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Friday June 22, 2001

Historic '76 Entebbe raid remembered on the Web

Mark Mietkiewicz

Twenty-five years ago, the world was riveted by a drama that began in the eastern Mediterranean with the hijacking of an Air France jet. It culminated seven days later with the spectacular rescue by the Israel Defense Force in Uganda. Today, a look at the raid on Entebbe as told on the World Wide Web.

The best summary on the Internet of the events leading up to the raid and its successful completion was written by Reserves Maj. Louis Williams, a senior press officer for the Israel Defense Force. You can find it at www.idf.il/english/history/entebbe1.stm Williams' "Entebbe Diary" follows in great detail the flight of Air France 139 as it took off from Ben-Gurion Airport on June 27, 1976 "on what promised to be a routine flight to Paris via Athens." Four terrorists boarded in Greece and hijacked the plane to Entebbe. In exchange for more than 100 Israeli and Jewish passengers, they demanded the release of terrorists being held in Israel, France, Germany, Switzerland and Kenya. This is a suspenseful read full of details that may have been forgotten over the years.

One of the names most closely linked to the raid on Entebbe belongs to Jonathan Netanyahu. Born in the United States and educated there as well as in Israel, "Yoni" was a veteran of the 1967 Six-Day War. Netanyahu led the storming party to free the hostages at Entebbe and was the lone Israeli military casualty.

From his early teens, Netanyahu wrote letters to relatives and friends, which were collected and published after the raid. "Self Portrait of a Hero" has just been republished to mark the raid's 25th anniversary. The Boston Globe wrote: "Yoni's unpretentious accounts of his accomplishments, simply written and thus the more grand, make him the convincing hero he was and make us wish that more like him were among us." The piece is at www.jpost.com/ Editions\2001/05/03/Books/Books.25560.html

On the fateful day of the hostages' liberation, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin addressed the Knesset. "The Israel Defense Forces have achieved one of their most exemplary victories from both the human and moral and the military-operational points of view, a remarkable manifestation of Jewish fraternity and Israeli valor." You can read Rabin's entire address online at www.us-israel.org/ jsource/Terrorism/entebbe1.html

I was interested to read what impact the raid on Entebbe had on the people of Uganda. Ugandan political commentator Charles Onyango-Obbo says that before the raid Idi Amin had established a powerful army that terrorized his people in submission. But the raid "shattered his aura of invincibility. Nothing Amin did after that could rebuild his grip on the country." The article is at www.africanews.com/ obbo/article95.html

And what of the fallen dictator? Amin was dethroned in 1979 by Tanzanian troops joined by Ugandan dissidents. The Christian Science Monitor reports that Amin fled to Saudi Arabia, reportedly arriving with his two wives and 24 children. He has been there for 22 years, now living in an exclusive community outside Jeddah, the capital. In a 1999 interview with a Ugandan newspaper, Amin said he is fond of fishing in the Red Sea, watching sports and CNN and playing his accordion. The Monitor article is at www.csmonitor.com/ durable/2001/04/19/p23s3.htm

A story as powerful as Entebbe's has proven irresistible to filmmakers. The Internet Movie Database -- www.imdb.com -- lists four Entebbe-based productions.

Of course, the raid on Entebbe had a profound personal effect on anyone who cared about the fate of Israel. Jonathan Rosenblum was studying in an ulpan in the summer of 1976 and remembers the tension and then the joy that filled the air. "Complete strangers were embracing on the bus. For once Jewish unity seemed like a reality, not a fundraiser's slogan. As I looked around the bus, one thought kept recurring: We are all Jews. The obvious differences between us -- language, skin color, personal and familial history -- suddenly seemed unimportant." His piece is at www.jewishworldreview.com/jonathan/rosenblum070999.asp

Decades later, Rosenblum puts those events into perspective. "While the first realization of the miracle of the Entebbe rescue will always rank as one of the happiest moments of my life, the memory today is a bittersweet one. For it always calls in its wake the question: Will we Jews in the land of Israel ever again experience the same feelings of unity we did that morning?"

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