There are few tougher leaders on the world stage today than Benjamin Netanyahu.
None face greater daily challenges as the leader of a country whose very existence is under constant threat of annihilation.
And behind that toughness lies a story that is at once deeply moving and goes to the heart of what drives a man who is on track to become Israel’s longest-serving leader.
It is a story about Bibi, as Netanyahu is generally known, and Yoni, a legendary Israeli commando who was cut down just months after his 30th birthday 40 years ago while leading the heroic raid on Entebbe, in the African nation of Uganda, to free hostages being held by Palestinian and German revolutionary terrorists.
“There’s practically not a day that goes by that I don’t think of him, and think of what he would do, and this is a great source of spiritual uplifting,” Netanyahu has said, speaking of the “hypothetical” conversations he has as he deals with Israel’s security challenges and prepares “to dispatch people to places where, if there’s a failure, they won’t come back”.
“Entebbe is always with me. It is deep in my heart,” he has said.
There can be no surprise in that. For in many ways the incredible raid on Entebbe, masterfully led by Lieutenant-Colonel Yonatan (Yoni) Netanyahu, was, as the Israeli Prime Minister says, a turning point in the world’s battle against terrorism that continues to have an impact.
“After Entebbe,” he has said, “it was very difficult to argue that you had no choice but to surrender to terrorism.”
It would be hard to argue with that, just as it would be hard to overstate the significance that Entebbe had on the making of Benjamin Netanyahu and the enormous effect he has had not only on Israel but also as he has trenchantly defended the Jewish state against what have at times seemed like insurmountable odds.
I know something of Entebbe. I was there in 1976, having managed, as a foreign correspondent, to finagle my way past the strict blanket ban on the entry of reporters imposed by the murderous and mad Uganda dictator Idi Amin.
I saw the desperate hostages and the hijackers before Amin’s security thugs picked me up and took me to the top of the tallest building in Kampala, the nearby capital, and threatened to throw me off. They eventually relented and put me on a flight back to my then home in Nairobi, in neighbouring Kenya. In a broadcast after the raid the delusional Amin claimed I had been somehow involved in preparing the raid.
Nothing could be further from the truth. But my experience then does, with hindsight, underline both the significance of the impact of the epic raid and Yoni Netanyahu’s heroic role on the Israeli psyche and on the future leader of the Jewish state, as Bibi Netanyahu then was.
Yoni and Bibi. Bibi and Yoni.
Two brothers caught up in the vortex of those grim early days of jihadist terrorism, four years after the dastardly slaughter of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and three years after the 1973 Yom Kippur War when Israel came perilously close to destruction.
When, on June 27, 1976, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris with 200 passengers was hijacked and ended up being diverted to the charnel house that was Amin’s Uganda, it seemed inconceivable that a rescue operation could be launched from Israel. It was all of 4000km away and Amin had not only welcomed the hijackers to remote Entebbe with open arms but deployed his security forces to help them.
He strode among the terrified hostages, acting for all the world as if he was one of the hijackers, incoherently mouthing support for the Palestinian and anti-Israel cause.
The turning point in the drama came when the 94 Jewish passengers (and 12 Air France crew members who refused to be released) were separated from the 148 non-Jews. The intention was clear: the Jews were to be killed.
At that point, an operation that no one thought possible was launched under the command of Yoni Netanyahu, with transport aircraft flying into Entebbe under cover of darkness in an operation that killed all seven hijackers as well as three hostages. I was at Nairobi airport on that unforgettable Sunday night. It served as a back up for the operation.
The sense that good had triumphed over evil was palpable.
Read the full article by Bruce Loudon at The Australian (subscription required).