Start-up Nation

—GIDI GRINSTEIN

IN 1984 SHLOMO (NEGUSE) MOLLA left his small village in northern Ethiopia with seventeen of his friends, determined to walk to Israel. He was sixteen years old. Macha, the remote village where Molla grew up, had virtually no connection to the modern world—no running water, no electricity, and no phone lines. In addition to the brutal famine that plagued the country, the Ethiopian Jews lived under a repressive anti-Semitic regime, a satellite of the former Soviet Union.

“We always dreamed of coming to Israel,” said Molla, who was raised in a Jewish and Zionist home. He and his friends planned to walk north—from Ethiopia to Sudan, Sudan to Egypt and through the Sinai Desert, and from Sinai to Israel’s southern metropolis, Beersheba; after that, they would continue on to Jerusalem.¹

Molla’s father sold a cow in order to pay a guide two dollars to show the boys the way on the first leg of their journey. They walked barefoot day and night, with few rest stops, trekking through the desert and into the jungle of northern Ethiopia. There they encountered wild tigers and snakes before being held up by a band of muggers, who took their food and money. Yet Molla and his friends continued, walking nearly five hundred miles in one week to Ethiopia’s northern border.

When they crossed into Sudan, they were chased by Sudanese border guards. Molla’s best friend was shot and killed, and the rest of the boys were bound, tortured, and thrown in jail. After ninety- one days, they were released to the Gedaref refugee camp in Sudan, where Molla was approached by a white man who spoke crypti-cally but clearly seemed well- informed. “I know who you are and I know where you want to go,” he told the teenager. “I am here to help.” This was only the second time in Molla’s life that he had seen a white person. The man returned the next day, loaded the boys onto a truck, and drove across the desert for five hours, until they reached a remote airstrip.

There, they were pushed inside an airplane along with hundreds of other Ethiopians. This was part of a secret Israeli government effort; the 1984 airlift mission, called Operation Moses, brought more than eight thousand Ethiopian Jews to Israel.² Their average age was fourteen. The day after their arrival, they were all given full Israeli citizenship. The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier wrote at the time that Operation Moses clarified “a classic meaning of Zionism: there must exist a state for which Jews need no visas.”³

Today Molla is an elected member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset; he is only the second Ethiopian to be elected to this office. “While it was just a four-hour flight, it felt like there was a gap of four hundred years between Ethiopia and Israel,” Molla told us.

Coming from an antiquated agrarian community, nearly all the Ethiopians who immigrated to Israel didn’t know how to read or write, even in Amharic, their mother tongue. “We didn’t have cars. We didn’t have industry. We didn’t have supermarkets. We didn’t have banks,” Molla recalled of his life in Ethiopia.

Operation Moses was followed seven years later by Operation Solomon, in which 14,500 Ethiopian Jews were airlifted to Israel. This effort involved thirty-four Israeli Air Force and El Al transport aircraft and one Ethiopian plane. The entire series of transport operations occurred over a thirty-six-hour period.

“Inside Flight 9, the armrests between the seats were raised,” the New York Times reported at the time. “Five, six or seven Ethiopians including children crowded happily into each three-seat row. None of them had ever been on an airplane before and probably did not even know that the seating was unusual.”⁴

Another flight from Ethiopia set a world record: 1,122 passengers on a single El Al 747. Planners had expected to fill the aircraft with 760 passengers, but because the passengers were so thin, hundreds more were squeezed in. Two babies were born during the flight. Many of the passengers arrived barefoot and with no belongings. By the end of the decade, Israel had absorbed some forty thousand Ethiopian immigrants.

The Ethiopian immigration wave has proven to be an enormous economic burden for Israel. Nearly half of Ethiopian adults age twenty-five to fifty-four are unemployed, and a majority of Ethiopian Israelis are on government welfare. Molla expects that even with Israel’s robust and well-funded immigrant-absorption programs, the Ethiopian community will not be fully integrated and self-sufficient for at least a decade.

“Given the context of where they came from not so long ago, this will take time,” Molla told us. The experience of Ethiopian immigrants contrasts sharply with that of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, most of whom arrived at roughly the same time as Operation Solomon, and who have been a boon to the Israeli economy. The success story of this wave can be found in places like the Shevach-Mofet high school.

The students had been waiting for some time, with the kind of anticipation usually reserved for rock stars. Then the moment arrived. The two Americans entered through a back door, shaking off the press and other groupies. This was their only stop in Israel, aside from the prime minister’s office.

The Google founders strode into the hall, and the crowd roared. The students could not believe their eyes.