Dilemmas of loyalty

                          Obligations of Solidarity and Belonging---continued
  

                                     Rescuing Ethiopian Jews 

   In the early 1980s, a famine in Ethiopia drove some four hundred thousand refugees into neighboring Sudan, where they languished in refugee camps. In 1984, the Israeli government undertook a covert airlift called Operation Moses to rescue Ethiopian Jews, known as Falashas, and bring them to Israel. Some seven thousand Ethiopian Jews were rescued before the plan was halted, after Arab governments pressured Sudan not to cooperate with Israel in the evacuation. Shimon Peres, the Israeli prime minister at the time, said, "We shall not rest until all our brothers and sisters from Ethiopia come safely back home." In 1991, when civil war and famine threatened the remaining Ethiopian Jews, Israel carried out 
an even bigger airlift, which brought fourteen thousand Falashas to Israel. 
   Did Israel do the right thing to rescue the Ethiopian Jews ? It is hard to see the airlift as other than heroic. The Falashas were in desperate circumstances, and they wanted to come to Israel. And Israel, as a Jewish state founded in the wake of the Holocaust, was created to provide a homeland for Jews. But suppose someone posed the following challenge : Hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian refugees were suffering from famine. If, given its limited resources, Israel was able to rescue only a small portion of them, why shouldn't it have conducted a lottery to determine which seven thousand Ethiopians to save ? Why wasn't the airlift of Ethiopian Jews, rather than Ethiopians generally, an act of unfair discrimination ? 
   If you accept obligations of solidarity and belonging, the answer is obvious : Israel has a special responsibility to to rescue Ethiopian Jews that goes beyond its duty (and that of all nations) to help refugees generally. Every nation has a duty to respect human rights, which requires that it provide help, according to its ability, to human beings anywhere who are suffering from famine, persecution, or displacement from their homes. This is a universal duty that can be justified on Kantian grounds, as a duty we owe persons as persons, as fellow human beings. The question we are trying to decide is whether nations have further, special responsibilities to care for their people. By referring to the Ethiopian Jews as our "brothers and sisters," the Israeli prime minister invoked a familiar metaphor of solidarity. Unless you accept some such notion, you would be hard pressed to explain why Israel should not have conducted its airlift by lottery. You would also have a hard time defending patriotism.