Commander Yonatan, the other Netanyahu

Fifty years ago, on the evening of 3 July 1976, a small group of Israeli soldiers, aboard four Hercules aircraft, set off from an airbase in the Sinai, flew at low altitude over the Red Sea to avoid detection by Egyptian and Saudi radar, and after a few hours, around midnight on 4 July, landed at Entebbe Airport in Uganda for what would become a remarkable rescue mission.

In Entebbe, in fact, 106 hostages – almost all of them Israelis – had been held captive for about a week following the hijacking of a flight that had departed from Tel Aviv and was bound for Paris. The hijacking, which took place after a stopover in Athens, was carried out by four terrorists (who were later joined by others): two Palestinians from George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and two Germans from the Revolutionäre Zellen. After a stopover in Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya – which was still in the throes of revolution at the time – the aircraft set course for Uganda under the delusional Idi Amin Dada, who ordered it to land. The hijackers demanded the usual things: money and the release of fellow terrorists held mainly in Israeli prisons. Otherwise, they threatened to execute all the hostages. Of the 248 passengers initially on board, more than half were released after a couple of days, with only those of Israeli or Jewish origin being held. The gesture by Michel Bacos, the aircraft’s captain, was unforgettable: he decided to remain with the hijacked passengers, as he still considered them to be under his responsibility – they were passengers on his aircraft. And so did all the other eleven members of the crew.

Israel had never before found itself in such a difficult situation. A huge number of Israeli civilians were in the hands of terrorists, in a state ruled by a mad dictator, four thousand kilometres from home. The 1970s were a particularly difficult period for the Jewish state, both at home and for its citizens abroad. Hijackings were incredibly frequent, as were attacks on airports. In May 1972, there had been an attack at Lod-Tel Aviv Airport by the Japanese Red Army, a group of communist terrorists who killed twenty-six civilians on the orders of a faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Also in 1972, in September, there was the horrific attack on the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. In August 1973, the Palestinian group Black September attacked passengers travelling to Israel in Athens. And, of course, in October 1973 there was the Yom Kippur War, in which Israel was taken by surprise and during which it paid a very high price in terms of human lives and the projection of its strength and invincibility to the Arab countries. And these incidents are merely the most prominent examples. In short, Israel was constantly under attack, both within and outside its own territory. Does this sound like a new development? Does it perhaps seem vaguely familiar today?

The Entebbe hostage crisis forms part of this extremely complex phase in the history of the State of Israel. In those days in 1976, the Israeli Prime Minister was Yitzhak Rabin and the Defence Minister was Shimon Peres, whilst the head of the army’s main elite unit – and future commander of the operation on the ground in Entebbe – was a lieutenant-colonel aged just thirty, Yonatan Netanyahu, Bibi’s elder brother.

When news of the hijacking reached Israel, the shock was total. There were no precedents for such an event. Initially, negotiation seemed the only way forward. The idea of a mission into a hostile state four thousand kilometres away seemed impossible. Israel, on this occasion, had been put in check. Later, Rabin, reflecting on those days, wrote that his intention had not been to use a ploy to buy time, but to enter into serious negotiations. However, his views began to change when, a couple of days after the hijacking, the non-Israeli hostages began to be released, and important information started to emerge about the situation at the Entebbe terminal where they were being held captive. Furthermore – and this was another crucial factor – that terminal had been built years earlier by an Israeli company. It was then decided to begin planning a rescue mission, but in the meantime, negotiations for the hostages’ release continued. The terrorists had set an ultimatum for 1 July, but this was subsequently extended by three days. Meanwhile, Yonatan Netanyahu’s unit was put on standby and involved in the preparations. Rounding out the list of prominent Israeli figures involved in this decisive event in the recent history of the Jewish state, the future Prime Minister Ehud Barak, then a colonel, was sent to Kenya, which borders Uganda, to coordinate a possible landing of the aircraft there.

Yonatan quickly drew up the plan with his officers and submitted it to Shimon Peres and Motta Gur, the Chief of the General Staff, who personally oversaw the repeated, meticulous drills. Everything was supposed to run like clockwork. The first Hercules was to land with an initial strike force of twenty-nine men. From there, a Mercedes and two Land Rovers, loaded with soldiers, would disembark; they would simulate the convoy with which Idi Amin usually travelled, so as to be able to approach the terminal undisturbed. Then the other aircraft would land; their task was to secure the entire airport area, destroy the Ugandan fighter jets on the ground that would otherwise have pursued them, and finally bring the hostages home. By the time the exercise had been rehearsed countless times and everything was ready, Yonatan was summoned by Shimon Peres, who later recounted: “He presented the plan to me in detail and I liked it very much. The two of us sat alone. My impression was one of precision and imagination, and complete self-confidence, which undoubtedly influenced me. We had a problem with a lack of intelligence. But Yoni said: ‘Do you know of any operation that hasn’t been carried out partly in the dark? Every operation is carried out partly in the dark.’ Yoni was fully aware of the problem and told me that the operation was entirely feasible. And as for the cost, he told me that we had every chance of coming through it with almost no losses.”

Thus, with Motta Gur’s endorsement, the mission received the go-ahead from the government. At stake were not only the lives of the hostages and all the soldiers deployed on the mission, but also what remained of Israel’s international credibility and, with it, its deterrent power. The risks involved in the operation were enormous, but they had to go for broke. The aircraft took off from the Sinai on the afternoon of the 3rd and, at the appointed time, the first aircraft carrying Yonatan and the assault team landed at Entebbe. They disembarked in the Mercedes and Land Rovers and stormed the airport. The operation was lightning-fast and decisive. An Ugandan soldier managed to raise the alarm earlier than expected, but the soldiers under Yonatan’s command rushed towards the terminal, neutralising all the hijackers and Ugandan soldiers. They freed the hostages, except for three who were killed in the heat of the battle. Only one soldier, the first to advance, fell alongside the three hostages: Commander Yonatan Netanyahu. His body was loaded onto one of the Hercules aircraft and brought home alongside those he had rescued. The following day, that young, previously unknown officer became a national hero, the unrivalled symbol of an operation celebrated throughout the world, which restored the aura of invincibility to the Israeli warriors.

On 6 July, during his funeral, Shimon Peres delivered Yonatan’s eulogy: “This operation required taking an enormous risk, but one that seemed more justifiable than the other possible risk – that of surrendering to terrorists and blackmailers, the risk that all submission and capitulation entail. The most difficult moment of that night of heroism came when the bitter news arrived that a bullet had torn out the young heart of one of Israel’s finest sons, one of our bravest fighters, one of the most promising commanders in the armed forces, the magnificent Yonatan Netanyahu.”

The quotations given so far are all taken from the book "Lettere di Yonatan", which I edited and translated ten years ago and which has just been republished in a new edition, fifty years on from the Entebbe operation and the commander’s death. In conclusion, let me say a few words about this extraordinary text, which is nothing other than a collection of the letters that this young man sent to his brothers, his parents and the women in his life from the age of eighteen right up until just a few days before he fell in battle. The result is a formidable, and unintended, coming-of-age novel that tells the story of a brilliant young man, the son of Israel’s cultural elite (his father, Benzion, was a leading authority on the history of the Marranos and one of the editors of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, as well as a young assistant to Ze’ev Jabotinsky), who could have had an exceptional career in the United States, having been admitted to Harvard, but who renounced this promise of happiness to follow what he felt was an inescapable calling: the defence of the State of Israel. These letters are an extraordinary document because they provide a first-hand account of the life of a thoroughly Western man who chose a way of life that we can no longer comprehend. There is no militarism in Yonatan’s words, nor any fanaticism. Instead, one hears the drama of a life fully aware of the hatred that surrounded – and still surrounds – Israel, and of the tangle of fanatical sentiments that threatens to crush it at any moment. One senses the necessity to fight in order to survive, the consequent inevitability of conflict, and the overwhelming need to win. For defeat would have meant annihilation. Does ‘from the river to the sea’ sound familiar?

In a letter from 1968, when he was just twenty-two years old but already had several years of war behind him, reflecting on the Six-Day War, in which he had fought and been wounded the previous year, he wrote: “It would be so wonderful if we could say now that ‘the war is over’. How easy things would be if this had been ‘a war that is over’, nothing more than a part of a distant past. But that is not the case.” Yonatan reflects on the fact that the war seems endless. “I have no doubt that the war will come. And I have no doubt that we will win it. But for how long? Until when? […] We are young and we were not born merely to wage war. I intend to continue my studies; I want to do so and I’m keen to do so. But I can no longer see this as the main mission of my life. Even though studying is the right thing to do—right for me and for Israel—it isn’t the most important thing right now. Deep down, I’m convinced of this. This is where the sadness I referred to earlier comes from—the sadness of young men destined for an endless war.” Yet, despite his desire to return to a normal life and enjoy his youth, Yonatan would feel the need to continue his service in the army, to do what he felt was most necessary, regardless of the sacrifice involved: to fight for his country’s survival.

In a lyrical passage – which also conveys the beauty of his writing – from a letter sent to his partner during Easter 1975, he writes: “I have always thought it was the most beautiful of our festivals. It is an ancient celebration of freedom, thousands of years of freedom. When I sail back through the seas of our history, I traverse long years of suffering, oppression, massacres, ghettos, expulsions and humiliation; many years which, from a historical perspective, seem devoid of any ray of light, and yet this is not the case. For the fact that the idea of freedom endured, that hope persisted, that the flame of freedom continued to burn through the observance of this ancient festival, is for me a testament to the eternity of the striving for freedom and the idea of freedom in Israel. […] My longing for the past mingles with my longing for you, and because of you, I delve into my past and find the time and the desire to remember, so that I may share my life with you. And by ‘past’, I do not mean only my own past, but the way in which I see myself: as an inseparable part, a link in the chain of our existence and of Israel’s independence.”