The Beta Israel had lived in the Ethiopian highlands for centuries, practicing a form of Judaism rooted in the Hebrew Bible but separated from the rest of the Jewish world long before the Talmud was compiled. For most of their history, mainstream Jewish communities did not know they existed. Israel eventually recognized them as Jews and opened a path to Aliyah, the return to the Jewish homeland. By the early 1980s, civil war in Ethiopia had become famine, and famine had become a forced migration. Whole families walked west, hoping to reach Sudan and from there, somehow, Israel. Before the airlift, fewer than 250 Ethiopian Jews had made it to Israel. Thousands more were waiting in Sudanese camps, dying of diseases a functioning clinic could have cured.

Operation Moses was the idea of Richard Krieger, then Associate U.S. Coordinator for Refugee Affairs, who had heard accounts of persecution in the camps and proposed an airlift. He met with Mossad officers and Sudanese representatives to make it work. Sudan, officially at war with Israel, secretly agreed to let the flights happen. After a closed cabinet meeting in November 1984, Israel authorized the operation. Trans European Airways, a Belgian charter carrier that had previously flown Muslims from Sudan on Hajj to Mecca, was the obvious choice. Its planes at Khartoum airport would not raise questions. The Israelis originally called the mission Gur Aryeh Yehuda, "Cub of the Lion of Judah." The United Jewish Appeal, responsible for much of the funding, renamed it Operation Moses.

Over seven weeks, more than 30 flights lifted about 8,000 Ethiopian Jews out of Sudan. Each plane carried roughly 200 people, routed through Brussels to disguise the destination, then on to Israel. The planners treated every flight as a potential political catastrophe, because it was. If the Arab League discovered what Sudan was doing, the airlift would end. The refugees boarded planes they had never seen before, flown by crews they did not know, bound for a country most had only heard about in prayer. Some of them had been walking toward this moment for months. Many children did not survive the camps or the flights. Parents carried the bodies of their children off the aircraft in Israel, where they were buried.

On Friday, January 5, 1985, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres held a press conference confirming that the airlift existed, and asked the press not to talk about it. The contradiction was doomed. The story moved immediately. Arab countries pressured Sudan to stop, and Sudan did, within hours. Some 1,000 Ethiopian Jews were left behind when the planes stopped coming. Roughly 500 of them were evacuated later in 1985 in the U.S.-led Operation Joshua. Families remained split for years. More than 1,000 children who had reached Israel became what were called "orphans of circumstance," waiting for parents still in Africa. In 1991, Operation Solomon brought another 14,324 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in a single 36-hour airlift from Addis Ababa, reuniting many of those families. Operation Moses itself was the least expensive of all the rescue operations Israel ever ran on behalf of Jews abroad.

The story did not end in 1985. Aliyah from Ethiopia continued in waves, sometimes officially, sometimes through secondary airlifts, always with controversy over who qualified. In 2010, the Israeli cabinet approved the immigration of 8,000 Falash Mura, Ethiopian Jews whose ancestors had converted to Christianity under pressure. In 2015 about 4,000 Jews were still in Ethiopia. By 2021 the figure was roughly 100, with the final immigrants of Operation Tzur Israel arriving that March. Disputes over remaining Falash Mura continued into 2022, when the Israeli Supreme Court briefly suspended Aliyah from Ethiopia, then allowed it to resume. The Beta Israel community in Israel now numbers roughly 160,000 people, with their own synagogues, soldiers, poets, and politicians, and the collective memory of a walk across Africa toward airplanes none of their ancestors had seen.

Operation Moses turned into films. The 2005 Israeli-French feature Live and Become, directed by Radu Mihaileanu, tells the story through an Ethiopian Christian boy whose mother passes him as a Jew so he can escape the famine, and won Best Film at the Copenhagen International Film Festival that year. The Red Sea Diving Resort loosely adapts Operation Moses and its sequel. Books, archives, and survivors still hold the names of those who did not make it. Thousands died on the walk. Hundreds died in the camps. The families who reached Israel carried those losses with them, and their descendants still carry them. The rescue was real. So was the cost of not rescuing sooner.