A few minutes past midnight on July 4, 1976, a band of Israeli commandos drove along the silent runways of Entebbe Airport in Uganda. The Hercules transport plane that had brought them receded from view, and before them stretched dark asphalt, hedged on either side by tall African grass. The lead car of the tiny convoy was a black Mercedes waving a Ugandan flag. Close behind it were two Land Rover jeeps. All three cars bore “Ugandan” license plates made of cardboard and drove with their lights on to add to their innocent appearance.
Their target — the old terminal building at the east end of the airfield — was drawing closer. In less than a minute, the men in the three cars would carry out one of the most spectacular and successful commando missions in military annals — the rescue of 105 hostages, held there at gunpoint for nearly a week by both the terrorists who had hijacked their plane and the Ugandan army.
Thirty-odd soldiers comprised the assault force. All belonged to the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit of the Israeli army (known as the “Unit” or Sayeret Matkal). Their commander, who rode in the front seat of the Mercedes and who, like his soldiers, wore Ugandan camouflage fatigues, was my brother, Lt.-Col. Jonathan (Yoni) Netanyahu. At 30, he was the oldest man in the group.
Several hours later, a phone call from an officer I knew from my own service in the same unit woke me up in my home in Jerusalem. I was still assigned to the Unit as a member of the army reserves, and wondered what it was that he wanted from me at that early hour of the morning. “For the time being, stay at home,” he said. “Once all this is over, you can go back to your usual routine.” Only half awake, I vaguely remembered a phone call earlier in the week from the Unit, following the hijacking of the Air France plane to Uganda, telling me that I should be ready for call-up at any moment if I was needed. “By the way, can you give me Bibi’s phone number in Boston?” added the officer who had woken me up, referring to my other brother, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then studying in the United States.
I gave him Bibi’s number and put the phone down. I had no inkling that a rescue mission had taken place, and even less that anything had gone awry. But along with the rest of the country, I soon found out about the operation, once the first report was broadcast on the radio and everyone in Israel began phoning one another to pass on the news. It didn’t take long before I got a call from Bibi. He was overjoyed at the news of the raid and its success, and asked if I’d heard yet from Yoni — there was no question, of course, that Yoni and his unit were at the center of the action.
Not long after that, I was called at home and informed of Yoni’s death. He was the only Israeli soldier who died in the battle.
To the general public, Yoni was virtually unknown during his lifetime because of the secret nature of his work in the army. In less than 24 hours after the safe landing of the hostages and soldiers in Israel, Yoni’s name would become a household word throughout the country; his life and person would take their hold on the imagination of countless Israelis.
What hasn’t been said about the raid on Entebbe since then? It occurred two and a half decades ago, yet evokes images of legends from the distant, heroic past. An “operation with no precedent in military history,” it was called by Drew Middleton, military analyst of the New York Times.
But it was outstanding not only in military terms. Refusing to knuckle under to blackmail and terror, a beleaguered nation of only three million people sent its finest men thousands of miles away to a hostile land, on a mission fraught with risks. In a world grown almost indifferent to brutality, in which purported disagreement over right and wrong is often merely a cover for moral feebleness and cowardice, the raid on Entebbe touched the souls of men and women across the globe in the most fundamental way possible. For it proved that at least once, even against inconceivable odds, justice could be done and right could win.
No wonder, then, that the raid took on mythic proportions almost overnight. The story was told and retold in many books, countless newspaper and magazine articles, and four different movies, as well as songs and poems. In many different ways, people strove to record this incredible event and reflect on its meaning.
Yet in spite of the plethora of accounts, the true story of Entebbe was not told. For its essential part — the feat of the men from the Unit who planned and prepared the heart of the mission, the rescue itself, who fought to have it approved, and who eventually carried it out — was not portrayed.
Part of the reason for this was that the activities of the Unit my brother headed were closely guarded secrets of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The very name of the Unit, General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, was classified information until a few years ago. Even now, a thick veil of secrecy surrounds the Unit and its activities. So reporters and researchers in the early years after Entebbe lacked any ready access to the men who actually fought the terrorists and the Ugandan army. Moreover, even if someone had been able to identify these men and gain access to them, he would have soon found that he was still up against a wall of silence, for the men would certainly have hesitated to speak candidly, if at all, to an outsider.
Perhaps too young to be concerned about what would be recorded for posterity, the soldiers remained content to keep the truth about their role in the raid to themselves. Thus, the official secrecy surrounding the Unit and the strong self-discipline of its soldiers combined to keep key data about the operation hidden from the public eye.
What’s more, even the Israeli army never made an effort to record, thoroughly and accurately, the role played by the Unit in the raid. The reasons are manifold and complex, and I will only touch on some of them. One was that Yoni, the Unit’s commander, was killed in the operation. Left leaderless, the Unit conducted only a short and inadequate debriefing, which was not recorded. After that session, the officers quickly moved on to reorganize and shoulder the enormous work load the Unit had at the time. By the following day, they had put Entebbe behind them. Nor was much done by anyone else in the IDF to preserve the details of the Unit’s involvement. With one exception, the Military History Division, in compiling its own account of the mission, failed to use information from the actual personnel of the Unit. And the limited information they received was on the whole unreliable and inaccurate.
The result was that the role played by the main fighting force in the Entebbe operation went essentially undocumented. Virtually all that was left of the Unit’s part in the raid, and the part of its fallen commander, was the personal recollections of the soldiers. These memories were never recorded and collected, never organized and analyzed. And as the years went by, they were slowly fading away.
It was this situation that I and other members of my family set out to remedy when we began conducting recorded interviews with the soldiers and officers who had participated in the Entebbe operation. The first few interviews were conducted by my brother Benjamin and my father Prof. Benzion Netanyahu. I continued with the bulk of the task.
Since I was both Yoni’s brother and a veteran of the Unit, the members of the Unit were willing to speak to me freely and frankly. Indeed, many were only too happy to be able to give me their side of the story before a microphone. The information was thus gathered piece by piece, one man’s account after another, and what emerged was a tale of enormous strength. Such a tale, combining the drama of Entebbe and the tragedy of Yoni’s last days, could not of course remain in the archives. Thus this account began taking shape.
Written in Hebrew, the book was first published in 1991, when it became a bestseller. It describes, for the most part, the role played by the Unit and Yoni, its commander, in the rescue operation. In going over the current English translation, ten years later, after having read new descriptions of the raid and after having examined once again the thousands of pages of my transcribed interviews with the people involved and other relevant sources, I was struck by the accuracy of my original account. Only a few minor details had to be altered. In order to correct several mistakes and underline the veracity of several points that have been contested since my book was first published, I felt compelled to add a few quotes from some of the men interviewed by me and several explanatory footnotes. Otherwise, however, Yoni’s Last Battle is identical with the original Hebrew edition.
Having been a member of the Unit helped me to write this book also beyond the collection of data. My first-hand experience with the workings of the Unit, its way of thinking, and the manner in which it prepared and executed its missions, enabled me to give an insider’s account of how such a singular operation as the Entebbe rescue could be put together and successfully carried out. And the “inside” aspect of the story goes further: Yoni, besides being my brother, was also, in one way or another, my commander during most of my years of military service. Such an intimate knowledge of the man who led the rescue force could not but bring an added, critical dimension to the work. Only by acquaintance with the personal side of the major decisions and actions, including the motives that determined them, can one understand how such events could come about.
A feat like the Entebbe rescue requires unique individuals, or those who at the critical moment can rise above themselves to uncommon heights. Without such people, the raid on Entebbe (renamed “Operation Jonathan” by Israel’s government in memory of Yoni) would simply have been impossible.
“The Israeli army concentrates within it…a type of person who is to my taste,” wrote Yoni, not long after he returned to the army as a junior officer in the Unit. “People with initiative and drive, willing to break with convention when necessary, people who do not stick to one solution but are constantly seeking new ways and new answers.”
This is the way that Yoni viewed the men with whom he served in the Unit. Not many years after he wrote these lines, he led them to Entebbe. This is their story, and the story of their commander.
Iddo Netanyahu