Fifty Years Ago – 4 July 1976 – Memories
Fifty years ago, I was working (as a rabbinic student) on the programming staff of the Reform Jewish movement’s summer Camp Swig in Saratoga, California. As I recall, all of us were planning to celebrate with our campers the 200th anniversary of the United States on 4 July. We had heard, however, about what had happened a week before on 27 June and discussed how to teach our campers about what was taking place.
An Air France Airbus with 248 passengers was hijacked by members of the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to Entebbe, Uganda, that was governed at the time by the dictator Idi Amin. The entire awful story of that hijacking and the extraordinary Israeli response and rescue can be read here – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entebbe_raid
The plane departed from Tel Aviv and carried 246 mainly Jewish and Israeli passengers with a crew of 12. The plane flew to Athens, Greece, and picked up an additional 58 passengers, including the four PFLP hijackers and two German revolutionaries. The flight was on its way to Paris, but soon after take-off, it was diverted to Benghazi, Libya and then to Entebbe, Uganda where it was greeted happily and warmly by Idi Amin who had, in his earlier years, trained in Israel.
As noted in the resource above, the hijackers “demanded the release of 53 Palestinian and pro-Palestinian [terrorists], 40 of whom were prisoners in Israel. They threatened that if these demands were not met, they would begin to kill all the hostages beginning on 1 July 1976.”
The hijackers did a “selection” of the Israelis and Jews from everyone else, reminiscent of what the Nazis did in the death camps. The account reads as follows:
“On 30 June, the hijackers released 48 hostages. The released were picked from among the non-Israeli group – mainly elderly and sick passengers and mothers with children. Forty-seven of them were flown by a chartered Air France [jet] out of Entebbe to Paris, and one passenger was treated in hospital for a day. On 1 July, after the Israeli government had conveyed its agreement to negotiations, the hostage-takers extended their deadline to noon on 4 July and released another group of 100 non-Israeli captives who again were flown to Paris a few hours later. Among the 106 hostages staying behind with their captors at the Entebbe airport were the 12 members of the Air France crew who refused to leave, about ten young French passengers, and the Israeli group of some 84 people.”
What the Israeli government secretly ordered, however, under the command of then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on 3 July was what was a very risky but ultimately a successful rescue attempt of all but one of the hostages (an elderly Jewish woman) under the nose of Amin and the terrorists that resulted in only one Israeli combat death, the commander of the rescue team, Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of the current Prime Minister. Israelis and the Jewish world were exultant when it was reported that the plane carrying the remaining hostages lifted off and was on its way out of Entebbe.
That event eclipsed for us at Camp Swig the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the United States, but we celebrated both events. The Entebbe rescue remains one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of the State of Israel.
So much has changed during these past 50 years in Israel, the Jewish world, for the Palestinians, and the United States. To list here those changes would take volumes, and indeed, volumes have been written and are still being written. However, on that 200th anniversary of the United States (4 July 1976), my memories of what Israel did to save Israelis and Jews remain uppermost in my heart, mind and pride.