Thursday’s discussion about Ethiopian aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel) at the Knesset’s Immigration and Integration Committee could have been called to a close after five minutes. After giving his opening remarks, Committee Chair Oded Forer gave the floor to Tair Rabukhin of the Finance Ministry, who sheepishly announced that the 2025 budget has no funds devoted to continued aliyah from Ethiopia. That’s despite the 1,226 Ethiopians still waiting in camps to come to Israel after a previous government approved their aliyah.
But the show went on. Moshe Solomon and Tsega Melaku, two coalition lawmakers of Ethiopian descent, made their case to various officials, and everyone present blamed the Ethiopian government. But why do any of this? What’s the point?
Last March, Israel’s envoy for Ethiopian aliyah presented his findings to the government about the Ethiopian aliyah crisis. Decades after the large waves of Ethiopian aliyah in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, thousands of Ethiopians citizens still say they are eligible for aliyah. But Israel has said multiple times that official aliyah from Ethiopia has ended.
The government is apparently still discussing the four options brought by the envoy, which range from allowing a small number to immigrate to allowing a larger number. But as Forer said in his closing words, “Not making a decision is itself a decision.” Two years have passed since the current government was formed, and in practice the government has made the decision to close Israel’s borders to the hundreds of Jews in Ethiopia waiting to make aliyah.
“The committee that was appointed by Minister Sofer and that presented its conclusions has ended its path in ambiguity,” Yehuda Etzion, a longtime advocate for Ethiopian aliyah, said.
Ephraim Ngusa, the Aliyah and Integration Ministry’s representative, told the committee that “the fact that the ministry still hasn’t finalized a budget amount doesn’t mean that the ministry isn’t prioritizing Ethiopian aliyah.” That remark caused the committee chair to laugh.
Ofir Sofer, the minister of Aliyah and Integration, has expressed pride in continued immigration to Israel from all over the world. But as Moshe Solomon, a fellow member of Sofer’s Religious Zionism pointed out, Jews in Ethiopia face a very different reality from, say, a young woman from Germany who discovers she has Jewish roots and could move to Israel within a month. Like Solomon, many Ethiopian Israelis are frustrated that they are seen as “Israeli enough” to send their children to the military but not Israeli enough for their relatives waiting in Ethiopia to be allowed to join them.
The goal of the meeting was to clarify questions that had come up in previous discussions. Committee Chair Forer had been asked whether the Interior Ministry plans to launch an exceptions committee as had been suggested in every one of the envoy’s proposals. Michal Yosfov, a representative from the Population and Immigration Authority, said that the government would open such a committee once a wider decision had been made about Ethiopian aliyah. That, too, made Forer laugh.
The committee also discussed the question of who would perform interviews for Ethiopians hoping to make aliyah. Across the world, Aliyah interviews are performed either by representatives of the Jewish Agency for Israel, or, in the United States, by contractors hired by the Jewish Agency. But in Ethiopia, the presence of the Jewish Agency is very limited, and the government has said that interviews must be carried out by representatives of the Interior Ministry.
“You need to understand that there’s a difference between aliyah from places like this compared to aliyah from other places,” Yosfov, the Population and Immigration Authority representative said. Her intended meaning seemed to be that Ethiopians seeking to make aliyah don’t have official documentation of their Judaism—but her phrasing, just like the Population and Immigration Authority’s handling of the issue overall, wasn’t quite right.
in addition to the 1,226 Ethiopians whose aliyah has been delayed indefinitely due to lack of Israeli funding, 33 Ethiopians eligible for aliyah through the Law of Return have not been able to leave Ethiopia yet due to delays on the part of the Ethiopian government. Those present in the committee strongly condemned the Ethiopian government, calling the 33 Ethiopians “prisoners of Zion,” the term for Zionist activists persecuted by their state. That condemnation would be less jarring if the very government these committee members belong to had not indefinitely delayed thousands more Ethiopians from coming to Israel, including 1,226 whose aliyah was already approved.
Given the apparent lack of government interest in continued aliyah from Ethiopia, especially amid the ongoing war and the resulting budget cuts, Ethiopian Israeli families who send their children to the IDF should expect to wait many years for their relatives back in Ethiopia to join them in Israel.
This article was translated from Hebrew by Leah Schwartz.
