Justice for Ethiopian Jews

The peace agreement with Sudan, when signed, will be historic. The most prominent reason is that the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, was where the Arab League in 1967 announced its “Three Noes”: no to peace with Israel, no to recognizing Israel, and no to negotiations with Israel.

Now, not only has Israel managed to break the three noes and the Arab League boycott, it has also managed to break a part of the Shi’ite crescent, and to establish diplomatic relations with a country that used to be a terrorist base for Iran, and one that until recently was viewed by Israeli intelligence agencies as “Hamas’s backyard.”

In the agreement, unlike the deals with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, there is another dimension that has been mostly overlooked by the public and the media.

Many of us tend to forget, or do not even know, that Sudan was part of the route taken by Ethiopian Jews on their way to Israel. During the aliyah operations in the 1980s, Ethiopian Jews passed through Sudan – a country hostile to Jews and Israel – and, sadly, many died there in refugee camps.

Some estimates put the number of dead at 4,000 people who did not survive the difficult journey to Israel. They were buried there, in Sudan.

A part of the deal with Sudan should be allowing Jews to return to these areas in Sudan to look for the remains of their loved ones who did not finish the arduous journey through the desert.

This would be similar to what happened after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Israel started sending delegations to the death camps in Eastern Europe. Now, too, it would be the right thing to allow Israelis to visit the places where Jews lost their lives on their way to the Holy Land.

Aliyah and Integration Minister Pnina Tamano- Shata echoed this idea in an interview with KAN Reshet Bet on Sunday. Ahead of Aliyah Day in Israel, the minister was asked about her personal story of immigration from Ethiopia.

Tamano- Shata came to Israel when she was three years old, during Operation Moses in 1984, at the same time as her husband.

“Operation Moses was one of hardest, most complicated operations.... My husband lost there two of his sisters,” she said. “One was two years old, the other was three years old. I have many friends who arrived in Israel as orphans.”

Tamano- Shata acknowledged the notion of allowing Jews to trace the remnants of their loved ones in Sudan as part of the agreement.

“We could go back to the place where we buried thousands of people,” she said. “[ We could go there and] erect a monument and look for graves.”

This would be another milestone in the recognition of the Ethiopian- Israeli community, which fought the political establishment for many years to acknowledge its suffering on the way to Israel.

Only in 2007 – more than 20 years after the two major aliyah operations involving Ethiopian Jews – was a formal remembrance site inaugurated at Mount Herzl.

The normalization of relations with Sudan comes in the shadow of the Ethiopian- Israeli community’s ongoing battle to be treated as an equal part of Israeli society.

Only recently we witnessed a disgraceful remark by someone demonstrating against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who happens to be a former senior Israel Air Force officer. The protester said to the Ethiopian- Israeli policewoman who confronted him, “I brought your parents from Ethiopia. Aren’t you ashamed [ for confronting me]?”

This sense of superiority can also be found among some of Netanyahu’s right- wing supporters. We all remember how Miri Regev, a Likud minister, told Deputy Public Security Minister Gadi Yevarkan ( back when he was a member of the Blue and White Party) that he “lacks thankfulness and modesty that was always a basic characteristic of Ethiopian Jews.”

Almost 40 years after the aliyah operations from Ethiopia to Israel, it is time to start seeing Ethiopian- Israelis as equals.

They are not here to serve political aspirations, for the Left or Right. They are members of a diverse group with a rich heritage and history that deserves to recognized. The time has come for the Israeli government to stand proudly for Ethiopian- Jewish justice.