History doesn’t repeat itself in exactly the same way, but it often rhymes.
The story of Ethiopia’s Jews is a reminder of a broader historical pattern: during periods of severe political and economic crisis, minorities - and especially Jews - have often become convenient scapegoats. This has happened under governments of very different ideologies and in many different countries. While every case is unique, history repeatedly shows that when states descend into chaos, vulnerable minorities are often among the first to suffer.
That was the fate of the "Beta Israel" community in Ethiopia.
For centuries, Ethiopian Jews had maintained one of the world’s oldest continuous Jewish communities. But after the 1974 revolution, Ethiopia fell under the communist Derg regime. The country descended into civil war, political repression, and one of the worst famines of the twentieth century. As order collapsed, many Ethiopian Jews found themselves trapped in an increasingly dangerous environment. Leaving the country was illegal, and thousands risked everything to escape on foot through mountains and deserts into neighboring Sudan.
They died from hunger, disease, exhaustion, or attacks by bandits before ever reaching the refugee camps.
Sudan, however, was an enemy state. Israel had no embassy there, no diplomatic relations, and no official way to reach them.
So Israel, the only Jewish Country, that is built to defend the Jews around the world, did something extraordinary to help.
The Mossad secretly leased an abandoned resort on Sudan’s Red Sea coast and reopened it as "Arous Holiday Village", a functioning luxury diving resort.
Real tourists came from Europe for scuba vacations.
By day, the “hotel staff” welcomed guests, served meals, and managed the resort.
By night, those same staff - Mossad operatives led by officers including Dani Limor, under the direction of Mossad chief Yitzhak Hofi - smuggled Ethiopian Jewish refugees from camps to the coast, where Israeli Navy commandos from Shayetet 13 evacuated them under the cover of darkness. Later, as the operation became more dangerous, Israel also carried out covert nighttime airlifts from makeshift desert airstrips.
These missions paved the way for Operation Moses in 1984 and Operation Solomon in 1991, ultimately bringing tens of thousands of prosecuted Ethiopian Jews safely to Israel.
Today, Israel is home to tens of thousands of Black Ethiopian Jews and their descendants.
So much for the simplistic slogan about Israel being a country of “white European colonizers”.
Israel is not a foreign racial enclave planted in the Middle East. It is the national home of a people dispersed across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the wider Middle East - and it has gathered Jews from communities as diverse as Ethiopia, Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Iran, India, Russia, France, and the United States.
The operation remains one of the most remarkable humanitarian intelligence missions in modern history: an intelligence agency running a real tourist resort - not to gather secrets, but to save lives.
For Israel, this was more than a covert operation. It reflected an idea that has shaped the country since its founding: that when Jewish communities are in danger and have nowhere else to turn, Israel has a responsibility to try to bring them to safety.
There is only one Jewish state in the world.
It is committed not only to protecting the Jews living within its borders, but also to helping endangered Jewish communities anywhere in the world.
And it is difficult to ignore that some of the most determined opposition to Israel’s very existence comes from movements and regimes that openly call for the murder, expulsion, or subjugation of Jews - not merely in Israel, but everywhere.
That is why the question of Israel’s existence is not an abstract political debate for Jews. Even for the "antizionist" Jews.
History has repeatedly demonstrated what can happen when Jews are left defenseless and dependent upon the goodwill of governments that may collapse, turn hostile, or simply look away.
Israel exists so that, the next time history begins to rhyme, Jews will not have to wait helplessly for someone else to save them.
That is the meaning of Zionism, and that is the reason Zionism is not racism, and antizionism is.
