Israel Pledges to Rescue Jews Still in Ethiopia : Peres Seeking to Quiet Domestic Controversy Over Airlift Disclosures

JERUSALEM —  Israeli government leaders tried desperately Monday to defuse a political controversy over the interrupted campaign to rescue Ethiopian Jews and pledged to do all in their power to save those Ethiopians still stranded in East Africa.

“We shall not rest . . . until all our brothers and sisters from Ethiopia will come safely back home,” Prime Minister Shimon Peres said at a Hebrew University symposium.

President Chaim Herzog pleaded that “this national endeavor not become a partisan political subject even if grave mistakes may inadvertently have been made.”

A clandestine airlift that had carried more than 7,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the last two months was at least temporarily halted over the weekend, after a series of public disclosures shredded the veil of secrecy that surrounded the effort.

Those Left in Peril

The halt threatened to strand as many as 12,000 Ethiopian Jews, or Falashas, remaining in their drought- and famine-devastated homeland.

Critics, including some Ethiopian Jews in Israel who fear for the safety of relatives still in Africa, blamed the government press office, which last Thursday disclosed some details of the operation at a hastily called news conference.

Officials said the purpose of that disclosure had been to limit the damage from premature publicity by trying to focus press attention on the absorption of Ethiopian Jews in Israel rather than on the airlift itself, which involved transporting the Falashas from refugee camps in Sudan.

On Monday, however, a caucus of the Likud bloc called for a commission of inquiry into the government’s handling of the case. Dan Meridor, a Likud member of Parliament and former secretary to the Cabinet under Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, said his party had begun the rescue operation and had kept it under wraps. He charged that associates of Peres, head of the rival Labor alignment, confirmed details of the effort--code-named “Operation Moses”--to give the prime minister publicity.

However, Likud leader Yitzhak Shamir, who is foreign minister and alternate prime minister in the national unity government, told Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that, while it was a mistake to make the story public, he believes no harm was intended.

The United States maintained official silence on the Falasha airlift Monday. State Department spokesman Alan Romberg several times refused to go beyond a statement last Friday, in which the department said the United States had worked “quietly and closely with a number of organizations and governments to save the lives of the African refugees, including African Jewish refugees.”

A senior American official said he sees no point in talking any more about the Falashas.

In Israel, small opposition parties abandoned their intention of introducing no-confidence motions in Parliament after Peres promised to make a statement in Parliament today cqon the rationale behind last Thursday’s disclosures.

Talent for Undoing Advantage

President Herzog offered both a wry comment and a serious appeal Monday. “We have a dubious talent for converting any admirable achievement into a matter of controversy,” he said of the Falasha airlift. “It is my plea that we do not make this splendid rescue of Ethiopian Jewry into an ugly chapter of accusations and slanders leveled by political groups against each other.”

Herzog urged all concerned to “make every effort to quiet the storm and quietly and intensively repair what has gone amiss.”

The Israeli president also lashed out at the Arab states, which have protested the secret airlift. He used the issue of the Palestinian refugees, whose cause the Arabs champion.

“With the oil revenue of a single day, they could have rescued all the Palestinian refugees from their distress,” Herzog said. “They could have and did not, and now cry out against a humane rescue operation of the greatest nobility. Can there be more blatant hypocrisy than this?”

The Arabs hold that the Palestinian refugees should be permitted to return to the homes they lost in the 1948-49 Israeli war of independence.

The news leak may have begun as early as Nov. 20, when Aryeh Dulzin, chairman of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency--which is responsible for Israeli immigration--asked Jews in New York state to help raise $100 million for a special operation to settle the Ethiopian Jews in Israel.

“Although I am not free to discuss this subject in public, I am free to tell you that the Jewish Agency is prepared for a sudden jump in immigration,” the Israeli newspaper Maariv quoted Dulzin as having said in New York. “One of the oldest of Jewish tribes is about to return to its homeland.”

Another Israeli newspaper, Hadashot--hoping to ease the rough spots in the Ethiopians’ adjustment--on Monday published a dictionary of simple phrases in Amharic and urged readers to converse with the Falashas in their own tongue.