It remains my favorite story. I think of it as a modern Bible story. When I read Yoni’s Last Battle, in Jerusalem in 2002, I put the book down after finishing, and I wondered, Did that really happen?
Indeed, it did.
A few very rare times, we hear a story so iconic and epic, so transformational…it never leaves you.
So it was with the daring hostage rescue Israel launched in the summer of 1976.
In the U.S., we were eagerly anticipating our Bicentennial. It was a year-long anticipation. We visited museums and saw the Freedom Train that spanned the country carrying our relics from the past. I bought a cheesy medallion. It was all so exciting. It was a completely different culture then.
A week before the Fourth that year, an Air France jetliner refueled at Athens, on the last leg home to Paris. After getting back in the air, terrorists with guns stood up and demanded the plane be flown to the heart of Africa: Entebbe, in Uganda. The country was run by a madman, Idi Amin, who enjoyed throwing people off buildings into canals filled with crocodiles. He had been cozy with the PLO for a while.
In this case, though, the terrorists were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the German Baader Meinhof Gang. They demanded that Israel and the Europeans release terrorists from their prisons. If they didn’t, they would murder the Jewish passengers, all 105 of them. In fact, soon enough, the terrorists released hostages that were not Jewish. And, just as at Auschwitz, they separated the Jews from the others: one to the left, the other to the right.
Israel did not negotiate with terrorists. This put even more pressure on the cabinet, led by Yitzhak Rabin. The hostages’ families were screaming for a deal. Of course.
Thursday was the deadline.
Everyone, including the grave-looking TV anchors, knew Israel was in a real bind. They had foiled some airplane hijackings, but no one had ever operated at such a distance. It was 2,500 miles away from Israel.
Rabin announced they would negotiate.
That motivated the terrorists to push the deadline to mid-morning, Sunday, July 4.
At the same time, an Israeli pilot had a gem of an idea. He shared it with his superiors. Shimon Peres was defense minister at the time. It was his job to present the plan to the cabinet, greenlight it if he so decided.
This left Israel barely two days to plan and implement this audacious plan. The tip of the spear would be the Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s elite counter-terrorism unit. All three Netanyahu brothers would serve in it at different times, including the youngest, Iddo. Bibi had helped thwart a hijacking four years earlier in Israel. He and his team put on white coveralls and carried toolboxes, pretending to be from the maintenance crew. When they got in the door, bullets started flying, and the terrorists were quickly eliminated.
The year 1976 was a different matter.
It was decided to leave Israel at 4 p.m. on the 3rd. They would take off from the southernmost tip of the Sinai, at Sharm El-Sheikh. (Interestingly, if Israel had already given back the Peninsula to Egypt, they would not have had the base at Sharm El-Sheikh and would not have been able to reach Entebbe.)
When they took off, the troops did not know if the cabinet had approved the plan. Israel sent its entire fleet of transport planes—four—and no fighter escort. They could not draw attention and could not be detected by Saudi or Egyptian radar. The planes flew just off the surface of the Red Sea in order to escape radar detection. The choppy ride caused several troops to get sick.
Lt. Col. Jonathan Netanyahu, commander of the Unit, read a novel as he sat in the lead jeep, tied down like the rest of the other vehicles.
En route, they got the greenlight from the government. Years ago, I interviewed two of the soldiers that went. One told me he actually relaxed when he heard they were, in fact, going ahead with it.
A couple of minutes before midnight, the planes circled high above Lake Victoria, a mile from the terminal where the hostages were kept. Believe it or not, the entire operation involving securing the hostages took five minutes. Five.
All terrorists were killed within minutes. A separate group led by Shaul Mofaz fired on the tower to keep heat off everyone else. They also blew up every Ugandan Air Force plane so no one could pursue them. The attention to detail was staggering, and most of it was planned by Netanyahu. His hair was longer than usual. He had been deeply involved in still-classified actions in the Sinai before being called back. He slept very little those last few days.
Another commando, the one that was in the door first, told me that they had to have complete surprise that night, and they did. The last thing anyone on the planet expected was waves of IDF commandos coming from the sky.
Within minutes, stunned hostages were being led/carried to waiting planes.
The Israeli cabinet felt they would take 20 percent casualties. With 200 men sent, that meant 40 killed or wounded. In the end, they suffered two serious casualties. Surin Hershko, a member of the elite Golani Brigade, was shot and is to this day a quadriplegic.
Jonathan “Yoni” Netanyahu was killed.
He lay on the tarmac while a small team worked on him. He briefly tried to raise himself, then fell back down. He bled out, and his body was placed in a foil-like bag. Next day, he would be buried on Mt. Herzl. His parents, his brothers Bibi and Iddo, Rabin, and others were there. Peres read the eulogy. I’ve visited Yoni’s grave many times.
Every time I think about it, which is very often, I marvel. For me, those young commandos, with face-paint and wearing Ugandan fatigues, are still emerging from the planes and jumping into the vehicles for the short drive to the terminal building at Entebbe Airport.
In the end, they succeeded far beyond even their wildest hopes. By mid-morning, the exact moment of the murderous deadline, Israeli citizens looked up and saw the transport planes back in their own airspace. The shrieks and screams of joy can probably still be heard. Rabin and Peres were there waiting for the lead plane. They asked where Yoni was.
“He went first, he fell first,” came a reply.
Where do such men come from? They come from God, I do believe. The novelist Herman Wouk, a friend of the Netanyahu family, wrote that Yoni was “an ember of sacred fire.”
Yes, he was. In every era a handful of men like them are in place to keep the rest of us safe. The brightness of their being stings the eyes of the mediocre men that surround us, including the gargoyles that practice terrorism, and their enablers in politics and media. Those that affirm them, such as the college students lionizing the Hamas gang that raped and murdered Jews on October 7, are so empty-headed one wonders how they function at all. They are profoundly stupid and, I think, unreachable.
I also don’t believe the culture is what it once was. Few remember Entebbe today, and when they do hear about it, seem indifferent. I find that staggering.
It doesn’t, though, in any way stop me from remembering them, the young Zionist lions that volunteered to go to a remote land and free innocents. They will always deserve our most profound respect. As one of the participants said years later, the operation was “beyond the horizon.”
And so it was.