We’re on board an Air Kenya plane flying westward over Lake Victoria in the early afternoon toward Entebbe Airport. Below, I can make out many small islands, which in the dark of night thirteen years earlier were invisible from inside the Hercules transports. Most of the jungle-covered islands are uninhabited; on a few I can see round straw huts thinly scattered along the beaches or in clearings in the woods.
Africa.
I look away from the window, and the same old thought hits me again: Why didn’t I go to the Unit’s base at the beginning of that week, when they phoned me and said to stay close to home and be ready to be called up? Could I, in spite of everything, have ended up on one of the Hercules? The thought is futile. Yoni would never have taken me. And besides, hadn’t I smiled when I heard the message on the phone? Just more nonsense, I thought at the time.
Bibi sits on the left side of the plane, a little further forward; Noa, his eleven-year-old daughter, sits directly across from me on the other side of the aisle. For the moment, each of us is lost in his own thoughts. The plane will land in a few minutes, and I press my face against the window on the right-hand side, expecting at any moment to see the airport.
“There it is,” Bibi calls out suddenly. I rush to his side of the plane and take the seat behind him. The plane circles over the town of Entebbe, and instead of landing from the south, as the hercules did and as I expected us to do, it will come in from the north. Over there is the new terminal, on an elongated hill. And there, further to the east, is the old terminal, below the town. Even though I knew how close the houses of the town were to the old terminal, I’m taken aback for a moment. We identify the landmarks almost automatically, without any connection to the feelings that take hold of us. We approach the main runway. To its left we see the diagonal runway leading toward the military base. Everything is just where it should be, just as it was thirteen years before.
The plane lands, and the old terminal disappears from sight. The new terminal and the big white letters reading “Entebbe” on the grassy slope next to it shoot by us. The plane slows down, turns, and taxies northward. It passes below the sharp escarpment that the paratroop commandos had such a hard time climbing. Now I can see why the commandos hit the escarpment here, at the most difficult spot, for the tower stands above it, on the highest point of the ridge Finally, the plane comes to a stop in the parking area, next to the fuel lines.
We go down the stairs. Bibi is here as the guest of the new president of Uganda, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone waiting on the ground to greet us. As we approach the huge entrance to the passenger hall, I spot a Ugandan soldier in camouflage fatigues holding out a white piece of paper. On it, handwritten in big block letters, is the word “Yoni.” This is our reception.
The soldier leads us through the terminal to a small office with a large photograph of the president in uniform on one wall It’s the third or fourth such picture that we’ve seen since entering the terminal, and it’s not hard to guess what kind of regime Uganda has We wait a long time in the stifling heat of the office for the president’s aide to rescue us. When the two soldiers responsible for us leave the room for a moment, Bibi takes the piece of paper that greeted us from the table as a souvenir.
When the president’s aide finally arrives, he takes us to the VIP lounge. Everyone in Uganda knows the name “Yoni,” the aide says when we ask about the piece of paper; I can’t tell whether he expects me to take his comment literally. I look through the windows and say to Bibi: “Those are Surin’s stairs…” I want to go outside to photograph them, but refrain; it’s not the appropriate time. I’ll do it later, I tell myself, not knowing that the next day, when I ask permission, I’ll be told not to. The Ugandans escorting us notice where we’re looking. “Yes, this is where your soldier was wounded, on these stairs,’ one says. Thirteen years have passed, and yet they know even this detail. They say it matter-of-factly. But why not? They have no idea who Surin is. How would they know how deeply he has suffered, or how remarkable a man he is?
I’m sitting with Noa in the open tent where the president receives guests. The slope, covered with grass and flowers, overlooks Lake Victoria. With us is the president’s aide, an affable man who speaks fluent English. Bibi is in the palace at the top of the hill, immersed in a long conversation with the president. It’s dusk, and my mind tries to absorb what my eyes have seen in the hours we’ve been here — especially during the visit to the old terminal. As I chat with the aide and sip my tea, I try to reconstruct what I’ve seen, while the images are still fresh and still race through my mind: the half-ruined, neglected, filthy terminal, with its shattered windows, partially collapsed roof, and walls pockmarked with bullet holes. It’s impossible to say which holes are ours and which the result of the fighting in this country in the years since Operation Jonathan. There’s no sign of the foot high brick wall in the entrance plaza, behind which Yoni was taken after he was wounded.
“I hadn’t imagined it was so large,” Bibi said as we stood outside. “Thirty men to take control of a building like this, with lots of rooms, and in a few minutes,” he was astonished.
“This is the place,” I told Bibi, pointing out where Yoni was hit. Bibi responded only by looking down, as if he were trying to carve the look of the spot of asphalt into his memory. I asked him to stay where he was, on the spot where Yoni was wounded, while I stood in the large hall, close to the second entrance.
Yes, a burst of fire from here could easily have hit him.
But when we climbed to the top of the tower, and saw how completely it dominated the plaza, we said to each other: “But maybe he was shot from here after all…” But no, that seems impossible. A bullet coming from here could not have hit him where it did.
“How is it that you don’t believe in Jesus and his resurrection?” the president’s aide suddenly asks me. I put down my teacup on the tray between me and Noa. The red setting sun imparts a particularly beautiful hue to the splendid scenery. We’ve been talking about Israel and the archeological discoveries there, though I’ve paid only halt a mind to the talk "You, who live in the land where Jesus walked and breathed and died — how is that you of all people don’t believe in him?”
I ask myself how I can possibly explain the Jewish people to him. There’s no way. Here in Africa, as everywhere else in the world, we are a mystery, strangers to all. And it makes no difference that here, too, I hear first names taken from our language and our past. It was only by coincidence that Zionism — that incomprehensible enterprise of the Jews, to which the name “Uganda” got tied almost at the start* — found the expression of its very essence in an operation in this land.
Operation Jonathan has become a legend here, almost a tourist attraction. Driving to the old terminal, our Ugandan escorts tried to tell us the story of “Entebbe” and describe the operation as though we were regular tourists. After we had gotten into their Mercedes, they had trouble finding the way out of the new terminal parking area to the runways leading to the old terminal, and I gave them directions. After all, I’ve studied the diagrams well. Yet a couple of minutes later, one of our hosts, who was sitting in the front of the Mercedes, asked us genially, “Do you know the story?” The car had just turned left from the diagonal runway. “We’ll go from here,” he said as he drove us east along the access road, straight towards the control tower, “but the Israelis came from over there, from the south.” It was obvious that he did not believe us when we explained that the Israeli force had come exactly the same way we were driving. He already knew wlial happened. As always, what’s told first takes on a power of its own, whether it’s true or not.
A pilot who had served in Idi Amin’s air force had come with us. “What does it mean when a sentry lifts his rifle and points it at you?” we asked him and the president’s aide.
“Halt, or I’ll shoot,” they answered in unison.
“The Russians were very angry with us the morning after your raid, you know,” the pilot look the opportunity to tell us. “Their ambassador asked us angrily, ‘Why did you hold the hostages at the airport instead of taking them to Kampala? ”
Now we’re flying back to Kenya, aboard Uganda’s only civilian plane. As on the way to Uganda, each of us is lost in his own thoughts. I think about the beautiful land I’ve just left and about how ruined it is — in part because of neglect, but mostly because of deliberate inhumanity. And in fact, the barbarity of human beings never stops, and no one has suffered as much from it as have the Jews. How terribly important, how right it is, to stand up to it; how humane and just was the rescue mission to Entebbe, a mission undertaken in the face a hostile, uncaring, destructive world. “What an insane world we live in!” Yoni had cried out on paper in response to the slaughter in Biafra and to the world’s indifference. But at Entebbe something had been done. And Yoni, as ever, or perhaps more than ever, understood the purpose toward which his actions and his life had been directed.
I think about the sadness that took hold of Yoni during the last months of his life — no doubt related, at least in part, to what he saw around him, at the Unit and outside it. Sooner or later, that’s the fate of anyone like Yoni: the inevitable clash between the extraordinary individual and the surroundings that oppose him and that he cannot accept.
And I can’t help thinking about his last moments. Did he know the operation was about to succeed completely, that the hostages were going to be saved? Did he realize that his men indeed understood what needed to be done, and would act in an exemplary way, just as he’d told them they would? Or had he noticed that some things had gone awry, and assumed that the operation might fail? He had surely been able to see, a second before he was hit, that the team assigned to the first door of the large hall was running past it. Maybe at that moment he turned to the left for a split-second, and that was when he was hit perhaps by one of the terrorists’ shots? But he probably also saw that Amir and Amnon were running straight for the second door. Did he understand that within two or three seconds they would be inside the hall?
To these painful questions, I know I’ll never have answers. If he had only been wounded ten seconds later, after all the terrorists in the large hall had been eliminated, after the work of his entire adult life had come to a climax, had borne fruit…but it wasn’t to be.
If there’s any consolation in Yoni’s death at that time, it’s that the dejection of those last months was erased in one stroke by the preparations for the operation, which gave him the opportunity to show his full stature as a leader and soldier.
I think with a sad smile about those who say that at Entebbe Yoni reached the height of his abilities. Who knows better than I what he could have achieved. Entebbe wasn’t all of what Yoni had in him. It was just one example.
If there’s any other consolation for Yoni’s death, anything else that can ease the pain, it’s in the realm of ideas. What, I ask myself, will be remembered from all this? I don’t know the answer, but I think of what the African-American leader, Bayard Rustin, said on a visit to Israel: “I am certain that for years and years to come, perhaps even a thousand years from now, when people are confused and frightened, and they are dispossessed of their humanity and feel that there is no way to go except to face death and destruction, someone will remember the story of Yoni at Entebbe. That story will be told to those despairing people, and someone will move into a corner and begin to whisper, and that will be the beginning of their liberation.63
Uganda is behind me; the plane is approaching Nairobi airport. I think to myself: Of all the nations in the world, there is no other, at least in this generation, that would have done what we did at Entebbe. I say “we” because the operation belonged to the whole people — to the government, which came from the people and was chosen by it, and dared to make the decision; to the IDF, a true citizen’s army, which gave its all to carry out the mission; and to the boy from Jerusalem named Amir — and others like him — who, to save the innocent people within that hall, charged right into the line of the German terrorist’s fire and killed him.
I think about Operation Jonathan, and about the Jewish nation, which has nurtured the world with its ideas and its deeds for thousands of years. And I know: In this people, there is still boundless ability and strength.