On Wings of Eagles: the airlift of Yemenite Jewry

There were about three hundred and eighty flights. The real Israeli name is מבצע על כנפי נשרים, Mivtzaʿ ʿAl Kanfei Nesharim, "On Wings of Eagles," from Exodus 19:4: "I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you unto Myself." "Magic Carpet" is a nickname of journalists and the Anglophone press, not the operation's name; and it collides with the US Navy's operation of the same nickname in 1945–46, which repatriated American servicemen and has nothing to do with this.

The dates: 16 December 1948—24 September 1950; the intensive phase runs from June 1949 to September 1950. The number: about forty-nine thousand Yemenite Jews on the standard count, or "over fifty thousand" per the Encyclopaedia Judaica—the range should be noted. The same lift carried out about five hundred people from Djibouti and Eritrea and about two thousand from Saudi Arabia. The baseline populations in 1948: some fifty-five thousand Jews in Yemen proper and about eight thousand in the Aden Colony.

About 380 flights were made by British and American transport aircraft; the principal contractor was Alaska Airlines, its president James Wooten directing the airlift, together with Near East Air Transport; C-46 Commandos and DC-4s with their seats stripped flew Aden–Lod. The cost was borne largely by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

Losses: about 850 people died en route to the departure points and in the camps. The transit camp Ḥashed outside Aden, renamed Geʾulah, "Redemption," was built for five hundred and at times held twelve or thirteen thousand—without adequate latrines, shelter, medical care or a cemetery.

The setting: the Aden riots of December 1947, after the partition vote, killed 76–82 Jews (with them 33 Arabs, four Muslim Indians and one Somali), destroyed synagogues and shops, and shattered the Aden community's confidence in British protection. Imam Aḥmad's permission to depart in 1949 is what unlocked the exodus.

Three corrections besides the name. The planes were not Israeli but American civil charters with mostly American crews; this is consistently misreported. The story that the Yemenites "had never seen an aircraft and boarded fearlessly because Isaiah had promised eagles' wings" is much repeated and thinly documented: Yemenite Jews had been travelling by sea for seventy years and through Aden by rail and steamer, and Indian Ocean commerce had passed through their hands for a millennium; the trope belongs to the Israeli press of 1949–50 and its exoticising register—the same that produced the photographic canon of the airlift. And "the airlift saved the community with almost no loss" is false: about 850 died, most in the Ḥashed camp and on the walk to Aden, which some families made over weeks; infant mortality among the arrivals in Israel remained extremely high through 1950.