Influencer Alana Hadid, daughter of real estate mogul Mohamed Hadid and sister of models Bella and Gigi Hadid, said the State of Israel was not a safe haven for Jewish people because it sterilized Ethiopian Jews who immigrated to the country.
“Did you know Israel forcibly sterilized Ethiopian Jewish women and then tried to cover it up?” Hadid told her almost 700,000 Instagram followers.
Hadid asserted that Ethiopian Jews weren’t allowed to emigrate to Israel until they “finally arrived” in the 1980s and 1990s, and even then were met with racism.
In the video, which had been liked 25,000 times by press time, Hadid said Ethiopian Jewish women migrants were “sterilized” with contraceptive injection Depo-Provera, which, according to the Mayo Clinic, provides contraception for around three months.
“This was about controlling a population they deemed undesirable, all while maintaining the image of being a safe haven for Jewish people,” said Hadid. “They still try to say they are a safe haven for Jewish people and yet it took them over 30 years to welcome Ethiopian Jews and then when they came they tried to keep them from procreation.”
Hadid cited reports from the Israeli newspaper “Heretz” [sic] that Ethiopian women were lied to, coerced, and threatened that they wouldn’t be able to immigrate without the injections. Israeli officials supposedly admitted to the policy, for which there allegedly was no accountability.
“This wasn’t just a medical crime, it was population control, and it’s deeply routed in racism,” said Hadid. “This isn’t just about forced sterilization it’s about exposing the structural racism at the core of racism.”
Haaretz issued corrections for its 2013 article claiming that Israeli officials admitted to such a policy. While it initially reported that then-Health Ministry director-general Prof. Roni Gamzu had halted the prescriptions of the injection to Ethiopian women who didn’t understand the treatment, the outlet clarified that when 35 women made allegations in 2012 about forced or coercive practices for birth control, without admission of any policy, Gamzu took the precaution to order a halt to the prescriptions if there was doubt that women of any background did not understand the implication of the treatment.
“The original version failed to state that this instruction was issued ‘without taking a stand or determining facts about allegations that had been made,’” Haaretz said of its article.
Haaretz reported in 2016 that a three-year state comptroller investigation determined that there was no evidence that the state had administered the shots in any improper policy.
The Joint Distribution Committee, which was involved in the transit camps that facilitated the difficult immigration from Ethiopia to Israel, was not subject to the review. JDC medical director Rick Hodes said in 2013 on Twitter that “Injectable drugs have always been the most popular form of birth control in Ethiopia, as well as among women in our program,” Hodes wrote on X/Twitter. “Our family program is, and always [has] been, purely voluntary.”
Ethiopian Jews
According to the Israel State Archives, Ethiopian Jews made aliyah prior to the major aliyah waves starting in the 1980s, as Israeli institutions debated the difficulties of integration and their status under Jewish tradition. Educational initiatives and delegations were launched with varying impact and reach into the 1970s, and in 1973 the chief rabbis determined that the community had biblical roots.
When Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam came to power in Ethiopia in 1977, restrictions on aliyah necessitated joint Mossad, IDF, and Jewish Agency operations to bring the Ethiopian Jews to the safety of Israel, according to the agency.
This included Operation Moses and Operation Solomon, which brought 8,000 and 14,000 Ethiopian Jews, respectively, to Israel. Many Ethiopian Jewish refugees had to flee on foot to the Sudanese border, enduring disease, hunger, robbery, and rape only to wait in camps for months. Approximately 4,000 members perished during this journey.
At the end of 2016, there were 144,100 Israelis-Ethiopian, 59% of which were born in Ethiopia, according to a Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute report. Currently, there is debate in Israel about whether those in Ethiopia requesting to make aliyah are eligible, with many of them reported to identify as Christians.