The day after the return of the hostages, not all of Israel’s Jews were celebrating. Instead the distraught families of Jean-Jacques Mimouni and Ida Borochovich–two of the three hostages killed during the rescue–were laying their loved ones to rest in private funerals in Netanya and Bat Yam respectively. Both were buried with military honours, their graves covered in wreaths from, among others, the Israeli government, the IDF and Air France.
‘This is a harsh land,’ declared Borochovich’s weeping husband, a Russian immigrant who had finally achieved his lifetime’s ambition to bring his family to Israel seven years earlier. ‘It was a magnificent, courageous operation,’ added Brigadier Mordechai Piron, the chief military chaplain. ‘But it is the fate of this nation that every joy and delight be mixed with pain and mourning.’
Elsewhere in Israel, border troops were on high alert as they watched for revenge attacks by Palestinian guerillas. But the main priority of Yitzhak Rabin’s government on 5 July–the day after the return of the hostages–was minimizing the diplomatic fall-out of its military action by impressing on foreign governments that it had had no option. The British ambassador to Israel, for example, was told by Yigal Allon that the ‘Government of Israel had no alternative means to secure the safety of its citizens, particularly in view of the fact that the Ugandan authorities collaborated with the hijackers and practically formed part of the extortionist action against Israel’. Yigal added: ‘An Israeli surrender… would have served as an added blow to international security and an encouragement to uninhibited blackmail.’ In other words, Israel had acted in self-defence.
In private Roy Hattersley, then a minister of state at the Foreign Office, told the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom that his ‘personal congratulations’ were ‘strongly felt and warmly meant’. But the official response of the British government–mindful of the safety of its 500 or so citizens living in Uganda–was to avoid any explicit praise of Israel. Prime Minister Jim Callaghan’s actual statement to the House of Commons on 5 July made clear his ‘satisfaction at the successful outcome of a daring and skilful operation which frustrated a senseless act of terrorism’. He added: ‘We very much regret the loss of life at Entebbe.’
This anodyne public statement infuriated many Britons who wrote to their MPs and the Foreign Office to complain. They wanted Jim Callaghan to send a personal message of congratulation to the Israeli prime minister. But senior officials at the FCO advised against this. ‘We see no particular need,’ wrote one to Callaghan’s private secretary on 5 July, ‘for the Prime Minister to send a message to Mr Rabin. President Ford, President Giscard [d’Estaing of France] and Chancellor Schmidt have sent messages. However all three had more obvious motives for doing so than exist in the case of the UK. We have nothing to gain from sending one, and need to bear in mind both the doubtful legality of the Israeli raid on Entebbe and the strong feelings it has aroused in Africa as well as the Middle East.’
The official was right: other Western countries, more directly involved in the crisis, had good reason for thanking Israel. In West Germany both Chancellor Schmidt and Dr Kohl, the leader of the opposition, sent telegrams of congratulation to Rabin, while Foreign Minister Genscher phoned his counterpart Allon ‘to express his relief and satisfaction’. Senior officers in the West German Bundeswehr told a British diplomat that they ‘could not decide which to admire more: the technical brilliance of the operation or the clear political directive behind it’. But the main relief for Schmidt’s federal government lay in the fact that it had been spared the dilemma of whether or not to release the terrorists held in West Germany. As a diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn put it:
Release of the prisoners held in the FRG would have been a very difficult step for the Federal Government. They include some of the most important remnants of the Baader–Meinhof gang and of the 2 June Movement… [and] the Government would inevitably have been exposed to criticism and unpopularity. But had they received a direct request from the Israeli Government to release the prisoners, it is hard to see how they could have refused–they simply could not have afforded to be accused of causing, even indirectly, the deaths of innocent hostages who moreover were Jews.
France and Switzerland were also broadly supportive of Israel’s action, while Sweden followed Britain’s lead by welcoming the rescue of the hostages.
The US president Gerald Ford sent a message to Rabin expressing his country’s ‘great satisfaction that a senseless act of terrorism has been thwarted’. Behind the scenes at the US State Department, however, there was some disquiet that Israel had clearly broken the terms of its agreement not to use American-supplied military equipment like the Hercules C-130 outside its own country. This prompted Henry Kissinger to phone Simcha Dinitz, the Israeli ambassador to the US, on 5 July and threaten to freeze all new military shipments. But Dinitz talked him round and, towards the end of their chat, Kissinger agreed to the ambassador’s request to protect Kenya from Ugandan retaliation. His exact words were: ‘We will not let Kenya get [screwed] for this.’ As for pulling off the raid, Kissinger had nothing but praise for the Israelis. ‘It was,’ he told Dinitz, ‘a terrific thing to do.’
True to his word, Kissinger arranged for the US Seventh Fleet–including the aircraft carrier USS Ranger– to sail towards East Africa, a naval frigate to dock at Mombasa in Kenya, and a US naval patrol aircraft to fly to Nairobi’s Embakasi Airport. All these moves were designed to discourage a Ugandan attack on Kenya that had seemed imminent after Idi Amin had sent letters to both the Organization of African Unity and the Security Council of the United Nations, accusing Kenya of allowing Israeli planes to land in Nairobi both before and after the operation, and warning that ‘Uganda reserves her right to retaliate in whatever way she can to redress the aggression against her.’
The response of Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, president of the OAU, to Amin’s letter was to send a telegram of his own to Piero Vinci, president of the UN Security Council, condemning Israel’s ‘unprecedented aggression’ as ‘a danger not only to Uganda and Africa but to international peace and security’. He and the OAU heads of state therefore requested the immediate summoning of the Security Council ‘to consider this wanton act of aggression against a member state of the UN’.
Because only a few people in the Kenyan government knew about the secret deal with Israel, the official reaction to Amin’s accusations was confused. In Mauritius for the meeting of the OAU, and therefore unacquainted with the facts, Vice-President Daniel Arap Moi insisted that Kenya ‘has not been used as a base for aggression against Uganda’ and unreservedly condemned ‘this naked Israeli aggression against one of our OAU Member States’. But the cat had already been let out of the bag by a special edition of the Kenyan Sunday Nation newspaper which confirmed that the Israelis had passed through Nairobi, accused Amin of collusion with the hijackers and praised the Israeli action.
‘It remains to be seen,’ a well-informed British diplomat in Nairobi reported to the FCO on 5 July, ‘whether the Kenyans will elaborate on Moi’s disingenuous view or whether they will eventually concede some involvement on humanitarian grounds. They are in a dilemma since there will be strong misgivings about Kenya’s public and close identification with Israel in a military attack on her neighbour. At present the Government appear to be still at sixes and sevens over their public stance.’ Later that day, he added:
The Kenyans continue to remain silent about the extent of their role in the Israeli operation. They have not attempted to deny that the aircraft passed through Nairobi on their way back from Uganda… Preliminary contacts here suggest the Kenyans will elaborate on the theme that [they] received minimal warning and acted purely on a humanitarian basis…
On balance it is our view that a very small number of senior Kenyans were informed perhaps two days in advance in general terms of the Israeli plans. The information was not spread within the government and whatever support the Kenyans arranged was probably authorized and laid on at a very late stage. The silence of the Kenyan government reflects considerable indecision among ministers as to what should be said and suggests again that there was no advance knowledge or discussion outside a very limited circle.
The diplomat’s assessment was entirely correct, as was his suspicion that Kenyatta had been told in advance of the operation (yet ‘only in such a way that he could not realize its full implications’). Fortunately for Kenya, it had the full military backing of the United States, and Amin knew, under the circumstances, that it would be foolhardy to attempt an invasion. So instead of making new threats against Kenya, he stressed that the ‘people of Uganda and Kenya are brothers’ and that he forgave Kenya ‘for its mistake’.
Most of the opprobrium for the raid, however, was directed not at Kenya but at Israel. As well as the OAU, the chief accusers were mostly Arab and communist countries. It was, said Egypt, nothing less than ‘government terrorism’ and particularly regrettable because it came ‘at a time when negotiations would have led to saving the hostages’. The Soviet Union described it as ‘the latest act of piracy by the Israeli military’, while Austrian Kurt Waldheim, the UN secretary-general (who had served with the Wehrmacht during the Second World War), condemned the raid as ‘a serious violation of the national sovereignty of a United Nations member state’. The meeting of the Security Council to consider this ‘violation’ was set for 9 July.
As well as avoiding war with Kenya, Idi Amin’s chief concern on the day after the raid was to cover up the murder of Dora Bloch. To that end he told his health minister Henry Kyemba that if ‘any inquiries were made about the sick hostage’ he was to say ‘she had been returned to the airport one hour before the Israeli commandos had arrived, and that the commandos had taken her with them’. To back up this lie, Kyemba was instructed to ‘fix the records’ at the hospital so that it appeared as if Mrs Bloch had indeed been discharged.
Kyemba did as he was asked, and also collected Bloch’s belongings and hid them. ‘I felt sickened by my actions,’ he wrote later. ‘But I justified it by reflecting that everyone involved knew the truth of what had happened.’
Amin also tried to muddy the waters by accusing James Horrocks, the acting British high commissioner, of knowing about the raid in advance–an accusation the diplomat categorically denied. But Horrocks was not taken in. Both from Peter Chandley’s account of his visit to Mulago Hospital on 4 July and from further reports received from the staff at the hospital, he knew that Mrs Bloch ‘had been dragged screaming from her hospital room to the lift and that her few items of luggage were left at the hospital’. Yet the same staff had also stressed their belief that it was ‘unlikely that as the sole remaining Israeli hostage left in Uganda she was being taken away to be killed to assuage the wrath of the Ugandan Army over their own losses’.
When the FCO learned of Amin’s denials, it instructed Horrocks to deliver a strongly worded note to the Ugandan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, demanding ‘access to Mrs Bloch with a view to facilitating her early departure from Uganda to the destination of her choice’. It produced no immediate response.
A day after the burials of Jean-Jacques Mimouni and Ida Borochovich, Yoni Netanyahu was interred at Mount Herzl, Jerusalem’s military cemetery, in a service attended by his family and thousands of mourners. Many of his former comrades from the Unit wept as his simple wooden coffin, adorned with dozens of wreaths, was lowered into the ground. Also in attendance were Israel’s senior military and political figures, including Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, who delivered the graveside eulogy.
‘There are times,’ said the defense minister, ‘when the fate of an entire people rests upon a handful of fighters and volunteers. They must secure the uprightness of our world in one short hour. This young man was among those who commanded an operation that was flawless. But to our deep sorrow, it entailed a sacrifice of incomparable pain: that of the first among the storming party, the first to fall. And by virtue of the few, the many were saved, and by virtue of the one who fell, a stature bent under the heavy weight rose again to its full height…’
Almost overnight Yoni Netanyahu had become an Israeli national hero. ‘Yoni’s passing,’ wrote his biographer Max Hastings, ‘unleashed one of those immense catharses that shake Israel from time to time.’ Schools and newborn children were called after him. ‘Operation Thunderbolt’ was renamed ‘Operation Yonatan’. The Jonathan Institute was created to serve his memory.
In the United States, too, Netanyahu’s name lives on. His obituary in the Harvard Crimson was read into the Congressional Record. A part of the Bronx–Pelham Parkway in New York City was redesignated ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu Lane’. ‘The American people,’ wrote Hastings, ‘like the Israelis, seemed to find in Yoni a symbol to erase the Vietnam image of the warrior as a man of My Lai,* mindless bombardier of society, and to replace it instead with the older, more brilliant version of the hero in arms as the saviour of innocents.’
Yoni’s hero status is a source of great pride for the Netanyahu family. Moreover it has aided–and is still aiding–his middle brother Bibi’s political career. Bibi was studying at MIT in the United States at the time of the raid and probably thinking of a career as a management consultant. But his brother’s death in battle, and instant fame, opened up possibilities. After a brief spell as a diplomat, including the post of Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, he joined the right-wing Likud party and–at the time of writing–is serving his third term as Israel’s prime minister, only the second man after David Ben-Gurion to achieve such a feat.
Two days after the rescue of the hostages, Michel Cojot gave a written account of his experience at Entebbe to a young French official who was collecting testimonies ‘for the sole benefit of the archives’. Cojot also, as spokesman for the hostages, wrote a letter to the Air France management ‘praising the crew’s behaviour’ and omitting any inconvenient details such as the fact that, contrary to all the reports in the press, the crew were never given the option to remain behind with the other passengers. He wrote later:
In the elation of the liberation, I threw my reservations to the wind. There should be no false notes in the general rejoicing. So I wrote a fine letter… suggesting unity of behaviour among the crew, which had numbered twelve very different people. Without writing anything false, thanks to the marvellous instrument that is the French language, I succeeded in bending the truth. I, too, wanted things to be as I would have wished them.
But official France, annoyed that Israel had succeeded in her stead, and without even consulting her, maintained a pinched silence. She offered neither congratulations nor thanks. The secretary-general of the Elysée [Presidential Palace], one of the first in France to be informed, did present his felicitations on the telephone ‘in a personal capacity’; the prefecture of police was unusually nice to those who needed new documents; Air France was unusually generous in compensating the hostages for lost baggage; but silence, a great milky silence, prevailed. I wanted to cry out, but I no longer had a loudspeaker.
Cojot was particularly unhappy that the French government chose to obscure the fact of its own inaction by making heroes out of the crew. ‘France is the State,’ wrote Cojot, ‘and what could be closer to the State than the uniformed servants of its own nationalized airline? The captain was hastily made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour… The rest of the crew were awarded the Cross of Merit.’ He added:
The press, books, films–including the Israeli film [‘Operation Jonathan’, starring Sybil Danning and Klaus Kinski]–joined in the chorus: the crew was composed solely of lion-hearted heroes who had protected their terrified passengers… There were other French hostages who had remained with the Israelis until the end, but only the crew was worthy of praise because collectively they symbolized France… Certain details were expanded while others disappeared. Roles were glossed over. Thus the truth was gradually retouched… Was I jealous of these cut-rate decorations fallen from the sky?… Sincerely, I do not think so. None of the hostages had voluntarily risked life or even an hour’s freedom; none deserved a Cross. But I had a tremendous feeling of injustice, of exclusion. Again I was rejected by France.
Only in Israel was Cojot’s contribution truly appreciated. Chief of Staff Motta Gur later told Ilan Hartuv, one of the rescued hostages, that had it not been for the information that Cojot gave to Amiram Levine after he returned to Paris on 2 July, ‘many more hostages and soldiers would have died’. Yigal Allon, the foreign minister, told Hartuv the ‘same thing’.
Michel Cojot, his son Olivier and Ilan Hartuv were among a group of sixty-seven hostages who later sued Air France in an Israeli court for security failures in Athens prior to the hijacking. On 4 July 1981, exactly five years after the rescue, the airline agreed to an out-of-court settlement of almost $2 million in compensation, giving each hostage $21,000 and a similar amount for the relatives of each fatality. Hartuv’s written deposition contained the odd criticism of crew members, such as one or two injudicious remarks they had made. He was convinced that Air France settled because it did not want discussions of this type in open court. ‘It’s a moral victory,’ declared Hartuv’s brother Daniel Bloch. ‘I didn’t care so much about the compensation. I cared about the principle, the lack of security on Air France.’
Flown back out to Uganda at Prime Minister Jim Callaghan’s request to investigate the disappearance of Dora Bloch, acting High Commissioner James Hennessy went straight to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building in Kampala but was told that both the minister and the permanent secretary were in a Cabinet meeting. He later called on his French and West German colleagues, Renard and Ellerkman. Renard said that Amin had accused him of collaborating with the Israelis and that ‘the Palestinians would get him or his family sooner or later’. Despite this, Renard did not think that Amin was in league with the terrorists and believed that the ‘Israeli intervention was unjustifiable and unnecessary’.
West German Ambassador Ellerkman, who like Hennessy had been on home leave when the raid occurred, did not go quite so far, but still took the view ‘that Amin was capable of and had intended a happy ending to this hijack affair’.
Hennessy reported to London: ‘All the reports I have had so far suggest that [Mrs Bloch] is dead and has already been buried. My French colleague supports this view. While it is unlikely that we shall get any firm evidence it seems that she was shot in an act of revenge on the day of the Israeli commando raid, when so many Ugandan soldiers died. At this stage we have no firm evidence to suggest that the murder was directed by the government.’
Uganda’s foreign minister Juma Oris Abdallah opened the Security Council debate at UN headquarters in New York City by thanking the members of the OAU for requesting such a meeting to consider ‘the aggression of Zionist Israel’. During his long, rambling speech, Juma went through the sequence of events in exhaustive if inaccurate detail. He denied any collaboration with the hijackers and accused Israel of ‘naked aggression’. His demand was for the Council ‘unreservedly to condemn in the strongest possible terms Israel’s barbaric, unprovoked and unwarranted aggression against the sovereign Republic of Uganda’; and for his country to be given ‘full compensation from Israel for the damage to life and property caused during its invasion’.
In his spirited and extremely detailed response Chaim Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, said he was standing before the Council ‘as an accuser of all those evil forces which in their inherent cowardice and abject craven attitude see blameless wayfarers and innocent women and children–yes, even babes in arms–as legitimate targets for their evil intentions’. He also took aim at ‘all those in authority throughout the world who for reasons of cynical expediency have collaborated with terrorists’ (a clear dig at Idi Amin); and even at the United Nations itself ‘which has been unable, because of the machinations of the Arab representatives, and their supporters, to coordinate effective measures in order to combat the evil of world terrorism’.
Israel’s action at Entebbe to release its hostages, on the other hand, ‘had given rise to a worldwide wave of support and approval, such as has rarely been seen from every continent, including Africa; from every walk of life; from countries hostile, as well as friendly, to Israel’. He added: ‘The ordinary man and woman in the street have risen behind us and proclaimed “enough” to this spectre of terror…’
Herzog’s one false note was to claim that, during the rescue, ‘three of the hostages were killed by the terrorists before the terrorists were gunned down by Israeli troops’, and that ‘a senior Israeli officer was killed, shot in the back’. But overall his speech was compelling, particularly the detailed section that dealt with Uganda’s alleged complicity. He even mentioned Dora Bloch’s disappearance, suggesting that it ‘and the by now all-too-familiar picture of the terrifying happenings in Amin’s Uganda provide ample justification in themselves for the premonition which prompted’ the Israeli government to act.
Insisting that the rescue was justified in both international and moral law, Herzog concluded ‘with a simple message to the Council’:
We are proud of what we have done, because we have demonstrated to the world that in a small country, in Israel’s circumstances, with which the members of this Council are by now all too familiar, the dignity of man, human life and human freedom constitute the highest values. We are proud not only because we have saved the lives of over 100 innocent people–men, women and children–but because of the significance of our act for the cause of human freedom.
In his reply to Herzog, the Ugandan foreign minister maintained the ludicrous and easily rebutted falsehood that Mrs Bloch had been returned to the airport with the other hostages on 3 July, and that therefore it was Israel’s responsibility to say what had happened to her.
The argument continued back and forth, with claim and counter-claim, for four days: supporting the draft resolution condemning Israel were, among others, Mauritania, Libya, China, Guyana, Tanzania, Cuba and the Soviet Union; broadly supportive of Israel–or at least not prepared to condemn it–were France, the United States, Sweden, West Germany and the United Kingdom. As it was by now clear that at least three of the five permanent members of the Security Council–France, the United Kingdom and the United States–would use their veto to block the draft resolution, it was never put to the vote.
Fearful of jeopardizing the safety of British nationals in Uganda in general, and Dora Bloch in particular, the FCO had instructed its ambassador to the UN to tread a middle ground by suggesting a separate draft resolution that condemned aircraft hijacks, deplored the loss of life at Entebbe and reaffirmed ‘the need to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all States’. Because many anti-Israeli countries refused to vote, the resolution did not garner the requisite majority to be adopted.
Arriving back at Heathrow from what had been a draining royal tour of the United States–and minus his wife Susan, who had been hospitalized in Maryland with a broken jaw, the result of a fall–Foreign Secretary Tony Crosland was given the grim news that Dora Bloch’s body had been found. The British High Commission in Kampala had eyewitness statements to the effect that Mrs Bloch had been shot by men from the State Research Centre, and her corpse dumped in a sugar plantation near the Jinja road, twenty miles from Kampala. One informant had even drawn a map to mark the spot.
Hearing the news that Amin’s thugs were almost certainly responsible for Mrs Bloch’s death, Crosland called an immediate meeting at the FCO to consider Britain’s response. Relations between Britain and Uganda had never properly recovered from Amin’s expulsion of Asians holding British passports in 1972, and the expropriation of British-owned companies and tea plantations in the same period. But the fall-out from the Entebbe Raid had brought matters to a head: first Amin ordered the expulsion from Uganda of British diplomat Peter Chandley and his wife for contradicting his claim that Dora Bloch had rejoined the other hostages on 3 July; then Amin made ‘serious threats’ against the rest of the British community in Uganda; and now there was the news that Bloch had indeed been murdered.
At the meeting, Crosland’s deputy Ted Rowlands argued for an immediate break in relations with Uganda, as did most of the under-forties; the over-forties, including the permanent secretary and his deputy, were against such drastic action, not least because there was no precedent for breaking with a Commonwealth country. Crosland had the casting vote. ‘I think on this occasion,’ he said, after much hesitation, ‘I’m for youth. We’ll take a fortnight to do it. All systems go to warn Britons to get out of Uganda.’