Stand for Israel

Lovers of Israel usually know about the daring airlifts that brought tens of thousands of Jews home to Israel from Arab countries, often in secret and in the dark of night. Lesser known is another daring airlift that brought home natives of Israel, but these weren’t Jews — they were fallow deer, a type of deer once indigenous to Israel that had disappeared from the Holy Land by the time the modern state of Israel was re-founded.

The 1978 Iranian “deerlift” remains one of the most daring feats and biggest successes of one Israeli general who retired from the military and applied his battlefield zeal to Israel’s then-burgeoning conservationist movement, according to a fascinating piece in the Wall Street Journal.

A Bibilical Animal

The Five Books of Moses set out dietary laws that govern what sorts of animals observant Jews may or may not eat. In Leviticus 11:3 and Deuteronomy 14:6, the Torah explains that animals that chew their cud and have cloven hoofs are kosher and animals lacking both signs are not kosher, and therefore cannot be eaten. Deer are among those permitted by the Bible:

These are the animals you may eat: the ox, the sheep, the goat, the deer, the gazelle, the roe deer, the wild goat, the ibex, the antelope and the mountain sheep. You may eat any animal that has a split hoof divided in two and that chews the cud. However, of those that chew the cud or that have a split hoof completely divided you may not eat the camel, the rabbit or the coney. Although they chew the cud, they do not have a split hoof; they are ceremonially unclean for you. The pig is also unclean; although it has a split hoof, it does not chew the cud. You are not to eat their meat or touch their carcasses.

(Rules governing fish and fowl also are covered in the same sections.)

Over the years, some of those animals once abundant in the Holy Land–including the fallow deer–were hunted to extinction or otherwise disappeared from the borders of ancient Israel. In the late 1950s, however, the species was rediscovered in Iran. Says the WSJ:

The Persian fallow deer stands about 3 feet tall at the shoulder, with a tawny coat, white spots and flattened antlers like those of a small moose. In the book of Deuteronomy, the deer was listed as one of the hoofed animals the Hebrews were allowed to eat. The Book of Kings says the animal was tithed to King Solomon by his subjects.

A General’s mission

Gen. Avraham Yoffe, commander of the army division that captured Sharm al-Sheikh in 1956, had been named head of the newly created Israeli Nature and Parks Authority. In the mid 1970s, he began courting Iranian officials, including the brother of the Shah, the then-leader of the Persian state.

Yoffe eventually got permission to capture a few of the fallow deer and re-introduce them to Israel, but his own health and the then-simmering Muslim revolution stymied efforts to get the deer back to Israel. As the Ayatollah Khomeini prepared to wrest power from the Shah, Israeli officials were (appropriately) more concerned with the fate of Iranian Jews than with a few deer. But Yoffee remained focused on the Biblical animal:

At the Israeli Embassy in Tehran, diplomats and intelligence agents were frantically shredding documents and trying to evacuate the 1,700 Israelis living in Iran, says Mr. Segev. For Gen. Yoffe, the clock was ticking since his deal for the deer would collapse with the shah’s government.

At pretty much the last moment, the General–working with Mike Van Grevenbroek, a Dutch zoologist living in Israel–was able to capture 4 deer and, using fake documents showing that they were going to Holland (since the ayatollahs were, er, less friendly to Israel than the Shah had been), got them airlifted home.

Thirty years later, several more of the fallow deer have just been taken from a nature reserve near Haifa in and released into the Judean hills around Jerusalem, where they’ve joined a herd of a few dozen that’s been living there for the past few decades.

In Jerusalem itself, residents can occasionally glimpse the deer running through the long greenbelt that begins with the enormous Gan Sacher park in central Jerusalem and runs south toward the Malcha area, where the Jerusalem mall and a large technology park are located.

To read more about the deer and about the general, who died in 1983, read the rest of the WSJ article here.