PART THREE
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The Israeli military goes to great lengths, including instituting media blackouts, to ensure that close family members of a fallen soldier are notified personally by authorized personnel of their loss. It’s relatively straightforward in a small country like Israel, where experienced teams of military doctors and psychologists are on call to visit families quickly. It’s more difficult when the family is scattered across continents.
“Yoni’s dead” was the first thing Colonel Ehud Barak, waiting for the arrival of the four C-130 Hercules transports carrying the rescued hostages from Entebbe in Uganda, was told by the commander of the mission, Brigadier General Dan Shomron, as they landed to refuel in Nairobi. It was in the early hours of July 4, 1976, in Africa. Barak went forward to where the body of Jonathan Netanyahu had been lain behind the cockpit and bade farewell to his old friend. Three hostages who were killed in the cross fire lay beside him. He then went to phone his wife. The Baraks lived in the same apartment building as Yoni and his partner, Brurya Shaked. They weren’t married, and Barak feared that she wouldn’t be formally notified. It fell to Nava Barak to go downstairs and break the news to her.
As morning dawned in Jerusalem, officers knocked on Iddo Netanyahu’s door. He had been up all night, listening on the radio as news of the successful rescue operation came through. A Matkal veteran himself, he had called the unit and been told to remain at home. He called Bibi. It was still nighttime in Boston.
Colonel Yossi Langotzky, the newly appointed military attaché for intelligence affairs, was woken with the news and instructed to inform the Netanyahu family and organize their flight back to Israel for the funeral. “I called Bibi, who told me he already knew and that he was on his way to tell his parents. I said I would take care of the tickets and meet them in New York,” Langotzky later recalled.
The seven-hour drive west from Boston to Ithaca, New York, where Benzion was a professor at Cornell, was the worst experience of Bibi’s life. He took Tzvika Livne, a former Matkal officer who was also at MIT, and they took turns driving. Miki and Tzvika’s wife, Ruth, sat in the back. Halfway there, Bibi called ahead to ensure that a doctor was waiting near the house. Bibi had preceded Yoni in joining Matkal. He knew the risks and arbitrariness of death in a special operations unit. He had feared not coming out alive from the Sabena rescue four years earlier and insisted that Yoni not join the team in order to avoid risking two brothers being killed together. Although he was not overly surprised by Yoni’s death, that didn’t in any way soften the devastating blow of losing the person he had been closest to since earliest childhood. Entebbe would irrevocably change his life.
They arrived in Ithaca at eleven in the morning. His parents had already heard of the Entebbe operation on the news. Tzila was worried, Benzion oblivious. He had never fully grasped the danger of his sons’ military service. When they saw Bibi and the doctor walking toward the house from the window, Benzion finally understood.
Langotzky met them at a New York City hotel, where they waited for twelve hours before going to JFK. “I knew them from Jerusalem, where my family had lived only a few streets away in the fifties,” Langotzky later said. “My mother was a nurse at the children’s clinic and had treated the Netanyahu boys. I spoke with them for hours—with Tzila about my mother and with Benzion about his research. They were incredibly composed. No crying or screaming.” Langotzky had known Yoni well. Before leaving for Washington, he had been in charge of directing Matkal’s “core missions.” He didn’t tell the family that only three weeks earlier, one of his last decisions as head of intelligence-gathering had been to recommend that Lieutenant Colonel Netanyahu be relieved of his command. Removing the commander of Sayeret Matkal would have been an unprecedented move, and it had to be authorized at the highest levels. Before Langotzky’s recommendation was acted upon, Yoni was killed leading his men at Entebbe.
SO MUCH HAS been made of the Entebbe raid over the years that it’s hard to grasp today just how daring Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s decision was to send a small military force over 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) from Israel’s borders to rescue 106 hostages held in a hostile country. Benjamin Netanyahu later described it as “the decisive battle against international terrorism. Following it, security forces of Western countries began a series of daring counterattacks against terror.”1 For once, Netanyahu wasn’t exaggerating. Admiral Bill McRaven, the Navy SEAL officer who commanded Joint Special Operations Command ( JSOC), has written that Entebbe was “the best illustration of the theory of special operations yet presented.”2
Air France Flight 139 from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked on June 27, 1976, by four members of a Palestinian-German cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, boarding during a stopover at Athens. Six days of intelligence-gathering, operational planning, and training culminated in fifty-eight minutes on the ground at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. The captors, who had demanded the release of forty prisoners held by Israel and thirteen in other countries, were killed in the raid, along with around forty-five Ugandan soldiers who were aiding the hijackers under the orders of President Idi Amin.
Yoni had a relatively minor role in the planning. At Entebbe, he commanded one of the units. Matkal’s role in storming the old terminal where the hostages were held and taking out the hijackers was crucial. Yoni was the IDF’s only fatal casualty in the operation, and since the names of most of the officers involved remained secret for years, in his death he became the public face of the operation.
Yoni’s heroic death obscured the fact that he had been going through a deeply troubled time in the months leading up to Entebbe. He had not been the universal choice for Matkal commander. He lacked the irreverent charm of Ehud Barak, or the endearing, down-to-earth gruffness of his immediate predecessor, Giora Zorea. There were two candidates—Amiram Levin and Yoni. Many within the unit were rooting for Levin, a legendary warrior who had begun his career in Matkal. Yoni, who got the job partly because the chief of staff, Mordechai Gur, admired his intellectualism, was seen by many as an aloof stickler. Iddo remembers angrily leaving the ceremony for Yoni’s appointment on August 1, 1975, after he heard Matkal officers bad-mouthing Yoni.3
At first Yoni set even higher standards for the unit, especially on physical resilience. Like any other commander, he had his fair share of operational successes and failures. But at some point his officers began to feel Yoni’s heart wasn’t in it. In the last months of his life, officers couldn’t help noticing Yoni’s increasing absences and lack of attention during briefings.
As chief of intelligence-gathering, Langotzky was a rank above Yoni. “I can’t pinpoint where I noticed it, but in operational meetings, he just wasn’t there,” he later recounted. “He didn’t listen, was writing things to himself, detached. A couple of times I asked him to stay behind and tell me if anything was wrong. He said everything was fine. But then officers from within the unit, at different levels, came and asked to meet. They said Yoni was unfocused and losing control.”
Those who knew Yoni at the time later believed he was suffering from depression, or perhaps posttraumatic stress disorder. His situation may have been exacerbated by the years of living alone, far from his parents in the United States, as a young divorcé, incapable of forming lasting relationships with women. Despite his shining military career, at thirty Yoni still felt shiftless and without a clear direction in life. In his letters he would repeat his plans for returning to Harvard, but he never completed the degree he had started there eight years earlier.
The last letter to Brurya, which he left in their apartment five days before his death when he was back for an overnight break from an operation in Sinai, discloses something of his anguish: “I am at a critical juncture in the saga of my life and facing a deep internal crisis that has been shaking for a while the chain of my concepts.”4 Describing his feelings, he quoted the title of a musical he had seen years ago in America: “Stop the world! I want to get off!”
His admiring brother Bibi, who had only seen him briefly in the last years of his life, since that golden summer of 1973 in Boston, predicted blithely that “Yoni will be the IDF chief of staff one day.” But the elder brother had none of Bibi’s political instincts, which he would have needed to climb the greasy pole of IDF General Staff politics.
UNSURPRISINGLY, NONE OF Yoni’s shortcomings were brought up during the shiva, the seven days of mourning. Israel’s entire leadership attended the military funeral at Mount Herzl. Bibi stood between Benzion and Prime Minister Rabin while Defense Minister Peres gave the eulogy. The family sat shiva in Iddo’s small apartment in Jerusalem. As senior officers and Matkal comrades visited, Yoni’s praises were sung. Those who had been central to the planning and execution of the operation downplayed their own roles, creating the impression that Yoni’s part was much larger than it actually was.
The first stage in the mythologization of Yoni as the peerless commander of the Entebbe raid was constructed in those days, out of sincere consideration for his family. Benzion, who had never had a clear idea of what Yoni did during all those years far away, eagerly grasped for every detail. Incapable of seeing his son as a vulnerable human being, he began building the posthumous image of a warrior-philosopher and leader-in-waiting.
Moshe Arens, a Likud Knesset member and veteran Revisionist, who had met Benzion in New York back in the 1940s and would soon play a pivotal role in Bibi’s career, later recalled being surprised by Benzion’s tone at the shiva. “I expected the father to say how much he loved his son and missed him,” he said. “Instead Benzion said, ‘The Arabs don’t know yet what a loss they have inflicted on the Jews. He was the best general who could lead the Jewish people and now he’s gone.’”
As the shiva ended, Bibi and Iddo set about collecting every letter and note Yoni had ever written and interviewing those who had known him over the years. The project quickly expanded way beyond the norm for even the most conscientious of families anxious to reserve a bit of enduring glory for their sons in a country that does not lack for dead heroes. Bibi automatically became the family’s spokesman and was soon in demand to speak to visiting delegations of Jewish Diaspora leaders eager for their own vicarious basking in the Entebbe glory.
Israel devotes great resources to preserving the memory of fallen IDF soldiers. Yet no other Israeli soldier has ever been accorded anything like the praise and commemoration that Yoni Netanyahu has received. Over the decades, the Yoni project intensified as his brother Bibi became a powerful politician. Local council leaders discovered that the way to his heart was naming a street or school after his fallen brother. Even visiting statesmen from overseas have learned that adding a visit to Yoni’s grave on Mount Herzl to their itinerary is a means of gaining face-time with the prime minister.
But the Entebbe operation took place less than three years after the debacle of the Yom Kippur War, and many wanted to share in its success. The Netanyahu family’s insistence on making it all about Yoni would soon irk others who had been involved. Over the decades, an entire industry of books, movies, and research was built around Entebbe, with the Netanyahus and others sparring for their place in the front row.
The debate over the raid is still ongoing. Over two hundred men took off in the four C-130s on July 3. They included an aircrew, paratroopers, soldiers from the Golani Brigade (a renowned infantry brigade), and doctors along with the Matkal team. The operations commander on the ground was the IDF’s chief infantry officer, Brigadier General Dan Shomron, whose team had done most of the planning alongside the air force and the intelligence services. For most of the week leading up to the operation, Yoni had been busy in Sinai, while his subordinates in Sirkin had planned and trained for Matkal’s part. He joined them forty-eight hours before takeoff and until the last moment was skeptical that the government would give the green light.
Officers, including Shomron; the pilots who executed the complex logistical feat of bringing the force to Entebbe; military intelligence and Mossad operatives, who had obtained crucial details; and commanders of other units in the Entebbe force have all clashed with the Netanyahus over the years. Even within Matkal, a group of former officers coalesced around one of Yoni’s deputies, Muki Betzer, who had done most of the planning and led the storming of the terminal, in opposition to the Netanyahus’ version of events. Yoni has been accused of acting against orders by opening fire on Ugandan soldiers and exposing himself to the control tower, from which the shots that killed him were likely fired. Yoni’s loyalists, in turn, accuse Betzer of hesitating at the entrance to the terminal.
Even the most successful military operation includes its share of errors. The firefight that began as the Matkal commandos sped toward the terminal jeopardized the crucial element of surprise. Twenty-five men rushed for the entrances, abandoning the original plan. Yoni was hit then. On his orders, the storming of the terminal was completed before casualties were tended to. Whatever mistakes he made in the last minute of his life should pale beside the sheer bravery needed to enter a dark building held by an invisible enemy. If it wasn’t for the way the Netanyahu family tried to marginalize the role of others in the operation, Yoni’s missteps would probably have never been mentioned.
Iddo wrote the family’s version in his book Yoni’s Last Battle, which differs from the IDF’s official account of the operation on key points. Iddo indicated that Yoni was actually killed by the German commander of the hijackers, rather than by a Ugandan soldier, suggesting to some that the family felt that being felled by an “inferior” African soldier was somehow a lesser way to die. Even some people closest to the family despaired. “When I became defense minister, Bibi spoke to me about it,” said Moshe Arens. “He was convinced Dan Shomron and others were trying to steal Yoni’s glory. It’s paranoid. Shomron wasn’t like that.”
The next stage was commissioning a biography of Yoni—a tall order for a subject who had died at the age of thirty, made much more difficult by the family’s aspirations to produce a weighty tome. The British publisher George Weidenfeld, an ardent Zionist, set about finding a suitable foreign writer. The choice fell on Max Hastings, a British war correspondent who was beginning to make a name for himself as an author of military histories. Twenty years later, in his memoirs, Hastings would describe the association with the Netanyahus as “one of the sorriest episodes of my own career.”5
Hastings was granted, on orders of the defense minister, unprecedented access for a journalist, let alone a non-Israeli, to Yoni’s former units, including Matkal and its officers. He spent time with Benzion, who impressed upon him “that his son had been both a soldier and an intellectual, an important thinker as well as a man of action.” Having interviewed dozens of Yoni’s contemporaries, Hastings reached the conclusion that Yoni was a “troubled young man of moderate intelligence, striving to come to terms with intellectual concepts beyond his grasp,” who had been “actively disliked by more than a few of his men.”6
The Netanyahus hated his manuscript. To make matters worse, Weidenfeld had given the Israeli government copy-approval as well. Hastings was not to even mention the existence of Sayeret Matkal. After an angry exchange of letters, he was forced to agree to a massively bowdlerized version of his manuscript, or else lose the money he had been promised.
Hastings never visited Israel again and became a fierce critic of its policies. He finally got his revenge on the Netanyahus in his memoirs over two decades later. He dedicated a chapter to his months with the family, describing Benzion mercilessly as a dogmatic and “emotional old man” who had helped to destroy his eldest son’s life with unrealistic expectations. Bibi, he wrote, was a slick, humorless “marketing man.” One passage included damning quotes from his conversations with Bibi:
“In the next war, if we do it right we’ll have a chance to get all the Arabs out,” he said. “We can clear the West Bank, sort out Jerusalem.” He joked about the Golani Brigade, the Israeli infantry force in which so many men were North African or Yemenite Jews. “They’re okay as long as they’re led by white officers.” He grinned.7
Support for the ethnic cleansing of Arabs—and what would have been worse for many Israelis, overt racism toward Mizrahi Jews and the IDF’s oldest brigade—could have been deeply damaging for a mainstream Israeli politician. However, by the time Hastings’s memoirs came out in 2000, Netanyahu was already an ex–prime minister, and so much mud had already been slung at him that the quotes, which Netanyahu, of course, denied ever saying, barely caused a stir.
OVER THE YEARS, the argument has continued to rage over Yoni Netanyahu’s record, with all manner of personal and political implications. Former officers who sided with the Shomron and Betzer camps found themselves ostracized from events by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and formal invitation lists were limited to those who praised Yoni. Meanwhile, journalists who hoped to keep an open channel to Netanyahu have been careful to dismiss the criticism of Yoni.
In 1994, a critical profile of Yoni was published in the newspaper Maariv.8 For the first time, the details of Yoni’s last months in command of Matkal and his impending removal from command were revealed in public. A group of former Matkal officers wrote Maariv an open letter praising Yoni. Another group of officers, still in uniform and therefore prohibited from writing openly, endorsed the letter. Four years later, under Prime Minister Netanyahu, one of them, Shaul Mofaz, was appointed IDF chief of staff. Thirteen years later, during Netanyahu’s second term, another, Tamir Pardo, was appointed chief of Mossad. Notably, for some, while both men were suitable candidates, both had volunteered to posthumously support Yoni and were chosen by Bibi over a more likely candidate.
THE MYTH OF Yoni would go on to serve as a political platform for Yoni’s brother. But Bibi wasn’t the first to use Yoni for his political ends. That would be Shimon Peres.
Rabin and Peres were both deeply involved in the plans to send the men to Entebbe, but the final decision and ultimate responsibility were the prime minister’s. Rabin even prepared a letter of resignation should the operation end in disaster. With the hostages back safely in Israel, a rancorous battle over the credit broke out between the two men that continued for years. In conversations with friendly journalists, Peres pushed the narrative whereby he had argued for the operation, while Rabin was skeptical. Rabin, in retaliation, omitted Peres’s name from official accounts of the operation, and in his memoirs branded Peres a “tireless underminer,” an epithet that would stick for decades.
The Rabin-Peres rivalry would extend to the silver screen. Three full-length movies were made on the Entebbe operation, and in the Oscar-nominated version, produced by Israeli director Menachem Golan, Rabin and Peres even had cameos. The film featured the original Hercules aircraft that flew to Entebbe. Both politicians subjected Golan to intense pressure to ensure they got sufficient screen-time.
Peres had one asset in his grab for glory. He had befriended the Netanyahus, eulogizing Yoni at the funeral and subsequently presenting himself as an old friend of the family, an outright lie. In interviews, Peres told of how he had been extensively briefed by Yoni before the operation, and of how it was Yoni who had assured him that the hostage rescue could be pulled off. Peres pushed for the posthumous renaming of Operation Thunderbolt as Operation Yonatan.
In the eulogy, Peres said, “I saw him a few nights before [the operation], at the head of his men.” In 1978, he published a book containing seven portraits of men he had worked with, beginning with his mentor David Ben-Gurion and ending with Yoni. He pretended to know the Netanyahu family well, writing that “his grandfather, Willikovsky, authored an important book on biblical research,”9 getting not only Nathan Mileikowsky’s name but also his profession wrong. Of Yoni he wrote that his appointment as Matkal commander had been “natural and unchallenged,” and added detailed descriptions of his conversations with Yoni before the operation.
The problem was that these briefings had never taken place. Defense Minister Peres had been briefed by Major Betzer. It was Betzer who had been in charge of the planning and training for Matkal in the Entebbe mission, while Yoni had been in Sinai. Peres’s version enraged Matkal’s officers; years later, he wrote a letter apologizing to Betzer, though he never set the public record straight. Peres needed the myth of Yoni and their invented meetings before Entebbe to put himself at the center of the operation, on level with Rabin.
There was no way Peres could have foreseen then that in constructing the Yoni myth, he was helping to build the political platform that would bring Yoni’s brother to power. Bibi would cause Peres his most painful political defeat, worse than any inflicted on him by Rabin.
EVEN WITH RABIN and Peres dead, the bitter dispute continues. Amiram Levin, Bibi’s first commander, who replaced Yoni in 1976 as Matkal commander, launched a failed bid for the Labor Party leadership in 2017 and gave a blunt, no-holds-barred interview to Israel’s Channel 10 describing how many Matkal veterans see the Netanyahus: “You don’t question a legendary warrior’s bravery. For that there’s no forgiveness. I expect Bibi and his brother Iddo who were in the unit [Matkal] to understand that. It’s not done, to build Yoni’s glory at the expense of Muki’s bravery. With us, in the unit, with warriors and commanders, it doesn’t pass.”10
Benzion and Tzila, Bibi and Iddo, remained convinced that there were those intent on stealing Yoni’s glory and denying his greatness. On his final briefing to the Matkal team, before boarding the Hercules on July 3, Yoni had said, “We cannot compromise with terrorists.” As decades passed and successive Israeli prime ministers, including Netanyahu, agreed to release thousands of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for captured Israeli soldiers, his sacrifice began to seem futile.
In 1997, in a rare interview with the Washington Post a year after her second son was elected prime minister, Tzila admitted she was angry. “What for? Thousands of prisoners are released today. For that Yoni had to be killed! It wasn’t worth it.”11