In the early 1980s, the Mossad developed a plan for transporting to Israel a substantial number of Ethiopian Jews who had taken refuge in Sudan. Since, then as now, there were no relations between Jerusalem and Khartoum, Israeli operatives purchased a defunct Italian resort on the coast of the Red Sea as a front for their activities, offering tourists windsurfing and diving classes while sending operatives out to locate refugees and lead them to safety. The episode is currently being made into a movie, scheduled for release later this year. Allison Kaplan Sommer describes what happened:
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More about: Ethiopian Jews, Israel & Zionism, Menachem Begin, Mossad, Sudan