Bibi’s brother
An interesting interview with Bari Weiss and Benjamin Netanyahu, especially about his brother:
BW: I want to open this conversation on July 4, 1976. On that day nearly 50 years ago, Israel carried out a stunning mission at the Entebbe Airport in Uganda. A week earlier, a few terrorists, four of them, had hijacked a flight of 248 passengers that were headed from Tel Aviv to Paris. They landed the plane in Entebbe and held the passengers hostage, separating the Israelis out from everyone else, while demanding the release of 53 Palestinian terrorists, many of whom were hardened murderers in Israeli prisons. Their terms were clear. If Israel refused, the hijackers promised to kill the Israeli passengers.
After a week of planning, Israel’s most elite unit, Sayeret Matkal, carried out a mission to rescue those hostages. And miraculously, almost all of the hostages were rescued alive. The New York Times called it an operation with “no precedent in military history.” Israel lost one soldier in that operation, a 30-year-old unit commander named Yoni Netanyahu. Now, I grew up, like so many young Jews, learning the story of Yoni, reading books about him, his letters, and visiting his grave at Israel’s military cemetery.
But Yoni was also your older brother. And it’s hard not to see this moment as your origin story. In your new autobiography, that is how you open the book and how you write about it—as a catalyst for the rest of your life and everything that would follow. So I wanted to ask you, how did this nightmarish day shape your view of Israel, of the fate of the Jewish people, and of the role that you wanted to play in both of those things?
BN: Well, it’s changed my life and steered it to its present course. I had no intention of entering political life or even public life.
In the course of that day, we heard a newscast which said that Israeli commandos had rescued the hostages and were making their way back to Israel. We were overjoyed. But something marred my joy, because the newscast said that one officer had been killed. I said, “what are they saying, officer?” They don’t say officer. They usually say one soldier was killed. I immediately picked up the atlas in my bookshelf and looked at the distance to Entebbe––you didn’t have Google in those days––so I computed it very quickly: 2,000 kilometers. Three or four Hercules planes, so 200 men. A quarter would be officers because they’d fight to get on such a mission. The odds were one to four.
We had faced worse odds before because Yoni and I, and my younger brother Ido actually, had served in this tiny unit and we often had to be separated on missions. I always calculated the odds; one to four, so not too bad. Yet I couldn’t resist, so I called my brother, and I said, “Is Yoni back?” I didn’t even ask, did Yoni command that? There was no question about it. They would be our special elite unit, which is a kind of a Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and Green Berets merged together and distilled. He said, “no, he’s not yet back.” I called him a few hours later and asked, “is he back,” and he said, “no he’s not back, but I sense that something is wrong.” Then a few hours later he called me and I said to my wife, “that’s Ido calling to tell me that Yoni had been killed.” And that’s what Ido told me. There was this indescribable silence of agony on both sides of the line.
The only thing I could think of at that point was that I didn’t want the news to reach my parents through the media. My father was teaching at Cornell University at that time, and I was in Boston, so I made my way through seven hours of indescribable anguish to Ithaca, New York. I walked up the path to my parents house. There was a big glazed window in the front of the house, and I could see my father marching back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back in his typical thoughtful ruminations. All of a sudden, he looked at me. He saw me and he said, with a look of surprise, “Bibi, what are you doing here?” Then he saw my face and he understood immediately. He let out a cry like a wounded animal, and then I heard my mother scream. That was actually worse than hearing about Yoni’s death; it was like a second death.
In the week of the Shiva—the mourning period—I had lost my sense of taste. I didn’t know if I could live. I didn’t know how I would live, and I thought that my life in many ways had ended as I knew it. And it did. But in the course of the Shiva, facing inconsolable grief, two things happened. The first was that people started giving us letters that Yoni had written to them over the years, and we could see that his story came to life through these letters. The first one was written when he was a homesick, 17-year-old Israeli teenager in the United States and the last one was written literally days before his fall in Entebbe. We immediately set about to put these letters into a book, which has endured for 45 years.
Yoni was a remarkable person. He didn’t have to die to become a legend. He was a legend in his lifetime. For those who knew him and those who served under his command, he was a poet warrior who didn’t want to be a warrior. He really thought of his life, and ultimately his death, as a service to the nation, to protect the one and only Jewish state because history wouldn’t give us another chance.
How did I extricate myself from this? I said that two things had gotten me out of this impossible abyss. The other one was that Yoni never believed that he was just fighting terrorism militarily. He thought it was a civilizational battle between barbarians and the forces of freedom and human rights. I thought that we had to mobilize the free world to adopt a different attitude towards terrorists, a different moral attitude to puncture their various lies—that they were fighting for human rights while they were trampling them and blowing up babies––to fight against the terrorist states that stood behind them, because international terrorism without terrorist states is basically impotent.
Until I read this interview, I didn’t know about his brother. I think it explains a lot about his zeal.