Dan Singer - Start-up Nation

Today Molla is an elected member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset; he is only the second Ethiopian to be elected to this office. “While it was just a four-hour flight, it felt like there was a gap of four hundred years between Ethiopia and Israel,” Molla told us.

Coming from an antiquated agrarian community, nearly all the Ethiopians who immigrated to Israel didn’t know how to read or write, even in Amharic, their mother tongue. “We didn’t have cars. We didn’t have industry. We didn’t have supermarkets. We didn’t have banks,” Molla recalled of his life in Ethiopia.

Operation Moses was followed seven years later by Operation Solomon, in which 14,500 Ethiopian Jews were airlifted to Israel. This effort involved thirty-four Israeli Air Force and El Al transport aircraft and one Ethiopian plane. The entire series of transport operations occurred over a thirty-six-hour period.

“Inside Flight 9, the armrests between the seats were raised,” the New York Times reported at the time. “Five, six or seven Ethiopians including children crowded happily into each three-seat row. None of them had ever been on an airplane before and probably did not even know that the seating was unusual.” 4

Another flight from Ethiopia set a world record: 1,122 passengers on a single El Al 747. Planners had expected to fill the aircraft with 760 passengers, but because the passengers were so thin, hundreds more were squeezed in. Two babies were born during the flight. Many of the passengers arrived barefoot and with no belongings. By the end of the decade, Israel had absorbed some forty thousand Ethiopian immigrants.

The Ethiopian immigration wave has proven to be an enormous economic burden for Israel. Nearly half of Ethiopian adults age twenty-five to fifty-four are unemployed, and a majority of Ethiopian Israelis are on government welfare. Molla expects that even with Israel’s robust and well-funded immigrant-absorption programs, the Ethiopian community will not be fully integrated and self-sufficient for at least a decade.

“Given the context of where they came from not so long ago, this will take time,” Molla told us. The experience of Ethiopian immigrants contrasts sharply with that of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, most of whom arrived at roughly the same time as Operation Solomon, and who have been a boon to the Israeli economy. The success story of this wave can be found in places like the Shevach-Mofet high school.

The students had been waiting for some time, with the kind of anticipation usually reserved for rock stars. Then the moment arrived. The two Americans entered through a back door, shaking off the press and other groupies. This was their only stop in Israel, aside from the prime minister’s office.

The Google founders strode into the hall, and the crowd roared. The students could not believe their eyes. “Sergey Brin and Larry Page . . . in our high school!” one of the students proudly recalled. What had brought the world’s most famous tech duo to this Israeli high school, of all places?

The answer came as soon as Sergey Brin spoke. “Ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys,” he said in Russian, his choice of language prompting spontaneous applause. “I emigrated from Russia when I was six,” Brin continued. “I went to the United States. Similar to you, I have standard Russian-Jewish parents. My dad is a math professor. They have a certain attitude about studies. And I think I can relate that here, because I was told that your school recently got seven out of the top ten places in a math competition throughout all Israel.”

This time the students clapped for their own achievement. “But what I have to say,” Brin continued, cutting through the applause, “is what my father would say—‘ What about the other three? ’ ” 5

Most of the students at the Shevach-Mofet school were, like Brin, second-generation Russian Jews. Shevach-Mofet is located in an industrial area in south Tel Aviv, the poorer part of town, and was for years notoriously one of the roughest schools in the city.

We learned about the history of the school from Natan Sharansky, the most famous former Soviet Jewish immigrant in Israel. He spent fourteen years in Soviet prisons and labor camps while fighting for the right to emigrate and was the best-known “refusenik,” as the Soviet Jews who were refused permission to emigrate were called. He rose to become Israel’s deputy prime minister a few years after he was freed from the Soviet Union. He joked to us that in Israel’s Russian immigrant party, which he founded soon after his arrival, politicians believe they should mirror his own experience: go to prison first and then get into politics, not the other way around.

“The name of the school—Shevach—means ‘praise,’ ” Sharansky told us in his home in Jerusalem. It was the second high school to open in Tel Aviv, when the city was brand-new, in 1946. It was one of the schools where the new generation of native Israelis went. But in the early 1960s, “the authorities started to experiment with integration, a bit like in America,” he explained. “The government said we can’t have sabra schools, we must bring in the immigrants from Morocco, Yemen, Eastern Europe—let’s have a mix.” 6

While the idea may have been a good one, its execution was poor. By the beginning of the 1990s, when large waves of Russian Jewish immigrants began to arrive following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the school was one of the worst in the city and known mainly for delinquency. At that time, Yakov Mozganov, a new immigrant who had been a professor of mathematics in the Soviet Union, was employed at the school as a security guard. This was typical in those years: Russians with PhDs and engineering degrees were arriving in such overwhelming numbers that they could not find jobs in their fields, especially while they were still learning Hebrew.

Mozganov decided that he would start a night school for students of all ages—including adults—who wanted to learn more science or math, using the Shevach classrooms. He recruited other unemployed or underemployed Russian immigrants with advanced degrees to teach with him. They called it Mofet, a Hebrew acronym of the words for “mathematics,” “physics,” and “culture” that also means “excellence.” The Russian offshoot was such a success that it was eventually merged with the original school, which became Shevach-Mofet. The emphasis on hard sciences and on excellence was not in name only; it reflected the ethos that new arrivals from the former Soviet Union brought with them to Israel.

Israel’s economic miracle is due as much to immigration as to anything. At Israel’s founding in 1948, its population was 806,000. Today numbering 7.1 million people, the country has grown almost ninefold in sixty years. The population doubled in the first three years alone, completely overwhelming the new government. As one parliament member said at the time, if they had been working with a plan, they never would have absorbed so many people. Foreign-born citizens of Israel currently account for over one-third of the nation’s population, almost three times the ratio of foreigners to natives in the United States. Nine out of ten Jewish Israelis are either immigrants or first- or second-generation descendants of immigrants.

David McWilliams, an Irish economist who lived and worked in Israel in 1994, has his own colorful, if less-than-academic, methodology to illustrate immigration data: “Worldwide, you can tell how diverse the population is by the food smells of the streets and the choice of menus. In Israel, you can eat almost any specialty, from Yemenite to Russian, from real Mediterranean to bagels. Immigrants cook and that is precisely what wave after wave of poor Jews did when they arrived having been kicked out of Baghdad, Berlin, and Bosnia.” 7