SPY RECALLS SECRET MISSION SAVING ETHIOPIAN JEWS. That is the name of the article in The Washington Post about the Israeli mission that is not only legendary, but also unique:

The resulting mission, codenamed Brothers, became a modern Zionist legend. For Shimron, it was a high-wire mix of the humanitarian and the hazardous about which, a generation on, he has written a book with rare acquiescence from Israel's censors.

"The feeling is that Sudan was one of our finest hours, the enlistment of an entire defense establishment for a truly altruistic purpose," Shimron, now 57, told Reuters in an interview promoting the English edition of "Mossad Exodus."

"We're the only Westernized country to have brought out Africans in order to liberate, rather than enslave them."

Other groups of Africans have been invited to leave their countries in emergencies, but this migration aimed to resettle the Ethiopian Jews in their ancestral homeland.

...From 1982 to 1984 the Israelis, receiving radio instructions from Tel Aviv, shuttled between the resort and inland areas where they had located 8,000 Ethiopian Jews.

...Israel was later to bring in another 22,000 Ethiopian Jews in airlifts known as Operation Moses and Operation Solomon.

The article also describes the problems Ethiopian Jews face today in Israel, nothing takes away from this operation, which ranks with the Entebbe mission for making Jews proud of Israel.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Ethiopian Jews.