‘Influencer’ Alana Hadid Makes Yet Another False Claim About Israel

Not herself model material — too dolichocephalic — Alana Hadid is the sister of Bella and Gigi Hadid, those catwalking models who, like their louche father Mohammed Hadid, are known for making outlandish charges against the Jewish state. Now Alana joins them by accusing Israel of deliberately “sterilizing” Ethiopian Jews. More on her charge — clearly meant to suggest that Israel has been guilty of racism against black and brown-skinned Jews— can be found here: “Alana Hadid: Israel not haven for Jews because it sterilized Ethiopian Jews,” by Michael Starr, Jerusalem Post, January 5, 2025:

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.

Her comment is false. Ethiopian Jews were not prevented by the Israelis from making aliyah. It was the Ethiopian government of the 1980s, the Derg, that prevented Ethiopian Jews, known as the “Beta Israel,” from emigrating to Israel. The Mossad established a phony “diving resort” at Arous, in Sudan, on the coast of the Red Sea, staffed by its agents, who were there to help Ethiopian Jews who had managed to escape from Ethiopia and made the perilous journey on foot from Ethiopia into Sudan, to then go by ship from Sudan to Israel. But why would Israel have made such a tremendous effort to bring Ethiopian Jews to Israel if, once they arrived there, its “racist regime” sterilized Ethiopian women? Wouldn’t it have been simpler not to help them arrive in Israel in the first place?

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 ignores the fact that the Ethiopian Jews were being held in Ethiopia against their will, and Israel made tremendous efforts to help get them safely to Israel. There were two ways out:

Jews who managed to escape from Ethiopia and went by foot to Sudan were then helped by Mossad in what was called Operation Moses, which in 1974 brought 8,000 Ethiopian Jews who were living in camps in the Sudan to Israel by airlift. The operation was shut down by the Sudanese government once news of the operation became public, and Arab governments protested. In 1985, the CIA and IDF jointly executed another airlift called Operation Sheba, which brought another 500 Ethiopian Jews directly from Ethiopia to Israel. Finally, in 1991, Operation Solomon began, a covert Israeli military operation in which 14,500 Jews were airlifted to Israel from Ethiopia. These were all complicated and expensive efforts, but the Israeli government was determined to bring all of Ethiopia’s Jews home to Israel. There was nothing “racist” about that effort.

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.

Alana Hadid referred only to the original report in Haaretz from 2013, without bothering to report Haaretz’ corrections to its own report, which included information from Prof. Roni Gamzu, the head of Israel’s Health Ministry, which said there had been no policy of forced sterilization, that women were free to choose if they wanted the procedure (as when, for example, they could not afford more children) and in case of doubt, where it was not certain that the women involved understood the implications of the treatment, it ceased to be prescribed. That is hardly “forced sterilization.”

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.”

Birth control injections were never imposed by Israel. Jewish women in Ethiopia were already familiar with, and used, such injections to keep their family’s size sustainable. Like the sterilization offered by the Israeli Health Ministry, the injections offered by the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was “purely voluntary.” Only in the perfervid brain of Alana Hadid, determined to press her charge of Israeli “racism,” did these voluntary programs become “forcible sterilization.”

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….

In other words, the Beta Israel were declared by Israel’s chief rabbis to be “real Jews.”

Alana Hadid says that the Israeli Health Ministry “forcibly sterilized” Ethiopian Jewish women. This is false. Birth control, including by injection, has been made available to Ethiopian Jews, as it has to all others — both Jews and Arabs — in Israel. The program, however, was, and remains purely voluntary, and so was the birth control program offered Ethiopian Jews by the Joint Distribution Committee.

Israel made enormous efforts to bring Ethiopian Jews, either by boat from Sudan, or in airlifts directly from Ethiopia, to Israel. Operation Moses, Operation Sheba, and OperationSolomon brought tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. Would a “racist” government have engaged in such a massive effort? Indeed, now there are more than 168,800 Israelis of Ethiopian descent, with 88,000 of them having been born in Ethiopia.

“Forcible sterilizing”? There was none. As for that grotesque charge of “racism,” Alana Hadid should study the stirring story of how, by craft and daring, the Mossad and IDF helped bring so many brown-skinned Jews of the Beta Israel, trapped in Ethiopia or Sudan, to Israel, where they now thrive, and greatly multiply.