Secret Exodus
The story of the migration, under conditions of extreme secrecy, of some 16,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel, in which Israeli intelligence agents, American diplomats, international refugee organizations and Sudanese officials all had vital roles. It is told by a Readers' Digest roving editor who calls it "the story of a good deed that even today almost no one wants to take credit for."
Related
Martin Gilbert's canonical history of the Israeli epic lies outside the heated debate that is questioning the country's founding myths.
The Jewish state turned 50 amid a midlife crisis. With the epic drama of Israel's founding behind them, Israelis confront dispiriting existential questions. Israeli politics, always ferocious, are reeling from the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The peace process, though flagging, is still pushing Israelis closer to a reckoning with the Palestinians, their original rivals for the land. Americanization is giving a country built by austere pioneers an identity crisis. Tensions between religious and secular are increasingly bitter, and even the army no longer unites Israelis the way it used to. As the myths fade, Israel is deciding whether a Jewish state can ever truly be normal.
Two major revisionist histories of the Arab-Israeli conflict are landmarks along the Jewish state's painful road away from its sentimentalized past.

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