By Tal Shalev, NCS
(NCS) — The commemoration of Israel’s most famous navy operation ought to have been a second to have fun for Matan Vilnai. Instead, the deputy commander of the Entebbe raid – wherein commandos rescued 102 hostages – boycotted the ceremony, together with many of the troopers who took half within the daring mission.
“What exactly is there to celebrate – an operation from 50 years ago? I haven’t celebrated since October 7,” Vilnai, a retired normal from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) informed NCS. “We have thousands of soldiers fighting right now, thousands of reservists serving – and they’re celebrating?”
On July 4, 1976, Israeli commandos flew almost 2,500 miles throughout largely hostile airspace, touchdown in darkness on the airport in Entebbe, Uganda. In lower than an hour, they freed 102 hostages held by Palestinian and German hijackers who had been demanding the discharge of dozens of convicted terrorists. The aircraft had been hijacked en route from Tel Aviv to Paris and diverted to Entebbe.
Three hostages had been killed throughout the operation, as was its 30-year-old commander, Yonatan (Yoni) Netanyahu, who grew to become a nationwide icon. Operation Thunderbolt – identified in Hebrew because the Entebbe raid – was subsequently renamed in Netanyahu’s honor as “Operation Yonatan.”
Entebbe grew to become one of the defining moments in Israel’s nationwide story, a logo of a rustic’s promise to go anyplace, and take extraordinary dangers, to guard its residents and produce them house.
It additionally marks the start of one other story: that of Netanyahu’s youthful brother, Benjamin, who entered public life within the shadow of Yoni’s demise and would turn into Israel’s longest serving prime minister.
Half a century later, that legacy is fraught, mirroring Israel’s deep inner divisions. At a state ceremony marking the anniversary on Sunday, dozens of the operation’s personal veterans – senior commanders and commando troopers who stormed the airport that night time, and even some of the hostages they saved – boycotted the occasion, hosted by President Isaac Herzog, in protest of its visitor of honor: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“There isn’t a day I don’t think about Yoni, there isn’t a day that I don’t consult with Yoni,” Netanyahu mentioned on the ceremony, connecting the Entebbe raid to Israel’s marketing campaign in opposition to Iran. The 1976 operation, he mentioned, “turned the impossible into possible” and demonstrated that terrorism have to be confronted with pressure. “This is what we are doing. We are systematically crushing the Iranian axis of evil, who tried to advance a plan to destroy Israel.”
But most of the lads who as soon as served beside his brother weren’t there to listen to his speech.
“We refuse to serve as a window dressing,” the veterans wrote in an open letter, accusing Netanyahu of “abandoning” the Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and of enabling mass draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox males, at the same time as reservists serve repeated fight excursions on a number of fronts.
“This is a matter of conscience,” Uri Sagi, a former navy intelligence chief who commanded Golani forces within the 1976 raid, wrote on social media, explaining his refusal to sit down alongside Netanyahu. Benny Davidson, who was 13 when he was rescued from Entebbe, additionally prevented the ceremony, saying he wouldn’t be half of “a display that covers a collapse of values and leadership.” Instead, he led a small, quiet protest exterior the president’s residence.
The rift between Netanyahu and a few of his brother’s former comrades has turn into more and more open. In 2023, on the top of mass protests in opposition to Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, members of the Entebbe rescue squad staged an indication at Ben Gurion airport, arriving in black Mercedes automobiles like those the commandos drove onto the Entebbe tarmac at first of the operation.
“Back then we set out on ‘Operation Yonatan’; today we embark on ‘Operation Benjamin,’” they declared, casting their protest as a second rescue mission, geared toward “freeing a prime minister who has been ‘kidnapped’ by extremists, along with an entire country racing toward a dangerous regime change.”
The warfare that adopted October 7 deepened the rupture, with a number of Entebbe veterans becoming a member of the weekly protests calling on Netanyahu to finish the combating and strike a deal to deliver the hostages house.
Vilnai, the mission’s deputy commander, mentioned: “The Entebbe legacy is far from unified. Each of us has their own reasons, but we will not be a decorative prop to Netanyahu’s cynical commemorations.”
Inside the ceremony, Herzog tried to rise above the rift. “Operation Yonatan does not belong to an individual or a group. It stands above all disputes,” he mentioned. He referred to as the mission a “moral declaration” that established an enduring precept: “There may be borders to the state, but there is no border to responsibility.”
IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir drew his personal line from 1976 to the current warfare, talking of “the compass that has guided us since that night in Entebbe, and with even greater intensity since October 7, driven by a deep and clear understanding: we, and we alone, are responsible for the lives and safety of our citizens.”
Whatever gaps the boycott left had been stuffed in a corridor filled with younger troopers, bereaved households and survivors from the Entebbe raid, and the veterans who selected to attend.
Among them was Doron Hanan, a member of the aircrew that flew the unique mission, who mentioned he understood those that determined to boycott, however that he had “swallowed” his discomfort, as a result of the anniversary mattered an excessive amount of to skip.
“I also feel uncomfortable with some of the figures here, but we came to meet with our crew members and remember the old days,” he informed NCS, earlier than noting how a lot has modified. “I am ashamed of what Israel has become, as well. This is not the country we fought for.”
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