http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1ct-meb6U0'We thought this would be the end of us': the raid on Entebbe, 40 years on Guardian - By Jonathan Freedland, Jun 25, 2016
On 4 July 1976, the day the US celebrated its 200th birthday, an Israeli expat took a phone call that would change his life. A student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he went by the name Ben Nitay, an Americanised shortening of the original, the better to fit into the land where he hoped to forge a business career and build a life. On the phone was his younger brother, calling with grave news. It concerned their older brother Yonatan, or Yoni.
As children, they had idolised him; he was the one who led their games, who, they felt, had raised them. Then 30 years old, ruggedly handsome and newly installed as the head of Israel’s elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, Yoni had, in the early hours of that day, led a raid to rescue more than 100 Israeli hostages held at Entebbe, Uganda. Word had just come that the operation had been an astonishing success and the hostages were free. But the leader on the ground – Yoni – had been killed in action. Their brother was dead.
And so, while the people around him watched marching bands and held street parties to mark America’s bicentennial, and while the world marvelled at the sheer audacity of a military raid that defied all odds, Ben Nitay – born Binyamin Netanyahu – made the seven-hour drive to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where his father was teaching. The 26-year-old was determined to break the news to his parents himself.
“I walked up the path leading to their house which had a big window in the front,” he recalls 40 years later, sitting in the office of the Israeli prime minister which has been his, on and off, for 10 of the last 20 years. “I could see my father pacing back and forth. And all of a sudden he turned his head and saw me. He had a look of surprise, but he immediately understood and let out a sharp cry. And then I walked in.” Netanyahu pauses as he relives the moment. “This was even harder than Yoni’s death: telling my father and mother.”
The family flew in virtual silence from the US to Israel for the funeral of the son and brother who had already been garlanded as a military hero and was now about to enter the national mythology. The Netanyahu name would take its place in the Israeli pantheon and, in the process, open up a path that would take young Binyamin to the top of Israeli politics – a path that began in Entebbe.
The career of Netanyahu is the most visible legacy of that July day four decades ago, but the impact of Entebbe would be felt in countless other ways, too. With its extraordinary cast of characters – including a trio of future Israeli prime ministers as well as the gargantuan, volatile Ugandan dictator Idi Amin – Entebbe would alter the calculus in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, changing the way Israel saw itself and was seen by others. It would come to seem a high watermark in global attitudes to the country, perhaps the last time Israel was viewed with admiration rather than suspicion or hostility. Entebbe would become a byword for military daring, the subject of three blockbuster movies, taught and studied by armies around the world – including by the architects of the raid that captured and killed Osama bin Laden. A raid that lasted a total of 99 minutes would live on for decades.
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Among them was the commander, Yonatan Netanyahu. Once the rescue had been completed, Betzer had got on the radio to report that their mission had been successful. He heard nothing but static. Eventually a radio operator came across to say: “Yoni’s down, Yoni’s down.” He had been shot within minutes of the first Hercules landing. A medic tried to treat him close to the terminal building, eventually handing him over to the commander of the medical unit, Dr Ephraim Sneh – another future Israeli cabinet minister. Around 25 minutes after the planes had first touched down, Netanyahu died in Sneh’s arms. Now, at the front of the plane, a stretcher carried his body.
When Ehud Barak, who had been handling the Kenyan end of the operation, climbed aboard the Hercules in Nairobi, he was struck by the mood on board. The hostages were “ebullient”: this was just one hour after their liberation. But, he told me, “The fighters were far from happy. They were very tired, more than anything else. And sad.”
He approached Netanyahu’s body. “His face was white. He was a handsome young man. I put my hand on his forehead: it was still warm. It was just an hour after he had died. It was kind of a serene face, not expressing any kind of suffering.”
Soon the phone would ring in the home of the young man then called Ben Nitay.
Shortly after the hostages were home, what had been Operation Thunderbolt was renamed Operation Yonatan, in his memory. The family helped organise conferences in his honour and set up a Jonathan Institute, with branches in Israel and the US. The British journalist Max Hastings was commissioned to write a biography, Yoni, with the family’s cooperation. The slain hero of Entebbe was becoming a national icon.
Binyamin would speak at these conferences and run the institute in the US, setting out his view of how the west should defeat terrorism, focusing on states he believed enabled terror – as Uganda had enabled the hijackers of flight 139. He began to drift away from the planned career in business and marketing, and into politics and diplomacy. With his US-accented English and telegenic looks, he fast caught the notice of Israel’s ruling circles and in 1982 was made No 2 in Israel’s Washington embassy. Within 14 years, he was prime minister.
Netanyahu himself readily admits it all began at Entebbe. “Totally,” he told me in Jerusalem. “It changed my life and steered it to its present course.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/25/entebbe-raid-40-years-on-israel-palestine-binyamin-netanyahu-jonathan-freedland#img-5http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DmvdcZfS4c
