Uri Lubrani
Veteran Israeli diplomat revered for his role in the Operation Solomon airlift of Ethiopian Jews
URI LUBRANI, who has died aged 91, was an experienced Israeli diplomat and an adviser to a succession of prime ministers, beginning with David Ben-gurion and ending with Benjamin Netanyahu.
As Israel’s head of mission in Tehran from 1973 to 1978, he foresaw the downfall of the Shah, with whom Israel had cultivated good relations, six months before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But his warning was not heeded either by his colleagues in Israel or by the US administration in Washington, and this would haunt him for years.
Though the bulk of his work was behind the scenes, Lubrani became a folk hero in Israel because of his masterminding in 1991 of Operation Solomon, when during the Ethiopian civil war 14,000 Ethiopian Jews were plucked to safety from Addis Ababa to Israel in the space of a single May weekend. Later that year he enhanced his reputation still further as the chief Israeli negotiator in a prisoner-hostage exchange brokered by the UN with pro-iranian Lebanese Shi’ite underground groups.
An only “spoilt” child (as he often put it), Uriel Lubrani was born on October 7 1926 in Haifa, in what was then British Mandate Palestine, where his parents, Aaron and Rose Lubrani, had emigrated from Vienna two years earlier. His father was a veterinarian who, in his spare time, ran a children’s theatre company. His mother and grandmother, meanwhile, ran a high-class pension.
Haifa was a cosmopolitan city at that time, teeming with Christian and Muslim Arabs, British soldiers, officers and their dependants, as well as Jews. Aaron Lubrani had many Arab friends and the young Uri soon picked up Arabic, developing an understanding of, and respect for, Arab culture. Many dignitaries passed through Haifa and visited the family pension, among them King Abdullah of Jordan and the British officer Orde Wingate during his time as an intelligence officer in Palestine.
Lubrani was educated at Hebrew Reali School of Haifa and from 1943 he served with the Jewish paramilitary Haganah, smuggling Jewish refugees from Europe into Palestine. In October 1947 he was sent by Haganah to southern France to help handle the wave of European immigration which became known as Aliyah Bet. He then moved to Britain to study at University College, London, but Israel’s war of independence intervened and in April 1948 he returned home to serve as an intelligence officer in the Palmach, the Haganah’s elite fighting force, working in Galilee.
At the end of the war he was one of only two, out of 300 candidates, chosen for work in the foreign ministry of the new state of Israel. He began in 1950 in its Middle East department and a year later became personal secretary to Israel’s first foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, a position he held for three years before returning to Britain to complete his degree, graduating in 1956 in History and Economics.
He was then appointed adviser on Arab affairs to Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-gurion and went on to alternate as part-time head of his private office until Ben-gurion’s resignation in January 1954. He stayed on as private secretary and political adviser to Ben-gurion’s chosen successor Levi Eshkol, but resigned in 1964 during an ideological clash between the pair. Lubrani had always regarded Ben-gurion as his mentor.
Returning to the foreign ministry, Lubrani was appointed ambassador to Uganda, serving until 1967, when he was appointed ambassador to the Ethiopia of Emperor Haile Selassie.
During his time in Kampala, Lubrani survived an air crash with Idi Amin, who subsequently declared the Israeli to be his “blood brother”. His acquaintance with the eccentric Ugandan dictator meant that in 1976, when he was serving in Iran, he was brought in as an adviser during the rescue of hijacked air passengers at Entebbe. Lubrani handled the negotiations with Kenya, with whom Israel did not have diplomatic relations, to arrange for Israeli planes to land and refuel.
Meanwhile, his three-year stint in Addis Ababa laid the groundwork for his pivotal role in Operation Solomon, when, for six months, he handled on-off negotiations with agents of the Ethiopian president Mengistu Haile Mariam. In an interview shortly after the successful completion of the operation, Lubrani revealed that he had received information that the airport was in imminent danger of falling into the hands of the rebels. It was captured by anti-mengistu forces the day after the last planes loaded with Ethiopian Jews took off.
After a short break from diplomacy in the early 1970s, in 1973 prime minister Golda Meir invited Lubrani to become head of mission in Tehran with the rank of ambassador, even though officially Iran and Israel did not have diplomatic ties.
He divined that the country was on the brink of revolution, later recalling: “I went down to the street and there I saw Iranian women demonstrating against the Shah … the people were with Khomeini.” But his concerns were dismissed by Israel’s foreign minister, Moshe Dayan. As Iran was then Israel’s main oil supplier, he persisted, urging the Israeli government to prepare itself for the overthrow of the Shah. The government, however, preferred to trust the assurances of the CIA, which dismissed Lubrani’s concerns as a “hallucination”. Six months later, the Shah fled into exile.
Lubrani had left Tehran a few months earlier to go into business. In 1983, however, he was invited by Israel’s defence minister, Moshe Arens, to coordinate the country’s activities in Lebanon. Israel’s invasion of the year before led to the withdrawal of PLO and Syrian forces from Lebanon.
But although Israel had launched its invasion as an ally of the Christian Maronites, Lubrani set about establishing improved relations with other religious groupings in that country, including Shi’ites and Druze, and was instrumental, in 1985, in organising the withdrawal of Israel Defence Forces to a security zone in south Lebanon.
As well as his role in negotiating the prisoner-hostage exchange of 1991, he was behind the ultimately unsuccessful efforts to repatriate Ron Arad, an Israeli pilot lost over Lebanon in 1986 and subsequently captured by Hizbollah. It is thought that Arad was killed during an escape attempt in 1988. Lubrani continued to coordinate Israel’s activities in Lebanon until its withdrawal from the country in 2000 under prime minister Ehud Barak.
Though he eventually retired in 2015, in his later years Lubrani, a portly, grandfatherly figure, became increasingly outspoken about threats to Israel’s security, including pressing the western powers to do more to bring about the overthrow of the revolutionary regime in Tehran.
He also campaigned to persuade his fellow Israelis to do more to cultivate good relations with their Palestinian neighbours and the rest of the Arab world, calling for Israelis to learn Arabic, for financial compensation to be offered to refugees with a claim to property in Israel, and pleading for greater courtesy and understanding.
In an interview in 2011 he recalled a bus journey with his father: “An Arab woman got on, with two baskets. My father told me to stand up and give her my seat. The man sitting behind us butted in, asking why my father had told me to do that. My father said again, ‘Stand up and let her sit down. We’re going to be living with her for another 2,000 years together.’ That stuck in my head.”
In 1953 Uri Lubrani married Sarah Levi, with whom he had four daughters.
Uri Lubrani, born October 7 1926, died March 5 2018