Israel was also apparently lucky that the Ugandan reinforcements didn’t rush to the airport to confront its rescue team. Why didn’t they?
It seems the Ugandan military was paralyzed because ever since Idi Amin became president of Uganda, his chief fear was a military coup. So when he heard about the shooting at the airport, he thought elements of his armed forces had turned on him and he left the presidential palace and hid in the gardener’s house. So he’s completely out of the game.
And the senior commanders who were responsible for security at the airport also disappeared or went into hiding when they heard all this firing going on because they thought it was military forces turning on their officers. So there’s no one really to coordinate a proper response.
You write interestingly that one of the outcomes of Israel’s raid on Entebbe was a new policy among Western powers not to negotiate with terrorists.
Yes, as a broad policy, that is exactly what happened. The UK, the U.S., and a lot of other western countries moved to a position where if there’s a terrorist situation and hostages are being held, they first look for a military solution. And of course you have many examples of that – the German GSG-9 rescuing its hostages at Mogadishu Airport in 1977; the Americans attempting to do the same with its hostages in Tehran in 1980; and the British rescuing hostages at the Iranian embassy in London in 1980.
Hijackings also apparently stopped.
Yes, pretty much. I mean you get Mogadishu the following year, but given that this is a time when you were having scores of hijackings every year, it reduces to a trickle. So this scourge of the late ‘60s up until the mid-1970s is pretty much put to bed by Entebbe.
In the book you also make the interesting observation that if not for the raid on Entebbe, Benjamin Netanyahu might not be prime minister of Israel today.
That’s correct. Benjamin Netanyahu was brought up in America and, given that he trained to be a management consultant, there was every likelihood that he was going to continue his career in the U.S. Overnight, though, his brother Yoni became a national hero since he was the only Israeli soldier to die at Entebbe and he was the leader of this famed special forces group, Sayeret Matkal.
So overnight the Netanyahu family went from being completely invisible in Israeli politics to being the most famous family. And it’s pretty clear that Benjamin Netanyahu launched his political career off the back of his family’s fame and has been using Entebbe ever since as a way of building up his strongman credentials.
Several films were made in the aftermath of the rescue mission. Which do you think is the most historically accurate?
Probably the Israeli film [“Operation Thunderbolt,” known in Israel as “Mivtsa Yonatan” or “Operation Jonathan”]. Of course every feature film is going to take a few liberties, but the Israeli film is the closest to the truth – probably because they had the best access to the real version of events given that a lot of the hostages and the rescuers and politicians were all Israel-based.
Of course the other factor is that ever since Entebbe the Israeli government has been very pleased and determined to publicize the sequence of events since it sends a pretty strong message to Israel’s enemies, which is “Don’t mess with us; if you take hostages anywhere in the world, we will come and get them.”
That’s a pretty powerful message.