Geting the Facts Straight About Ethiopian Jews and Contraception

Irresponsible, sensationalist reports distract from real social challenges facing Ethiopians in Israel, and do not help them. There are those, however, who do benefit from this saga. In the digital era, where falsehoods long outlast yellowed news clippings, the lie about Israel’s sterilization of Ethiopians will doubtless become another weapon in the arsenal used by extremists to delegitimize the Jewish state.

Tamar Sternthal..
Algemeiner..
07 February '13..

As a bat mitzvah girl in suburban Philadelphia, I was riveted by the plight of Ethiopian Jews in the late 1980s, and was twinned with Yeshalem, an Addis Ababa girl whose brother had already made his way to Israel. Following the inspiring two-day mass airlift of 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1991, news clippings about Operation Solomon yellowed on my bedroom wall for years.

By the time I finished high school, I was not able to track down my twin or her family – bureaucrats at the Ministry of Interior did not have time for an American teen with poor Hebrew and worn letters. So I don’t know what has become of her. Did her entire family make it to Israel? Did she go to university? Start a career? Get married? Have children?

Was she sterilized?

According to a sub-headline accompanying an Op-Ed in the English edition of Ha’aretz, “The revelation that Israel is sterilizing Ethiopian women adds to a shameful history of abuse of powerless women and communities.” That’s a shocking, horrifying assertion with its overtones of Nazi racism and Dr. Mengele’s experimentation. It’s also completely false. Although it was later corrected, the damage was done.

Along with two news articles in Ha’aretz which purveyed slightly less extreme charges – that Israel allegedly required Ethiopian women in transit camps en route to Israel to receive long-lasting contraceptive injections as a condition for immigrating – the Ha’aretzitems set off a firestorm of global coverage. According to reports, the coerced injections continued even after the women arrived in Israel.

(Video) Ethiopian Jews come Home

firstonethrough..
07 January '13..

Many centuries ago, there were over half a million Jews in Ethiopia, called Beta Israel. Due to persecution, many were forced to convert (Falasha Muras) and many were killed. In the mid-1980s and early 1990s, the Israeli government made several organized efforts to rescue the remaining Beta Israel and bring them to Israel.



Music: "Home" by Phillip Phillips

Researched, Fact-based Humor and Politics. Click here for more from firstonethrough

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Operation Solomon: Shamir’s Greatest Legacy?

Stephen Spector..
Tablet Magazine..
03 July '12..

As prime minister, the late Yitzhak Shamir authorized and oversaw one of the most dramatic mass rescues in recent history: the airlift of over 14,000 Ethiopian Jews from Addis Ababa to Israel in less than a day and a half in May 1991. The Israelis plucked the Falashas from imminent danger in that operation, flying them out of the Ethiopian capital at the climactic moment of a civil war, with rebel forces surrounding the city.

But the mission, which came to be known as Operation Solomon, was not a simple matter of rescuing Jews in peril. Less than two years earlier, the Ethiopian Jews faced no grave risk. To the contrary, they were safe in their villages in the Gondar region of the Ethiopian highlands, living much as they had for generations as tenant farmers and artisans. The Ethiopian aliyah had reached a crescendo with the secret Israeli airlift of the Falashas from camps in Sudan in 1984-85. But the Sudanese halted that mission after it was revealed publicly. Since then, the aliyah had slowed significantly, and by the late 1980s, the Ethiopian Jewish community was split in two. Almost every Jewish family in Gondar had relatives who had reached Israel and whom they had not seen in years. There seemed to be little prospect of reviving the immigration movement.

Then history took a turn. The Soviet Union was in the process of collapsing, and Mikhail Gorbachev told the brutal Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam that he would drastically cut back weapons shipments to the African nation. For Mengistu, this couldn’t have come at a worse moment: He was facing increasingly successful rebel advances against his army. In desperation, Mengistu turned to Israel, and in November 1989, he dispatched a trusted official to meet with Shamir in Jerusalem with the aim of renewing diplomatic relations.