Operation Magic Carpet (Yemen)

Yemenite Jews en route to Israel from Aden, Yemen

Operation Magic Carpet is a widely known nickname for Operation On Wings of Eagles (Hebrew: כנפי נשרים‎, Kanfei Nesharim), an operation between June 1949 and September 1950 that brought 49,000 Yemenite Jews to the new state of Israel. During its course, the overwhelming majority of Yemenite Jews – some 47,000 Yemeni, 1,500 Aden as well as 500 Djiboutian and Eritrean Jews – were airlifted to Israel. British and American transport planes made some 380 flights from Aden, in a secret operation that was not made public until several months after it was over. At some point, the operation was also called Operation Messiah's Coming.

The operation

The operation's official name originated from two biblical passages:

• Book of Exodus 19:4 - Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto myself.
• Book of Isaiah 40:31 - But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

The Operation Magic Carpet was the first in a series of operations. Israel sees the rescue operation as a successful rescue of Yemen's community from oppression towards redemption. 49,000 Jews were brought to Israel under the program.

A street in Jerusalem, one in Herzliya, and another in Kerem HaTeimanim, Tel Aviv, were named "Kanfei Nesharim" (Wings of Eagles) in honor of this operation.

In 1948 there were 55,000 Jews living in Yemen, and another 8,000 in the British Colony of Aden.

Anti-Jewish violence

Following the 1947 UN Partition Plan, Muslim rioters attacked the Jewish community in Aden that killed at least 82 Jews (1947 Aden riots) and destroyed a number of Jewish homes. Early in 1948, accusations of the murder of two Muslim Yemeni girls led to looting of Jewish property.

Reasons for the exodus

Esther Meir-Glitzenstein argues that collusion between Israel and the Imam of Yemen who "profited hugely from confiscatory taxes levied on the Jewish community" led to a botched operation in which the Jewish community suffered terribly. Reuven Ahroni and Tudor Parfitt argue that economic motivations also had a role in the massive emigration of Yemeni Jews, which began prior to 1948.

Tudor Parfitt described the reasons for the exodus as multifaceted, some aspects due to Zionism and others more historically based:

economic straits as their traditional role was whittled away, famine, disease, growing political persecution, and increased public hostility, the state of anarchy after the murder of Yahya, often a desire to be reunited with family members, incitement and encouragement to leave from [Zionist agents who] played on their religious sensibilities, promises that their passage would be paid to Israel and that their material difficulties would be cared for by the Jewish state, a sense that the Land of Israel was a veritable Eldorado, a sense of history being fulfilled, a fear of missing the boat, a sense that living wretchedly as dhimmis in an Islamic state was no longer God-ordained, a sense that as a people they had been flayed by history long enough: all these played a role. ... Purely religious, messianic sentiment too, had its part but by and large this has been overemphasised.

Critiques

Esther Meir-Glitzenstein also criticized the execution of the operation. She especially criticized the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Israel, which according to her abandoned thousands of Jews in the deserts on the border between North Yemen and Aden. Mismanagement or corruption by the imam of Yemen, the British authorities, and the Jewish Agency also played a role. Some 850 Yemenite Jews died en route to their departure points, and in the community which reached Israel infant mortality rates were high, but still lower than in Yemen. According to David Ben-Gurion's diary, the Yemeni children in the Israeli ma'abarot or tent transit camps were dying like flies. Children were often separated from their parents for hygienic reasons, or taken away to hospitals for treatment, but often parents only received notification, often by loudspeaker, they had died. According to some testimony, there was a suspicion that the state kidnapped healthy Yemeni children, for adoption, and then informed the parents they had died. As a result, some decades later, the Yemenite Children Affair exploded, in which it was rumoured that something of the order of 1,000 children had gone missing.

The Jewish community in Yemen after the operation

In 1959, another 3,000 Jews from Aden fled to Israel while many more left as refugees to the United States and the United Kingdom. The emigration of Yemeni Jews continued as a trickle but stopped in 1962, when a civil war broke out in North Yemen, which put an abrupt halt on further emigration. As of the year 2013, a total of some 250 Jews still live in Yemen. The Jewish communities in Rayday were shocked by the killing of Moshe Ya'ish al-Nahari in 2008. His wife and nine children emigrated to Israel. Other members of the Jewish community received hate letters and threats by phone. Amnesty International wrote to the Yemeni government, urging the country to protect its Jewish citizens. The human rights organization stated that it is "deeply concerned for the safety of members of the Jewish community in northwestern Yemen following the killing of one member of the community and anonymous serious threats to others to leave Yemen or face death". During the Gaza War, the Jewish communities in Raydah were attacked several times.

It was forbidden for native-born Yemeni Jews who had left the country to reenter, rendering communication with these communities difficult. Muslims were therefore hired as shelihim (emissaries) to locate the remaining Jews, pay their debts, and transport them to Aden. Little came of this.

See also

• Amka
• Operation Yakhin
• Yemenite Jews in Israel

External links

• Photographs of Operation Magic Carpet from the JDC Archives