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.