In the late 1940s and 1950s, the newly founded State of Israel ran a program — and 'program' is doing a lot of diplomatic heavy lifting here — in which hundreds, possibly thousands, of infants and toddlers from Yemenite Jewish immigrant families disappeared from transit camps and hospitals. Parents were told their children had died. No bodies. No graves. No paperwork. Just condolences and a suggestion to move on.

Some of those dead children later surfaced alive, having been raised by Ashkenazi families. The state, to its considerable credit, investigated this. Three times. Committees convened in 1967, 1988, and 1995 each arrived at the same conclusion: nothing particularly systematic occurred. Families who had spent decades searching for children the government said were dead found this unconvincing, particularly those whose dead children were still sending holiday cards.

Affected families — now multigenerational in their grief and fury — have demanded full disclosure of sealed records, reparations, and an acknowledgment that what happened was deliberate, racially stratified child removal, not administrative misfortune. The Israeli state has so far achieved the remarkable diplomatic feat of conceding that something happened while refusing to specify what. The hospitals, absorption agencies, and welfare institutions involved have not, as of this writing, submitted themselves for further review.