“The basic assumption in our work is to prepare in the best possible fashion, so that we may stand quietly on the day of judgment, when it comes, in the knowledge that we did everything we could in the time that we had.”
Lt.-Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, killed in action, Entebbe, July 4, 1976.
Forty years ago, the world was riveted by a drama that began in the eastern Mediterranean with the hijacking of Air France Flight 139. It culminated seven days later with the spectacular rescue by the Israel Defence Forces in Entebbe, Uganda.
Israeli Maj. (Res.) Louis Williams has written a very good summary of the events leading up to the raid and its successful completion. The IDF senior press officer’s “Entebbe Diary“ follows the jet as it took off from Ben-Gurion Airport on June 27, 1976 “on what promised to be a routine flight to Paris via Athens.” This is a suspenseful read full of details that may have been forgotten over the years.
You can now read excerpts of transcripts of Israeli cabinet deliberations in the days leading up to the raid. Defence Minister Shimon Peres, Foreign Minister Yigal Allon, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and others assess the gravity of their predicament and grapple with what seemed like a no-win situation. Peres: “The heart-wrenching question is whether we should risk the lives of innocent unarmed civilians, and save the future of this country, or not. If we surrender, the respect for terrorism will grow.” This is your chance to be a fly on the wall as history was being decided.
Several theatrical docudramas were created about the kidnapping and raid but you don’t really need actors to feel the emotion when you view a documentary like Operation Thunderbolt: The Entebbe Hostage Rescue. At just under an hour, watch interviews with key Israeli politicians as well as with the hostages who tell of those traumatic and then joyful days. Israel hostage Sara Davidson: “Someone shouts ‘Israeli soldiers!’… We lift our heads slowly with disbelief and we see the most magnificent sight of our lives… A short soldier… He looks at us calmly and says, ‘Halt. Are you alright? Come on, we came to take you home.’”
READ: RECALLING THE RAID AT ENTEBBE, 40 YEARS LATER
One of the names most closely linked to the raid on Entebbe belongs to Yonatan Netanyahu, older brother to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Yoni” led the storming party to free the hostages and was the lone Israeli military casualty. The fully bilingual site includes a biography, photographs, Yoni’s battle record as well as an opportunity to “light” a memorial candle and leave a note with your thoughts. Visitors to the site are greeted by this verse from II Samuel 1:25, “How the mighty have fallen in battle! Yonatan lies slain on your heights.”
Not everyone is quite as laudatory. In a recent book on the raid, British historian Saul David suggests that Netanyahu deviated from the rescue plan and was experiencing a “personal crisis” at the time.
This is not the first time that Netanyahu’s leadership has come under scrutiny. Muki Betser, Netanyahu’s deputy, has claimed that he was instrumental in planning the rescue, that Yoni was a failure and that Belzer had to save this mission. Others are critical that the mission was posthumously renamed Operation Yonatan and feel that too much emphasis has been placed on his role. “The Netanyahu family won the Israel branding championship and minimized the role of every other officer, especially Dan Shomron, the commander of the operation, and Yoni’s friend Muki Betser. An outside observer wouldn’t understand the insistence on exclusivity; there was enough glory for everyone.”
Betser’s claims have gained some traction over the years, but not with Uri Dromi, former spokesperson for the Rabin and Peres governments. Dromi writes that after a particularly critical article appeared in Ha’aretz to mark the raid’s 30th anniversary, 15 soldiers who had been to Entebbe released a statement.
“We were silent until now not because we have nothing to say but because we think that neither Yoni Netanyahu, nor we his soldiers, need additional glory – we are proud of what we did… Yoni justifiably became a national hero and we will not allow for his memory to be defiled and will not accept continuous attempts to distort Yoni’s contribution and what we and our comrades did in the operation. We were there.”
I did notice that recent articles on the operation stress that Yonatan Netanyahu was not the only one to die in the raid that included the deaths of four hostages, one whose name is relatively well known – Dora Bloch – and three others, less so: Jean-Jacques Mimouni, Pasco Cohen and Ida Borochovich.
Although we might think that the entire historical record is well known, some fascinating details are only now emerging. The Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv has launched a exhibit about the rescue which includes the diary of passenger Sara Guter Davidson. She and her husband, Uzi, an Israel Air Force pilot, were on board the hijacked plane. Writes Mitch Ginsburg at the Times of Israel, “When a terrorist with a thick German accent announced that they represented Wadia Hadad and that the plane was now called Haifa 1, Uzi took the un-laminated entry pass to his air force base out of his shirt pocket, she said in an interview at the Rabin Center last week, and chewed it up and stuffed it into his Coke can.”
On the fateful day of the hostages’ liberation, then-prime minister Rabin addressed the Knesset. “The Israel Defence Forces have achieved one of their most exemplary victories from both the human and moral and the military-operational points of view, a remarkable manifestation of Jewish fraternity and Israeli valour… The operation that rescued our dear ones from captivity will be a subject for research, for song and for legend, and it will be written about in the annals of the nation.”
Next time: the sometimes controversial legacy of the rescue.
