just of people of narrowly defined origins or economic status, as the Ethiopian immigration missions evidence. The job of welcoming and encouraging immigration is a cabinet position with a dedicated ministry behind it. Unlike the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, which maintains as one of its primary responsibilities keeping immigrants out, the Israeli Immigration and Absorption Ministry is solely focused on bringing them in.
If Israelis hear on the radio at the end of the year that immigration was down, this is received as bad news, like reports that there was not enough rainfall that year. During election seasons, candidates for prime minister from different parties frequently pledge to bring in “another million immigrants” during their term.
In addition to the Ethiopian airlifts, this commitment has been repeatedly, and at times dramatically, demonstrated. One such example is Operation Magic Carpet, in which, between 1949 and 1950, the Israeli government secretly airlifted forty-nine thousand Yemenite Jews to Israel in surplus British and American transport planes. These were poverty-stricken Jews, with no means of making their way to Israel on their own. Thousands more did not survive the three-week trek to a British airstrip in Aden.
But perhaps the least-known immigration effort involves post–World War II Romania. About 350,000 Jews resided in Romania in the late 1940s, and although some escaped to Palestine, the Communist government held hostage others who wished to leave. Israel first provided drills and pipes for Romania’s oil industry in exchange for 100,000 exit visas. But beginning in the 1960s, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaus?escu demanded hard cash to allow Jews to leave the country. Between 1968 and 1989, the Israeli government paid Ceaus?escu $112,498,800 for the freedom of 40,577 Jews. That comes out to $2,772 per person.
Against this backdrop, the Israeli government has made the chief mission of the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption the integration of immigrants into society. Language training is one of the most urgent and comprehensive priorities for the government. To this day, the ministry organizes free full-immersion Hebrew courses for new immigrants: five hours each day, for at least six months. The government even offers a stipend to help cover living expenses during language training, so newcomers can focus on learning their new language rather than being distracted with trying to make ends meet.
To accredit foreign education, the Ministry of Education maintains a Department for the Evaluation of Overseas Degrees. And the government conducts courses to help immigrants prepare for professional licensing exams. The Center for Absorption in Science helps match arriving scientists with Israeli employers, and the absorption ministry runs entrepreneurship centers, which provide assistance with obtaining start-up capital.16
There are also absorption programs supported by the government but launched by independent Israeli citizens. Asher Elias, for example, believes there is a future for Ethiopians in the vaunted high-tech industry in Israel. Elias’s parents came to Israel in the 1960s from Ethiopia, nearly twenty years before the mass immigration of Ethiopian Jews. Asher’s older sister, Rina, was the first Ethiopian-Israeli born in Israel.
After completing a degree in business administration at the College of Management in Jerusalem, Elias took a marketing job at a high-tech company and attended Selah University, then in Jerusalem, to study software engineering—he had always been a computer junkie. But Elias was shocked when he could find only four other Ethiopians working in Israel’s high-tech sector.
“There was no opportunity for Ethiopians,” he said. “The only paths to the high-tech sector were through the computer science departments at public universities or private technical colleges. Ethiopians were underperforming on the high school matriculation exams, which precluded them from the top universities; and private colleges were too expensive.”
Elias envisioned a different path. Together with an American software engineer, in 2003 he established a not- for-profit organization called Tech Careers, a boot camp to prepare Ethiopians for jobs in high tech.
Ben-Gurion, both before and after the state’s founding, had made immigration one of the nation’s top priorities. Immigrants with no safe haven needed to be aided in their journey to the fledgling Jewish state, he believed; perhaps more importantly, immigrant Jews were needed to settle the land, to fight in Israel’s wars, and to breathe life into the nascent state’s economy. This is still seen as true today.
CHAPTER 8
The Diaspora
Stealing Airplanes
—ANNALEE SAXENIAN
TODAY,” JOHN CHAMBERS SAID AS HE TOOK LARGE sideways steps across the stage to illustrate his point,
