More than 250 members of the Bnei Menashe community from northeast India landed at Ben Gurion Airport on Thursday evening, marking the first wave of a government-approved operation to relocate some 4,600 descendants of a biblical lost tribe to Israel. The new arrivals, who walked under a blue-and-white balloon arch to the strains of a traditional Hebrew greeting song, claim lineage from the tribe of Manasseh, one of the ten tribes exiled after the Assyrian conquest in the eighth century BCE. For Jerusalem, the operation, dubbed Wings of Dawn, is both a fulfilment of Zionist ideology and a carefully calibrated demographic gesture. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved the plan last year, prioritising a community whose Jewish credentials have been recognised by the Chief Rabbinate after conversion, but whose immigration has long been slowed by bureaucratic and political hurdles.

Viewed from New Delhi, the departure of these families from the violence-scarred hills of Manipur represents a quiet but significant shift. The Bnei Menashe have lived for centuries as a distinct ethno-religious group in India’s northeast, practising a form of Judaism that survived without rabbinical oversight. Their emigration is not without local controversy: some Indian voices question the loss of cultural diversity, while others note that the community is fleeing the same ethnic and separatist tensions that have roiled Manipur for decades. Yet the Indian government has not obstructed the transfer, treating it as a matter of individual religious freedom and bilateral goodwill.

Analysts in London point out that the immigration also carries strategic undercurrents. Israel’s desire to bolster its Jewish population—especially from non-European backgrounds—dovetails with a broader outreach to diaspora communities in Asia and Africa. The Bnei Menashe, who now number around 5,000 in India, will be settled mostly in West Bank settlements and peripheral towns, a factor that may deepen international scrutiny of Israeli settlement policy. Meanwhile, the remaining community members in Manipur await further flights, their journey suspended between a violent present and an ancestral promise. The question, as yet unanswered, is how swiftly Israel can absorb them—and whether the story of this lost tribe will end in integration or, as critics warn, in a new form of marginalisation.