Shlomo Hillel

Shlomo Hillel (; 9 April 1923 – 8 February 2021 ) was an Iraqi-born Israeli diplomat and politician who served as Speaker of the Knesset, Minister of Police, Minister of Internal Affairs, and ambassador to several countries in Africa. As an agent of the Mossad LeAliyah Bet in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he arranged the mass airlift of Iraqi Jews to Israel known as Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.

Biography Born to an Iraqi Jewish family in Baghdad, in Mandatory Iraq, Hillel immigrated to Mandatory Palestine with his family in 1934 at the age of eleven. After graduating from the Herzliya Hebrew High School in Tel Aviv, he underwent agricultural training in kibbutz Degania Alef, and later Pardes Hana. Hillel was secretary of a Hebrew Scouts group that later established Kibbutz Ma'agan Michael. In 1945, Hillel and his colleagues worked at a Haganah munitions factory disguised as a laundry facility in the basement of the Ayalon Institute in Rehovot. He studied political science, economics and public administration at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He married Temima, with whom he had two children, a son and a daughter. He lived in Ramat Denya, Jerusalem. He died on 8 February 2021.

Operation Ezra and Nehemiah

Hillel visited Baghdad again in 1950 to negotiate the mass immigration of the Jews of Iraq, 120,000 of whom were airlifted to Israel in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah between 1950 and 1952. On these trips, he disguised himself as either a Frenchman or an Englishman. The airlift was made possible through the cooperation of Iran, which was a close ally of Israel at the time.

Hillel's partner was Ronnie Barnett, a British Jew who worked for Transocean Air Lines. While organizing pilgrimages to Mecca, Barnett met the director of a travel agency called Iraq Tours, Abdul Rahman Raouf. Barnett and Raouf met in Rome and Hillel came along as "Richard Armstrong." Raouf realized that there was money to be made in transporting the Jews out of Iraq, and arranged for the two to meet with the prime minister of Iraq, Tawfiq al-Suwaidi, who was a board member of his company.

In 1969, Hillel returned to the Knesset on the Alignment list. He served consecutively from the 1969 elections until the 1992 elections, in which he lost his seat. He was Minister of Police between 1969 and 1977, and Interior Minister in 1974 and 1977. In 1984 he was elected Speaker of the eleventh Knesset.

He was president of the Society for Preservation of Israel Heritage Sites.

Published works In 1984, Hillel published Operation Babylon: The Story of the Rescue of the Jews of Iraq, a memoir of the operation, which was later translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Arabic.