Flying Under the Radar

This morning our house guest Yair showed us a video about his experience as a pilot in the Israeli air force. In the late 1980s, he flew missions into Sudan to bring Ethiopian Jews to Israel. The Ethiopian Jews lived in remote and primitive villages. Conditions of life were deteriorating as rebels were taking over the country. Jewish Ethiopians feared for their lives and began to walk away from their long-term homes, hoping that they would get to "Jerusalem." The Israelis made a plan to meet them in the desert of the Sudan. Yair and other pilots flew in, landed on the desert at night, quickly loaded the waiting Ethiopians into the cargo space in the plane, and took off again. The logistics and organization of this rescue effort were amazing.

The video showed the loading of the plane on the ground. The clips were filmed with night-vision cameras. All the people appeared as white on black backgrounds. The heat radiating from the plane, its engines still running, was also white. Crowds of shadowy figures were led by men in goggles. They hung onto one another or onto their long scarves as they stumbled onto the plane. I could imagine their fear: none of these people had ever seen an airplane before, and they had been walking across hostile land for days or weeks, then brought to the plane site in trucks. The film clips from inside the plane showed their colorful scarves, which they wrapped around their heads as they sat down on the floor of the plane for the long trip to their new land.

"We had to stay low, under the radar, to avoid the Sudanese authorities, who didn't know we were there," said Yair. "If we lost pressure, we had no oxygen masks for the people crowded onto the plane. There were no non-hostile airfields between the landing spot and Tel Aviv." The Israelis succeeded in a number of missions, and the Ethiopians are now citizens of Israel.

Yair and several other visitors from Nahalal are here to further develop the relationship between their community and ours. Yair was our guest on Friday and Saturday nights. He and his wife were our hosts at dinner when we visited the Nahalal Moshav in May, 2006, as I described in Visit to Migdal HaEmek, Upper Nazereth, and Nahalal.