Operation Yonatan

How a July 4 mission redefined counterterrorism forever

On July 4, 1976, as Americans celebrated the 200th anniversary of their independence, an elite Israeli commando unit launched one of the most daring rescue missions in modern history. Days before, two Palestinian and two German terrorists hijacked an Air France airliner en route from Tel Aviv to Paris and diverted the plane to Entebbe airport in Uganda, where the psychopathic dictator Idi Amin lay waiting.

The hijackers said they wanted $5 million and the release of 53 Palestinian and pro-Palestinian terrorists or they were going to start killing hostages. Notable among those listed was Japanese communist Okamoto Kozo, who four years earlier had massacred 26 people at Lod Airport, now Ben-Gurion. Okamoto later said he was trying to start a communist revolution, but admitted he didn’t really know what that meant. When asked about life after the revolution, he said, “We really do not know what it will be like.”

In other words, he killed 26 people to achieve an outcome that he himself could not describe. The consequences of his actions were simply unimportant to him. He couldn’t even say what they might be. Nor did he seem particularly bothered by the thought. When giving the answer above, the interviewer noted, he was smiling. That’s because what mattered to Okamoto and his fellow communists, the Palestinian and German terrorists who later demanded his release, was not some cerebral commitment to “expropriating the expropriators” or anything of the kind.

Yes, these were ostensibly true believers. The two Palestinians belonged to the Marxist-Leninist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations, while the two Germans belonged to the communist anti-Zionist group Revolutionäre Zellen, which had the good sense to collapse amid infighting once its “anti-Zionism” was exposed as antisemitism after the media revealed that when the hijackers released 148 of their 260 hostages on July 1, they had first divided the hostages not by Israeli citizenship but by Jewish blood, keeping all the Jews.

Yet despite their membership to such groups, these terrorists didn’t seem to give much thought to the societal consequences of the revolution for which they claimed to fight. What they actually cared about was being a revolutionary rather than putting in the deliberative work necessary to achieve their revolutionary goals. You see the same problem with the fifth-wave feminist, BLM, and trans movements today, though Okamoto himself was probably also half-mad. During his time in prison, he tried to covert to Judaism and attempted to circumcise himself using nail clippers.

The hijackers took their hostages on June 27. They landed in Uganda, where they knew the Soviet-allied Amin would protect them, made their formal demands the following day, and set a deadline of July 1. When the deadline came and went, they released the non-Jewish hostages and gave Israel an extended deadline of July 4, threatening to kill the remaining hostages if Israel did not comply. Israel continued to negotiate in order to keep the hostages alive and buy more time, but soon enough, the eleventh hour was upon them.

On the night of July 4, just before the deadline expired, Israel flew a team of commandos 2,500 miles under radar to Entebbe. In just 90 minutes, they stormed the terminal, killed all the terrorists, and rescued 102 hostages. It was a stunning achievement. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Entebbe raid fundamentally reshaped counterterrorism doctrine around the world.

That’s because it proved that long-range, high-risk rescue missions were feasible. Before Entebbe, the conventional wisdom held that negotiation or ransom was the only realistic option for long-distance hostage situations. The Entebbe raid shattered that assumption and stunned the world, something Israel has been getting back into the habit of recently thanks to exploding pagers in Lebanon and drone factories in Iran. Simply put, Israel projected force more than 2,500 miles away, on foreign soil, at night, in hostile territory — and succeeded. Only three hostage died in the raid.

Additionally, the raid elevated the role of elite special forces such as Israel’s Sayeret Matkal, which carried it out. Many countries subsequently accelerated the development of their own special forces. One year after the raid, the United States founded Delta Force, the UK began to expand its SAS more model globally, and Germany more deeply integrated its GSG 9 tactical unit, which was itself was initially created in response to the 1972 Munich massacre, also by Palestinian terrorists.

But despite the unprecedented success of Operation Thunderbolt, the mission came at a great cost. Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu, the unit’s commanding officer and the older brother of Israel’s future prime minister, as well as a native New Yorker whose father taught history at Cornell, was killed in action. In Israel, he was eulogized as a national hero and the mission was retroactively renamed Operation Yonatan.

The United States, under President Ford, praised Israel. Some African nations criticized the raid, but others were quietly relieved by Amin’s long-overdue humiliation. Amin, however, was furious and began seeking revenge.

At the nearby Mulago Hospital, 74-year-old Israeli passenger Doris “Dora” Bloch, Amin’s Hebrew interpreter for the hostages, was recovering. Bloch had become ill on the flight and was rushed to Mulago upon landing. The daughter of Joseph Feinberg, one of the founders of the Israeli city of Rishon LeZion in 1882, young Dora moved to Egypt after her father’s death where she was raised by an uncle and proved to be a brilliant child, quickly becoming fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, German, Italian, and English. She later moved to Jerusalem, married an Englishman, had three sons, and by the time of the hijacking, was a widowed grandmother living in Tel Aviv.

On July 5, Peter Chandley, second secretary of the British High Commission in Kampala, visited Bloch, who said she had been treated well but that she did not particularly care for the hospital food. Chuckling to himself, Chandley and his wife agreed to go out and fetch Bloch something to eat.

But when they returned, they were suddenly denied entry. It turns out, while they were gone, four men including Farouk Minawa, head of the Ugandan secret police, and Nasur Ondoga, Amin’s chief of protocol, had stormed the hospital, murdered the officer guarding Bloch, and then dragged her from her hospital bed where, according to later reports, “Farouk made a slashing motion across his throat as she was flung to the floor … driven away, sobbing, to a nearby forest, where she was shot in the back.” Her body was later found half-burned in a field.

It’s a heartbreaking yet incredible story. Though it exposes the darkest side of human nature, it’s also an action-packed adventure in which a native New Yorker gave his life saving innocent people from communist terrorists in a display of badassery so unprecedented that it revolutionized an entire field of military thought. What’s more, those commandos did it all flying under the radar of one of the most psychopathic, evil dictators in human history. I share this story not because it makes interesting July 4 reading, but because I think it conveys a deeper message.

Now, every Fourth of July weekend, Americans gather to celebrate an idea. We celebrate the idea that a free people can govern themselves without kings, lords, or inherited privilege. That a society can be bound not by blood or faith, but by a shared commitment to liberty and justice. That out of many, we can become one. It’s easy to forget how radical that idea was. And how unfinished it remains.

An American by birth, an Israeli by duty, and the hero at the heart of our tale, Yonatan Netanyahu gave his life that July 4 in Entebbe not just for his country, but for that same idea, the idea that innocent lives matter more than ideology and that liberty is so precious that it’s worth dying to ensure other people can have it. The hijackers saw revolution as a kind of existential theater, a symbolic assertion of their identity and grievance stamped in other people’s blood. Their violence was not instrumental but expressive. And in this, they prefigured the politics of spectacle that have come to dominate much of our contemporary moral landscape. Theirs was not a fight for justice, but a performance of victimhood weaponized into savagery.

Netanyahu, by contrast, embodied a dying but sacred ideal. Namely, that force, rightly used, can serve freedom. In sacrificing his life for others, he reaffirmed a tradition of liberal democracy that insists human dignity is not a means to an end, but the end itself. That is the paradox and the promise of July 4. It is a celebration not of perfection, but of a creed that obligates struggle, one that reminds us true liberty is not handed down by history but often secured by those who will not live to enjoy it.

In any event, every good July 4 celebration needs a few key things. An American flag, a backyard cookout, a fireworks display. In my home, these basics are often accompanied by a fine domestic cigar, a remarkable glass of bourbon, and a good toast to a great American who fought for liberty. This year, I raise my glass to Yoni.