Israel Stormy Skies for a Refugee Airlift

By Anastasia Toufexis

For a few days the mood was jubilant. The Falashas had come, and on street corners and in coffee bars Israelis excitedly discussed the rescue operation that had airlifted thousands of starving Ethiopian Jews from refugee camps in Sudan and brought them to the Promised Land. Declared one proud Israeli: "The rest of the world is talking about the famine in Ethiopia, and we are doing something about it. It makes me feel good." But two days after the covert seven-week mission, code-named Operation Moses, became public knowledge, it came to an abrupt halt. Just before a plane carrying some 200 Falashas landed in Israel, officials of Trans European Airways, the Brussels-based charter airline that had made 35 refugee-ferrying flights since late November, suddenly announced that it was suspending the airlift. Subsequently, airline officials acknowledged that the Sudanese government had ordered the halt.

The flights were canceled after Israeli officials confirmed newspaper reports / that a rescue mission was under way. Infuriated that premature publicity had compromised the airlift, the left-wing Citizens' Rights Movement and the right-wing Tehiya Party introduced no-confidence motions against the government in the Knesset. But Prime Minister Shimon Peres persuaded the parties to drop the motions by arguing that they would only bring more attention to the Falashas. "We Israelis manage to take a wonderful thing like this operation and create controversy all around it," said one Israeli immigration official in Jerusalem.

The intense publicity surrounding Operation Moses apparently triggered Sudanese fears of alienating other Arab states, none of which--with the sole exception of Egypt--has diplomatic relations with Israel. The concern was justified. Libya requested a special session of the Arab League, and newspapers in many Arab states last week condemned Sudan. Thundered Kuwait's Al Rai al A'am: "The smuggling of Ethiopian Jews across Sudan can be regarded not as a passing event but as a new defeat inflicted on the Arab nation!"

In Khartoum, the Sudanese government denied any role in the airlift. Foreign Minister Hashem Osman called in Arab, African and Asian diplomats to charge that Ethiopia had been "closing its eyes" to the Falasha exodus in return for weapons and money from Israel. Ethiopia's Foreign Minister Goshu Wolde countered with the accusation that Sudan had been bribing "a large number of Ethiopian Jews to flee Ethiopia."

As the debate raged, about 7,000 Falashas remained stranded in refugee camps in Sudan. Perhaps as many as 10,000 are still in Ethiopia. Anguished newcomers to the Israeli absorption centers, struggling to regain their health and adapt to the many confusing aspects of their new life, wait for word of those left behind. Last week they publicized their dismay at the disclosure of Operation Moses by praying for their relatives at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and staging a sit-in on the lawn of the Jewish Agency, the quasigovernmental body that oversees immigration. Said Baruch Tanga, a Falasha activist: "All the years it was hard to leave . . . now, with half of our families still there, they publish everything. How could they do a thing like that?"

For some, there was consolation in Prime Minister Peres' vow that "we shall not rest until all our brothers and sisters from Ethiopia come safely back home." Nonetheless, said one dejected Jewish Agency official, "all I know is that they're not coming now."

With reporting by Philip Finnegan/Cairo and Robert Slater/Jerusalem