What Really Happened at Entebbe?

The Israeli special-forces raid to rescue the passengers at Uganda’s Entebbe airport, after their flight had been hijacked by German and Palestinian terrorists, has gone down in history as one of the IDF’s most legendary operations. But unlike nearly every mission by Israel’s elite military units, there was no formal debriefing afterwards where participants discussed what could be learned from the experience. Thus the crucial question of what might have been done differently to have prevented to sole Israeli fatality—the death of the raid’s leader Yonatan Netanyahu (the brother of the future prime minister)—was left unresolved. A new book includes the testimonies of 33 veterans who took part in the mission, revealing new much new information. Mitch Ginsburg, who translated the book into English, describes what he learned:

There was a span of per­haps no longer than 60 sec­onds in which most of the oper­a­tion was decid­ed. The crux could almost be caught in a paint­ing, so brief and con­densed were the events. It was then that the force was stalled behind [Major Muki] Betser, then that Netanyahu was shot, then that a sin­gle sol­dier, Staff Sergeant Amir Ofer, sprint­ed alone towards the [airport] doors, charg­ing through a sev­en­teen-bul­let blast of glass-shattering auto­mat­ic fire. And then that his com­man­der, Lieutenant Amnon Peled, sens­ing the imme­di­ate per­il to his sol­dier, surged ahead, and killed the two Ger­man ter­ror­ists by the door just as they were in the act of swiveling their rifles toward Ofer’s back. For sev­er­al long sec­onds, Ofer and Peled were the only sol­diers in the room—a 25-meter-wide hall, filled with over 100 hostages and sev­er­al armed terrorists.

This is the mar­gin of error. It is so very slim. And this book, written by former sol­diers who today are farm­ers and builders and high-tech entrepreneurs, is unruly at times, lay­er­ing tes­ti­mo­ny over tes­ti­mo­ny. But in my opin­ion, it ulti­mate­ly tri­umphs in detail­ing the way tragedy and ela­tion can coin­cide, the way vic­to­ry is often just a hair’s breadth from defeat, and the way his­tor­i­cal fact is illu­mi­nat­ed, rather than veiled, by myr­i­ad points of view.

Read more at Jewish Book Council

More about: Entebbe, IDF, Uganda

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF