Nadene Goldfoot
“Well planned and flash executed impetuous operation of the Antebbe [sic] Airport in Uganda, by the brave Israeli commandos, saved the lives of a number of defenseless people who had been trapped in the grab of Air route bandits, aimed at persuing [sic] their defiled and unhuman goals and ended the adventure, alerting International Terrorism to think about the grievous consequences of their unwise and cruel attempts.”“Kindly convey my sincere greetings and admiration for successful accomplishmont [sic] of this valuable military and intelligence operation along with sympathies and condolences for the loss and martyrdom of the her” – here the letter is severed, perhaps cutting the word heroic – “unit commander dispatched to the scene to your respective chief.”was a letter from the Mossad station chief in Tehran from the desk of the Supreme Commander’s Staff of the Imperial Iranian Armed Forces praising the mission and extending condolences for “the loss and martyrdom” of Lt. Col. Yoni Netanyahu, the elder brother of Israel’s current prime minister.
In a small ceremony, the Netanyahu family marked 44 years on June 28, 2020 since March 13, 1946 when Lt.-Col. Yonatan (Yoni) Netanyahu fell [on the 6th of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, i.e July 4, 1976, ] while leading the soldiers of the IDF General Staff Reconnaissance Unit during Operation Yonatan to free the hostages in Entebbe, Uganda. Being the leader of his platoon, he was the 1st and only to be picked off.
Although born in New York in 1946, Netanyahu was raised from age two on in Israel, and his close friends remember him as “Yoni,” a nickname derived from the Hebrew equivalent of his first name.
In the early 1960s Netanyahu returned to the United States as his Polish-born father, a Judaic studies scholar who now heads Cornell’s department of Semitic languages and literature, took a teaching position at Dropsie College in Philadelphia. But after graduating from a high school outside the city in 1964, Netanyahu returned to Israel and entered the Israeli armed forces as a paratrooper.
Yoni Netanyahu was only a flash in Harvard’s pan, an undergraduate for a year and a summer, a hard working student living off campus, remembered by only a handful of people in Cambridge. But for those few, Netanyahu – the sole Israeli commando to die in the July 4 assault on the airport in Entebbe, Uganda – was a man worthy of profound admiration, an extremely intelligent person who, in the words of his one-time adviser, had a “truly unique sense of dedication that you just don’t find in people very often, regardless of their age.”
Also dying was three hostages, all of the Revolutionary Cells members, all of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine members, and dozens of Ugandan soldiers). The commonly accepted version of his death is that Netanyahu fired on Ugandan soldiers, and was shot in response by an African from the airport's control tower. The family refused to accept this verdict, and insisted instead that he was killed by the German commanding the hijackers. Netanyahu was shot outside the building being stormed, and would soon die in the arms of Efraim Sneh, commander of the mission's medical unit. The operation itself was a success, and was renamed as Mivtsa Yonatan ("Operation Jonathan" in English) in his honor.
Netanyahu was buried in Jerusalem's Military Cemetery at Mount Herzl on July 6 following a military funeral attended by enormous crowds and top-ranking officials. Shimon Peres, then Defense Minister, said during the eulogy that "a bullet had torn the young heart of one of Israel's finest sons, one of its most courageous warriors, one of its most promising commanders – the magnificent Yonatan Netanyahu."
There are memorial trees that have been planted in his honor in front of his graduating high school, Cheltenham High School, and a memorial plaque is located in the lobby.
Netanyahu married his long-time girlfriend Tirza ("Tuti") on August 17, 1967. Shortly after their wedding, they flew to the U.S., where Yoni enrolled at Harvard University. He took classes in philosophy and mathematics, excelling in both, and was on the Dean's List at the end of his first year. However, feeling restless at being away from Israel, especially with Israel skirmishing against Egypt during the War of Attrition, Yoni transferred to Jerusalem's Hebrew University in 1968. In early 1969, he left his studies and returned to the army. His father described those decisions, saying "He was dreaming of resuming his studies and planned to do so time and again. Yet he always conditioned his return to Harvard on the relaxation of the military tensions."
In 1972, he and Tuti were divorced. Netanyahu was living with his girlfriend of two years, Bruria, at the time of his death.
Once at Harvard, Netanyahu devoted most of his energy to studying, “getting his marriage and economics off the ground,” and “brooding” about the war, Entis says. There was no room left for extra-curricular activities, although Netanyahu ran every night and often took weekend trips in Vermont and New Hampshire.
BUT WHAT sticks in everyone’s mind is Netanyahu’s overwhelming concern for Israel. Repeatedly, when he dropped in to chat with Malin, Netanyahu would say, “I just shouldn’t be here. This is a luxury. I should be at home. I should be defending my country.” Thus Malin was not surprised in the spring of 1968 when Netanyahu dropped in to announce his plans to return, explaining that “Harvard is a wonderful place to be, but I just can’t justify being here…”
That fall, Netanyahu enrolled at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but soon he was back in the army. He later wrote a friend in Cambridge, “Conditions in Israel at the time, however, were such to make the request for added military service, which was then addressed to former officers, too difficult to ignore.
But Netanyahu had not decided to become an Israeli career officer. To the contrary, according to one of his closest friends at Harvard, Elliot Z. Entis ’67, Netanyahu wanted very much to be a physicist before he came to Harvard… Netanyahu applied here, perhaps because of the presence of Entis, whom he had befriended at camp in New Hampshire during high school. Harvard accepted him enthusiastically; Kaufmann, who worked as an assistant director of admissions in 1967, describes Netanyahu as an “incredibly strong” candidate with a similarly impressive record and set of recommendations.
Netanyahu’s smooth transition from solider to academic was destroyed by the June 1967 Six Day War, an experience that “changed Yoni incredibly,” Entis says... Seeing many of his friends die set off a process of inner turmoil that ultimately would lead Netanyahu – who was himself seriously wounded in the left elbow during the fighting – to leave Harvard, to become a career officer, to “resolve that what he believed in he would have to live by,” as Entis says.
Netanyahu’s Harvard friends, like Seamus P. Malin ’62, his adviser in 1967-68 and the current director of financial aid, are wary that their eulogies be mistaken for run-of-the-mill posthumous praise, and they offer eerily similar descriptions of Netanyahu’s extraordinary qualities.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, "The pain over Yoni's passing has only grown with the years and it is difficult to find comfort."Author Herman Wouk wrote that Netanyahu was already a legend in Israel even before his death at the age of 30. Wouk wrote: He was a taciturn philosopher-soldier of terrific endurance, a hard-fibered, charismatic young leader, a magnificent fighting man. On the Golan Heights, in the Yom Kippur War, the unit he led was part of the force that held back a sea of Soviet tanks manned by Syrians, in a celebrated stand; and after Entebbe, "Yoni" became in Israel almost a symbol of the nation itself. Today his name is spoken there with somber reverence.
Resource:
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/event_yoni_netanyahu280620
https://www.jpost.com/features/in-thespotlight/yonatan-netanyahus-odyssey-from-harvard-to-entebbe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonatan_Netanyahu
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