Red Sea Diving Resort: a modern day exodus - The Jewish Chronicle

A combination of intrigue, imagination, danger and sheer chutzpah have often made Mossad operations seem scripted for the cinema. Over the years, the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann, the daring raid on Entebbe (where the IDF acted on intelligence supplied by the agency) and the ruthless response to the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics have all attracted the eye of filmmakers, sometimes more than once. Now, for the first time, it’s the turn of Operation Brothers, which landed on Netflix this week as the action-thriller, The Red Sea Diving Resort.

Written and directed by Gideon Raff, the Israeli co-creator of Homeland and featuring a talented cast led by a bearded Chris Evans (in the first of his post Captain America roles to be released) alongside Michael Kenneth Williams, Sir Ben Kingsley, Alessandro Nivola, Greg Kinnear and Hayley Bennett, it tells the incredible story of how Mossad created a fake beachfront resort inside hostile territory in Sudan as cover for an operation to smuggle thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel.

If you haven’t heard about this ingenious if somewhat bonkers Mossad mission before, you’re not alone. It was revealed in Gad Shimron’s 1998 book, Mossad Exodus: The Daring Undercover Rescue of the Lost Jewish Tribe but since then seems to have largely been forgotten. Even Raff admits to only hearing about it five years ago (“I didn’t read the book, and the movie’s not based on it,” he says), when his Israeli producer Alexandra Milchan called him in Croatia, where he was filming the TV show Dig and told him the story.

At the time, he was thinking about what to do next and telling himself that it “probably shouldn’t focus on Israel”. His interest had been piqued, however, and he flew to Israel and met the Mossad agents who’d run the hotel, the diving instructors who took guests on excursions, Navy Seals, Air Force Commanders, and Ethiopian Jews who “courageously left their homes and trekked across the desert into Sudan in the hopes of reaching Israel.” By the end, he was hooked.

“It was so inspiring,” enthuses Raff of the encounters, “that I had to drop everything and start writing this.”

So how did Mossad find itself running a hotel in a predominantly Muslim country hostile to Israel, where if its agents were discovered they’d have been executed?

It began with the Ethiopian-Jewish activist Farede Aklum (the basis for Williamson’s character, Kebede Bimro), “a real hero in Israel and the Ethiopian community,” says Raff.

Aklum had fled to Sudan fearing retribution for working with the Israelis on two covert airlifts of Ethiopian Jews in the late 70s. From Khartoum, he wrote letters to Mossad asking for help, one of which landed on the desk of the new Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, who dispatched Danny Limor (the Mossad agent who inspired Evans’ Ari Levinson) to bring Aklum out.

Up until then, the exodus of Ethiopian Jews, who “yearned to arrive in Yerusalem, as they called it,” says Raff, had been very slow. “They would get these fake asylum visas to Canada, to the United States, and 12 people would leave in one year. Then 12 people would leave the next year. So they were looking for a better and faster way.”

Aklum thought that if Ethiopian Jews could be persuaded to make the journey to Sudan on foot, then Mossad could rescue them. He wrote to all the Jewish villages in Ethiopia and in 1979, the year in which The Red Sea Diving Resort begins, the mass migration of Jews began.

“One of my Ethiopian friends and consultants said, ‘There was a rumour that we should get to Sudan. That we should leave everything and from Sudan, maybe, you will find a way to Israel’,” says Raff.

His film gives us a taste of the journey to the camps on the border of Sudan but can only scratch the surface of the suffering and horror along the way. Aklum’s brother, Naftali, has estimated that between 1979 and 1984, 4000 people died in their bid to fulfill their dream of reaching Zion.

“The biggest challenge for me,” says Raff, “was listening to all these stories and then trying to condense it into a two-hour movie. There were people who lost their loved ones on the way. People who were taken captive. Robbed. Raped.”

Last Sunday, he met an Ethiopian “who’d marched through the desert, and while they were marching, his older sister died of malaria, and her parents buried her, and then continued walking towards Israel.”

Despite all the tragedy that befell many Ethiopians, “nothing broke their spirit,” says Raff, admiringly.

As the Ethiopians massed in camps, Mossad looked for a way to extract them. They struck gold when they discovered a complex of beachfront villas abandoned by Italian businessmen a decade earlier. They leased the site for three years, under the guise of a Swiss travel firm, took on local staff and opened their doors to paying guests, whose unpredictable arrival — along with unnanounced inspections by the Sudanese army — would often threaten to blow their cover.

“There was even a British unit, I think RAF, that was doing a commando week in Sudan and stumbled upon this hotel and stayed there for a while,” says Raff, laughing.

By day, the Mossad agents entertained the tourists. At night, they did their real job and drove over 400 miles south in trucks to pick up Ethiopians from the camps, and bring them to a secluded beach, where they’d be handed over to Navy Seals and taken to a ship waiting offshore by Zodiac dinghy.

Raff says both the Mossad agents and the Ethiopians are heroes and it was the fact of their working together which made the story so powerful for him.

It is ironic, therefore, that The Red Sea Diving Resort is being released at a time when tensions between the Ethiopian community and the authorities in Israel are running high. Recently, thousands of young Ethiopians took to the streets across the country to protest the shooting of 18-year-old Solomon Teka by police. Perhaps a film about unity is just what’s needed right now.

“Well the message was always a positive message of equality, of the fact that we’re all together and that we should work together. What’s happening in Israel now is so much more important, though,” he says, apparently thinking I’ve implied it could be good for the film. “Ethiopians are fighting for equality, they’re fighting to stop discrimination, they’re fighting to feel like they have reached their homeland, which it is, and their struggle for equality is a just one, and a noble one.”

The film ends with a message about the number of people currently displaced around the world and Kebede talking about reaching out to people who are suffering. Operation Brothers shows Israel at its best. I suggest, though, that the current government’s hardline attitude towards some refugees falls short. Is Raff calling for compassion?

“Compassion is absolutely a word that I love and try to practice in my life. And in my movies and my shows. And I think that’s exactly what’s missing from the world today,” he says, speaking generally. “From almost every discussion that we’re having, what I see is a lack of compassion. And I think that’s very important. Yes, absolutely.”

The Red Sea Diving Resort is available to view on Netflix now