Shlomo Hillel

Shlomo Hillel was born in Baghdad in 1923 into a wealthy and respected family descended from Rabbi Abraham Moshe Hillel, a former chief rabbi of Baghdad. The youngest of eleven children, he grew up within Iraq's ancient Jewish community.[1]

In 1934, at age eleven, Hillel moved to Mandatory Palestine to join two older brothers. His parents followed in 1935. He studied at Tel Aviv's Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium and joined a Scouts group whose members were encouraged to pursue agricultural settlement.[1]

After agricultural training at Degania Alef, Hillel joined a settlement group at Pardes Hanna in 1942. In 1946, the group moved to Givat Hakibbutzim, near Rehovot, to help build and operate the clandestine Ayalon Institute ammunition factory. The underground facility was concealed beneath a laundry building.[1][6] Members of the group established Kibbutz Ma'agan Michael in August 1949, and Hillel was among its founders.[1]

Recruited at age twenty-three, Hillel worked for the Mossad LeAliyah Bet from 1946 to 1953 in several Middle Eastern countries, especially Iraq, Egypt, and Syria. An academic study describes the Iraqi operation in which he participated as one of history's largest rescue operations, and Hillel later regarded this work as the peak of his public career.[1]

In 1947, Hillel helped organize Operation Michaelberg after early overland efforts to bring Jews out of Iraq achieved limited results. The plan called for fifty immigrants to travel in ten cars past an Iraqi military camp and through a breach in the Baghdad airport fence, where they boarded a C-46 Commando aircraft. The final car arrived shortly before the plane was due to leave, and the aircraft later landed in a field in the Galilee.[7] A second flight brought another fifty Iraqis. The National Library of Israel account says further flights were halted when the outbreak of the War of Independence made them too dangerous, while a Jerusalem Post account reports that competing demands for the aircraft also influenced the decision.[7][6]

Conditions for Iraqi Jews worsened after Israel's establishment. The Center for Israel Education records intensifying discrimination and violence, while the Jerusalem Post account reports dismissals from government employment, arrests, harsh sentences, and restrictions on emigration.[8][6] The latter account says that 12,000 to 13,000 Iraqi Jews fled to Tehran within one year. Hillel was sent there to manage their transit, initially arranging hotel rooms and later helping establish a temporary camp in the mortuary building of Tehran's old Jewish cemetery.[6]

In 1950, Iraq temporarily permitted Jews to emigrate if they renounced Iraqi citizenship and gave up their property. Registration greatly exceeded official expectations.[8] Hillel returned to Baghdad under the alias Richard Armstrong to help secure an air-transport concession. A Maariv retrospective reports that he posed as a British representative of the Near East travel company and met Iraqi Prime Minister Tawfiq al-Suwaidi with company representative Ronnie Barnett. The meeting lasted about two hours and ended with the company receiving the concession.[9]

Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, also called Operation Ali Baba, began on May 19, 1950, when its first two flights carried 175 Iraqi Jews from Baghdad to Israel via Cyprus. Approximately 120,000 Iraqi Jews had made aliyah by January 1952.[8] An Israeli government biography similarly describes the operation as bringing about 120,000 people—almost the entire Iraqi Jewish population—to Israel through Iran and Cyprus.[2]

Expectations during the operation's planning varied sharply. According to the Maariv account, al-Suwaidi estimated that 6,000 Jews would leave, British estimates suggested 10,000, underground leader Mordechai Ben-Porat anticipated 40,000, and Hillel told Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett that he expected 80,000.[9]

Hillel entered politics reluctantly. While he was abroad on Mossad work in 1951, Mapai invited him to join its list for the Second Knesset elections. The decision reflected his youth, kibbutz membership, Eastern Jewish background, and association with Iraqi Jewry at a time when Mapai had only two representatives from Eastern communities among its forty-six First Knesset members.[1]

Hillel did not win a seat in the election but entered the Knesset in 1953 after vacancies opened. He had initially resisted leaving his overseas work and found the parliamentary environment far removed from the operational demands of clandestine immigration.[1]

Re-elected to the Third Knesset in 1955, Hillel focused on immigrant absorption and criticized the difficult conditions confronting new arrivals in agricultural settlements and transit camps. He resigned on July 6, 1959, to enter the Foreign Ministry's diplomatic service. He later attributed the decision partly to disappointment over the treatment of Eastern immigrants and to his frustration with political life.[1]

Hillel became Israel's first ambassador to Guinea, serving from 1959 to 1961, and then its first ambassador to Ivory Coast from 1961 to 1963. He also served as nonresident ambassador to Upper Volta, Nigeria, and Dahomey, helping establish Israeli diplomatic relations with newly independent African states.[1]

From 1964 to 1967, Hillel served with Israel's permanent mission to the United Nations and headed the Foreign Ministry's Africa department. He then became deputy director-general for Middle Eastern affairs, a position he held from 1967 to 1969.[1][10]

Yitzhak Mualem's study of Israeli policy toward Egyptian Jews records that, at a Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting on July 18, 1967, Hillel reported receiving accounts of attacks on Jews in Arab countries. He advocated quiet, inconspicuous activity through foreign diplomatic missions, international actors, the United Nations, and the Red Cross, rather than public pressure that officials feared could worsen the Jews' treatment or impede negotiations.[11]

During the War of Attrition, Egypt attempted to connect the release of Egyptian Jewish prisoners with the return of a captured Egyptian pilot. Mualem records that Hillel opposed linking the two matters. He argued that Israel should return the pilot after interrogation while continuing to pursue the Jews' release independently, because a direct exchange might leave the Jewish prisoners as hostages after the pilot was returned.[11]

Hillel became minister of police in Golda Meir's government in December 1969 and remained in the post through June 1977, including under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.[12][13] He returned to the Knesset in January 1974 but had already served as a cabinet minister for more than four years.[10]

As minister, Hillel sought to give the portfolio substantive authority. He required ministerial approval for senior police promotions, transferred the police budget unit to the minister's office, and arranged direct meetings with senior commanders. During his tenure, he appointed three inspectors-general and argued that ministerial responsibility had to be accompanied by genuine authority.[1]

Hillel also served briefly as minister of the interior in 1974 and, according to the Jerusalem Post account, again in 1976–77.[13][6] As interior minister, he applied the Law of Return to the Beta Israel community of Ethiopian Jews, helping establish the legal basis for their immigration to Israel.[2] He also reintroduced daylight-saving time in June 1974 after it had been discontinued in 1958.[1]

A politically sensitive episode occurred in March 1976, when six Arab Israeli citizens were killed by police during protests in the Galilee against planned land expropriation. The events became known as Land Day. Hillel said that his ministry had not anticipated the escalation and stated that public expropriation required compensation for those affected.[6]

After chairing the Knesset Interior Committee from 1977 to 1984, Hillel was elected Speaker of the Knesset by sixty votes to forty-six, with seven abstentions. He served from 1984 to 1988 during the rotation government of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir. He was the second Knesset Speaker of Eastern or Sephardi background, following Israel Yeshayahu-Sharabi.[1][3]

In 1985, Kach leader Meir Kahane submitted several private bills that the Knesset Presidium, headed by Hillel, refused to place on the agenda because they were viewed as racist.[14] Kahane petitioned the High Court of Justice, which ruled that the bills had to be permitted. Hillel did not comply. A later petition seeking to compel compliance was rejected because the earlier order was declaratory and contained no practical enforcement measures. The Knesset subsequently amended the law, including retroactive application, to permit the blocking of bills deemed racist in essence.[15]

After leaving the speakership, Hillel served on the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. He ran for president of Israel in 1993, but Ezer Weizman was elected.[1] In April 2019, Hillel was placed symbolically in the final, 120th position on the Labor Party's Knesset list.[10]

Hillel received the Israel Prize in 1998 for special contribution to society and the state.[4] He also received the Ben-Gurion Award and the Yitzhak Sadeh Prize for his book Ruach Kadim.[2] His later public service included serving as world chairman of Keren Hayesod.[16]

Hillel's public career linked clandestine immigration work with diplomacy, parliamentary service, and government administration. His activity on behalf of Iraqi and Ethiopian Jews reflected a sustained commitment to aliyah from Jewish communities in the Middle East and Africa.[1][2]

Hillel died at his home in Ra'anana on February 8, 2021, at age ninety-seven, about a month before his ninety-eighth birthday. He was buried on Mount Herzl.[1][5] His son Ari said that one of Hillel's final projects was a museum at Atlit dedicated to Jewish immigration from Arab countries. The museum included an aircraft used in Operation Michaelberg, and Hillel visited the site about a month before his death to follow its progress.[5]

His best-known achievement remained his role in the immigration of Iraqi Jewry. By January 1952, approximately 120,000 Iraqi Jews had made aliyah, representing most of a community whose roots in Mesopotamia extended to antiquity.[8][2]

Published totals for Operation Michaelberg are inconsistent. The National Library of Israel's detailed account describes two flights carrying fifty Iraqi passengers each, but its introduction refers to a mission transporting 150 immigrants from Iraq and Italy. The article does not explain the difference.[7]

Figures for Operation Ezra and Nehemiah also vary according to what is being counted. The Center for Israel Education and the Israeli government biography give a total of approximately 120,000 Iraqi Jews, while the Jerusalem Post distinguishes about 104,000 people flown through Cyprus from approximately 125,000 Iraqi immigrants whom Hillel helped bring to Israel.[8][2][6]

The causes and circumstances of Iraqi Jewish emigration remain subjects of historiographical dispute. A Ben-Gurion University research abstract contrasts an Israeli-Zionist account emphasizing national and religious yearning together with persecution with a counter-narrative alleging that Israel used terror, panic, and propaganda to drive or force emigration. It also notes the disputed case of Yosef Basri and Shalom Salah, who were executed in Iraq after being accused of planting bombs. The abstract does not establish Hillel's personal involvement in those alleged acts.[17]