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I’ve got a question for you: what’s the difference between an airplane and a truck?
Well, stuff 1,088 people in the back of the plane and you’re saving the world, but get
pulled over with 1,088 people in the back of your truck and suddenly everyone makes
a big commotion.
Ok, maybe that was a bad joke, but you know what’s also bad: the persecution of Ethiopian
Jews.
Let me explain.
Our story begins in 1991.
Neon crop tops were in, Nirvana was all over MTV, the Terminator had just made good on
his promise to be back, and the Ethiopian government, led by this guy, Mengistu Haile
Mariam, was on the verge of falling as the result of a long-running civil war with Eritrean
and Tigrean rebels.
Now, the Mariam government was already bad—like, very, very, responsible for famine the caused
the deaths of up to 2,000,000 Ethiopians bad—and the toppling of his government was expected
to lead to massive instability that would also be bad, and the point is, things in Ethiopia
were… like….
really bad… and getting worse.
All of which is why the people of Israel—which is a nation somewhere in this area that I
won’t zoom into because there’s no way to show its borders and not make some people
mad—started to get very worried about the well-being of Ethiopia’s sizable Jewish
population.
Therefore, Israel began to secretly make plans to get the Ethiopian Jews out of Ethiopia
and get them to Israel… using airplanes.
See where I’m going here?
The record for most people on a plane is going to be set when they evacuate the Ethiopian
Jews.
Did you not get that?
Come on, this is basic foreshadowing.
Now that plan may sound a bit odd, but it had actually been done before—Operation
Moses in 1984 and Operation Joshua in 1985 had both airlifted Ethiopian Jews to Israel,
but the airlifts had been forced to stop in 1986, for complicated international relations-y
reasons.
This new secret operation, intended to pick up nearly all the remaining Ethiopian Jews,
was called Operation Solomon, after Solomon Grundy, the evil zombie who fights against
Batman, or maybe it was named after King Solomon; hard to say.
But getting 14,500 people from rural Ethiopia to Israel wouldn’t be easy, and it required
a lot of preparation—after all, Israel is here, and the Ethiopian Jews lived here, in
the Gondar region, and the nearest airport was here, in Addis Ababa, and all those places
are pretty far apart.
Plus, the nearest Taco Bell was here, so they wouldn’t be able to have any Nacho Cheese
Doritos Locos Taco Supremes on their journey.
And so, for two years, starting in 1989, members of the Ethiopian Jews traveled the approximately
400 miles or 650 kilometers from the Gondar Region to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia
where the airport was located, mainly using buses and trucks procured by the AAEJ—the
American Association for Ethiopian Jews—but also occasionally using horses or their own
two feet.
Finally, by mid-1991, nearly all the Ethiopian Jews had arrived in Addis Ababa, which meant
it was time to leave—but leaving wouldn’t be easy either; after all, you can’t exactly
fly 14,500 people out of a commercial airport without anyone noticing, because, if you’ll
remember, airports used to be places that people went to.
To do it, the Israelis would need approval from the Ethiopian government, which required
help from the Kentucky-Fried Country itself, the United States.
For a while, the Ethiopian President had been trying to trade the departure of the Ethiopian
Jews for help from the US, and the US was maybe going to give it to him, but then in
May of 1991, the Ethiopian President fled the nation in exile—because of all the war
and killing people stuff—and President George HW Bush wrote a letter to the new Ethiopian
leaders, which got them approval to leave.
And so, on May 24, 1991, the Ethiopian Jews began an extraordinary exodus.
All 14,500 travelers gathered at the Israeli embassy in Addis Ababa, and were transported
to the airport on special buses, escorted by Israeli soldiers of Ethiopian descent.
Using 35 planes—a combination of Israeli Air Force C-130s and El Al Boeing 747s—14,500
people made the 1,500 mile journey from Addis Ababa to Israel in under 36 hours, the fastest
mass departure until audiences walked out of Rise of Skywalker.
There were a total of 40 flights, and among them was an El Al Boeing 747, which set, and
still holds, the Guinness World Record for the most passengers on a single plane ever.
The total number is most commonly cited as 1,088, but it may have been as few as 1,078
and as high as 1,122, including two babies who were born over the course of the flight,
but the dispute ultimately doesn’t matter—anywhere in the range of consensus would still be the
record.
Interestingly, these 1088-ish actually had the option to fly the trip on United Airlines,
but they decided this would be more comfortable… maybe.
Now, normally, a Boeing 747 would carry about 366 passengers, but the additional 700-ish
could fit because the passengers were crammed together really really tightly, were malnourished
because of the aforementioned famine, and because the entire plane has been stripped
of all its seats and Skymall magazines.
Ultimately, all 14,500 landed in Tel Aviv, where an enormous celebration broke out, because,
you know, they did the thing—and when you do the thing, you gotta celebrate.
As an interesting side note, this all happened on the Sabbath, which would normally bar observant
Jews from traveling—but luckily, there’s an exception for when the action would save
a life; or in this case, 14,500 lives.
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