millions of dollars to set up an operational infrastructure
for secret activity in an enemy country, involving large army forces, only to
save several thousand famished refugees in civil war-torn Africa?” Only Israel!
Dr. Harold Goldmeier teaches Middle East Politics
in Tel Aviv and is a free public speaker to business and community groups. He
was an R&T Fellow at Harvard and manages an investment fund.
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