Ethiopia in 1985 forced the Israeli government to stop its covert airlift of Falasha - Ethiopian Jews - to Israel. Since beginning the airlift in 1974 (when persecution of the Falasha increased after the fall of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie), Israel had airlifted some 12,000 members of the ancient Jewish sect, which had existed in isolation from the rest of the Jewish world since about the second century BC. Israel resumed the airlift in 1989, and within $a few years most of the approximately 14,000 remaining Falasha had emigrated.