Netflix's Red Sea Diving Resort is only part of a much darker true story
Netflix's new thriller The Red Sea Diving Resort is based on the recently declassified Mossad mission to help thousands of Ethiopian Jewish refugees escape persecution via a fake resort on the coast of Sudan.
The movie, directed by Gideon Raff (Homeland) left out quite a lot of the truth, both literal and emotional, from the Hollywood version. Don't worry, though – we've done all the research for you.
Operation Brothers inception
The movie puts the decision making and moral impetus in Ari's (Chris Evans) hands. However, the operation really began because of a man named Farede Yazazao Aklum.
Aklum (the inspiration for Michael K Williams' Kebede Bimro) was working secretly in Ethiopia with Mossad to exchange weapons for Jewish Ethiopians (more on that later). He fled the country and walked 300 miles to Khartoum, Sudan. There, according to his brother Naftali, Farede mailed letters to Mossad agents asking for help.
One letter landed on then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin's desk. He sent Mossad agent Danny Limor (upon whom Ari is based) to retrieve Farede.
Once in Sudan, Farede wrote to Jewish villages, rallying the Ethiopian Jews to escape. He suspected Mossad could evacuate them from Sudan since Mossad had just come for him.
He continued to work for Mossad until he mysteriously died aged 60 during a visit to Addis Ababa in 2009.
Naftali Aklum told Haaretz: “I don’t want people to think ‘Oh, [the Israeli government] saved the Ethiopian Jews from Ethiopia,’ because that’s not true. We are the true heroes — the Ethiopian Jews, the ones who left our houses and marched to Sudan when no one promised us that, in the end, we will make it to Jerusalem.”
In the movie, Kebede and his fellow Jews are merely pawns, window dressing to accompany Ari's courage. But Gad Shimron (a Mossad agent in Operation Brothers) said the "the real heroes of the stories" are the Ethiopian Jews.
“What they went through in order to fulfil their dream to come to Zion – no normal Israeli or any Westerner could have endured for even three days.”
Arous Holiday Village
In the film, the idea for the fake hotel comes to Ari and he has to convince Mossad of the plan. However, the plan was crafted by numerous Mossad agents and likely had support – at least in some way – from the get-go.
Then there's the hotel itself.
The hotel was staffed by many locals, who in the movie are rendered almost entirely invisible. How the fake hotel turned real, with real guests and running real diving trips, is glossed over.
It was purchased through a shell company in Switzerland (just like in the movie) and a handful of Mossad agents with dual nationality headed to Sudan. But then real tourists began to show up.
Shimron recounted a time their cover was nearly blown by the guests. A Canadian tourist recognised them as Israelis but kept it to himself.
The hotel was so successful it even turned a profit.
Leaving for Zion
In the movie, the final escape is successful because of the helpful intervention of the CIA. In real life, there wasn't one final daring Operation Brothers trip in an American aeroplane – there were 17 smaller ones.
The airlifts were coordinated by Mossad agents in Arous, Shimron said. He added there was a "moment of elation" when the planes departed and they were left alone in the quiet desert.
What happened after Operation Brothers?
There is a bit of humble-bragging from Ari and his fellow agents throughout the movie. But when it comes to numbers, Operation Brothers was not the most successful.
Operation Moses airlifted more than 7,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel from Sudan via Brussels between November 1984 and January 1985. Operation Solomon brought more than 14,000 in May 1991.
The movie frames their arrival as a cathartic moment in which they finally disembark in the homeland they fought so hard to reach. But once there they faced intense prejudice.
Naftali said his family was placed in a city with a 75% Ethiopian population, which made it hard to integrate into Israeli society. Not to mention institutional racism, which, Naftali says, "hasn't skipped Israel."
This has become apparent most recently in the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Solomon Teka by an off-duty Israeli police officer in June. In the wake of the tragedy, young people took to the streets in protest. Michal Avera Samuel, director of the Association for Education and Social Integration of Ethiopian Jews, told The Washington Post: "Young people… will not let this pass silently."
Shula Mola, former chairwoman of the Association of Ethiopian Jews, agreed and cited the lack of integration post-Operations Brothers, Moses, and Solomon as a main contributing factor.
In the past thirty years, there have been policies of forced segregation in schools, housing plans which drove many Ethiopian families into ghetto-like neighbourhoods, mistreatment in the health-care system and distrust from Rabbis who don't accept they are Jewish.
Why is this happening?
The simple answer? Racism and antisemitism, of course.
Jews have lived in Ethiopia for centuries in a community known as Beta-Israel (which translates as House of Israel), since approximately 325 CE.
Throughout the centuries the Jewish Kingdom was periodically invaded, annexed, and relegated to second-class citizenship before gaining their territory back, only to have the cycle repeated. Jews were killed, made nomadic, had their texts burned but thrived nonetheless.
During World War Two, Italy invaded and occupied Ethiopia, and Mussolini proposed solving the "Jewish problem" of Europe by relocating European Jews to Ethiopia. This, obviously, never came to pass.
By 1948, the State of Israel was established but Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia denied Beta Israelis permission to leave. Selassie was ousted by a coup in 1974, during which an estimated 2,500 Jews were killed and 7,000 became homeless.
In 1977 a covert arms-trade deal was made between Ethiopia's new communist government and Israel, allowing Ethiopian Jews to emigrate under the radar.
But in February 1978, Israel's then-Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan broke the pact by speaking publicly about it. The Ethiopian government, in response, halted the exodus and targeted Ethiopian-Jewish activists involved.
One of whom was Farede Yazazao Aklum, who fled to Sudan and thus began the story of The Red Sea Diving Resort.
The Red Sea Diving Resort is available to stream now on Netflix.
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