Photo: GPO/Wikimedia Commons
“I Flew to Entebbe as an Israeli and Returned as a Jew”
Some 100 Israeli soldiers landed in Entebbe on the morning of July 4th 1976 to rescue the Israeli hostages held there. Among them was R, a young commander whose identity is protected for security reasons. Rabbi Aron White spoke with R about his experiences, and how his reflections on that remarkable day have matured over time.
Before we talk about Entebbe itself, can you tell me a little about your background and how you ended up in Sayeret Matkal?
I’m 73 years old today, and I was born and raised on a kibbutz, where I’ve spent virtually my entire life. Back then, the kibbutz was completely communal – there were shared dining halls, communal laundries, and children slept in children’s houses rather than with their parents – so the people I grew up with became, in many ways, more like siblings than friends. That environment shaped how I understood responsibility, collective identity, and service to the country.
Joining the army was simply what everyone around me did. In the kibbutz movement there was an almost unquestioned assumption that you gave as much as you could to the state, but I wasn’t some exceptionally driven teenager dreaming about elite military service. In fact, I began pilot training and didn’t continue, and then, almost by coincidence, someone directed me toward Sayeret Matkal, which ultimately changed the course of my life.
At the time, the unit didn’t possess the mythological status it has today. It was extraordinarily secretive, to the point where you couldn’t tell people where you served, what you did, or where you had been. Friends would return home on weekends sharing stories from their military service while we sat quietly, unable to say anything at all. Although at the time that silence simply felt normal, I understand now that it also created a certain emotional distance from the outside world.
What kind of operations was the unit focused on before Entebbe?
The unit essentially operated along two parallel tracks. The first involved covert operations tied directly to Israeli security, where success meant remaining invisible; in that world, if gunfire erupted, it usually meant something had already gone wrong. That way of thinking was almost the inverse of conventional military logic, where combat itself is often considered proof that soldiers are engaging the enemy.
The second mission evolved during the 1970s as hijackings and hostage situations became increasingly common around the world and especially connected to Israel. The country was confronting attacks constantly – from the children’s home in Misgav Am to the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv – and the unit gradually became responsible not only for responding to those crises, but also for inventing the operational doctrine for dealing with them. There wasn’t any established handbook or accumulated institutional knowledge. Every incident required improvisation, adaptation, and rapid planning, because one week you were preparing for a school siege, the next for a hotel takeover, and the next for an airplane hijacking. Entebbe emerged directly from that reality.
When the Air France plane was hijacked in June 1976, did you immediately understand that your unit would be involved?
Not at all, because in the first days nobody truly understood where events were heading. The plane was hijacked in Athens, then flown to Libya, and eventually to Uganda, but from Israel’s perspective there was still enormous uncertainty about whether this would become a military matter at all.
At the time, I was already serving as the operations officer of the unit under Yoni Netanyahu, but despite the hijacking we actually continued with other operations in Sinai because there was still no clear indication that Israel intended to intervene militarily. We travelled to Sinai to do what we needed to, and as intelligence slowly began arriving from Entebbe, however, discussions intensified throughout the military establishment. Officers everywhere were trying to imagine possible responses, most of which turned out to be unrealistic or impossible, until eventually, by Thursday evening, Dan Shomron informed us that our unit would likely lead the rescue mission. The timing of the operation was based on the deadline set by the terrorists, and at that point we had less than 48 hours to prepare for an operation unlike anything Israel had ever attempted before.
That is actually jaw-dropping. What did it feel like at the time, knowing you had only two days to prepare?
Honestly, we functioned almost automatically, because there simply wasn’t time to fully absorb the magnitude of what was being asked of us. People today often imagine Entebbe as a flawlessly engineered operation planned in meticulous detail, but the truth is much more complicated. Looking back, I think the operation’s success itself obscures just how extraordinary, and even dangerous, the entire undertaking actually was.
We were attempting to plan a hostage rescue mission 4,000 kilometers from Israel in less than two days, and from a purely professional military perspective that is almost unimaginable. I vividly remember a meeting on Shabbat morning with Yoni Netanyahu, Shaul Mofaz, Muki Betser, and the other officers, during which we asked ourselves a very direct question: were we truly prepared for an operation of this scale?
The answer had three parts. The honest answer was no – not in the sense that we refused to go, but in the sense that we were nowhere near the level of preparation we believed such a mission required. There simply wasn’t enough time to conduct the kind of planning we were accustomed to – contingencies, escape routes, required levels of intelligence and reconnaissance and more. Secondly, we also believed that no Israeli government would realistically approve such a mission because it seemed too extreme, too dangerous, and too improbable to authorize. But then we reached a third conclusion, which was perhaps the most important one of all: if the government did decide to launch the operation, then we were unquestionably the best force available to carry it out. That was the mindset with which we boarded the planes.
Did anyone oppose going?
No, there was no refusal and no resistance based on fear. The discussion was entirely professional. We were used to preparing difficult operations over the course of months, not days, and suddenly we were expected to execute an operation halfway across the world with barely any preparation time at all. Over the years I’ve said something that sometimes makes people uncomfortable: if the operation had failed, history would likely judge those preparations very differently. Success has a way of making everything appear inevitable and brilliantly planned, but at the time many aspects remained uncertain, improvised, and dangerously unresolved.
You were on the first Hercules plane that landed in Entebbe. What do you remember from the flight?
The flight itself was physically and emotionally exhausting. People tend to imagine dramatic music and heroic anticipation, but the reality was hours of tension, turbulence, heat, silence, and fatigue. We flew under radio silence in Hercules aircraft through extremely difficult conditions, sitting on the floor surrounded by equipment and weapons rather than comfortably in seats. There was no sense of glamour about it.
In my view, the true heroes of Entebbe were the pilots, because what they accomplished was extraordinary beyond words. Flying four Hercules aircraft in formation, under complete radio silence, through storms and over enormous distances before landing at a hostile airport in the middle of the night required astonishing skill and discipline. They didn’t even know if there would be any lighting for them when they would be landing these large planes.
Throughout the flight, my mind was consumed by operational concerns. As operations officer, I kept replaying every detail in my head: had I overlooked something, forgotten intelligence, failed to prepare one of the teams properly? At the same time, I also commanded one of the assault teams myself, so mentally I was balancing strategic responsibility with the immediate task of preparing my men for combat.
What was the feeling when the planes landed in Uganda?
The first thing I remember, strangely enough, was the silence. After nine exhausting hours inside the aircraft, the ramp opened and suddenly we stepped into this quiet tropical night filled with warm air, palm trees, and open green fields. For a brief moment it didn’t even feel like a battlefield.
But reality returned almost immediately. We drove toward the terminal in the black Mercedes and accompanying Land Rovers designed to resemble Idi Amin’s convoy, while my team’s role was to secure the outside perimeter as the main assault force entered the building.
One moment remains especially vivid in my memory: the encounter with two Ugandan soldiers standing at a checkpoint near the terminal. There was hesitation about whether to shoot immediately or attempt to preserve the element of surprise, but eventually gunfire erupted. At that exact moment, I genuinely believed the operation might collapse, because in hostage rescue missions surprise is everything. Once loud gunfire begins, you fear the terrorists will start killing hostages before you can reach them.
But somehow the operation continued moving forward.
When did you first feel the mission had succeeded?
During combat you don’t really think in those terms because your entire consciousness narrows into movement, timing, commands, and survival. The emotional moment came later, when the hostages finally began leaving the terminal. They were terrified and confused, and many of them didn’t fully understand what was happening. We attempted to load them onto jeeps to bring them back to the aircraft. We had planned how many people would be in each vehicle, but in the chaos the hostages climbed onto every available vehicle, desperate not to be left behind.
And then I experienced something I’ve never forgotten.
I suddenly heard a voice inside me saying: “R, you are saving Jews.”
I’m the son of Holocaust survivors. From my father’s family in Poland, only his mother survived, while from my mother’s family almost nobody remained alive. In that moment, standing in Uganda thousands of kilometers from Israel, I understood something emotionally that I had never fully understood before: nobody came to save the Jews in Europe, but now we had come to save Jews.
That realization struck me with enormous force. You saw Israeli soldiers escorting Jewish hostages through the darkness toward Israeli planes while wounded people, dead people, and terrified families moved together under armed Jewish protection. The scene felt almost biblical to me, like a modern version of the Exodus unfolding in front of my eyes. That image never left me.
Did you fully process the significance of Entebbe when you returned to Israel?
No, not at all. While the hostages landed in Lod airport to the media fanfare, we landed back in Tel Nof military airport. We landed back in Israel on Sunday, had 24 hours off on Monday, attended Yoni Netanyahu’s funeral on Tuesday, and on Wednesday resumed normal operational activity. I was only 23 years old, and I came from a world where emotions weren’t discussed openly, especially in families shaped by the Holocaust, where silence often became the dominant language.
So although the country exploded with celebration and collective joy, internally I mostly returned to routine without fully processing what had happened.
When did that understanding begin to change?
It changed only forty years later, when I was invited for the first time to speak publicly about Entebbe before Jewish communities abroad. Through those encounters – with students, military audiences, Israelis living overseas, and Jews from many different backgrounds – I gradually realized that Entebbe was not only an Israeli military story. For many Jews around the world, it symbolized something far deeper: the idea that Jews were no longer helpless.
Over time, layers began peeling away inside me emotionally and intellectually. One night I woke up with a sentence in my head that suddenly felt completely clear: “I flew to Entebbe as an Israeli kibbutznik and returned as a Jew.”
Growing up in Israel, particularly in the secular kibbutz world, my identity had been overwhelmingly Israeli – agricultural, collective, local. But through Entebbe, and through meeting Jews around the world afterward, I came to understand myself as part of a much older Jewish story extending far beyond the borders of Israel itself.
How did October 7th affect the way you think about Entebbe today?
Profoundly, because after October 7th I no longer believe it’s possible to speak about Entebbe as a clean heroic story disconnected from the present. To talk about events from Entebbe alone after October 7th feels sterile.
Entebbe almost becomes a benchmark against which one can measure the difference of our situation today.
One question haunts me constantly: why did the world applaud Israel after Entebbe in 1976, while after the massacre of October 7th antisemitism exploded across the world almost immediately? After Entebbe, Jews everywhere felt pride and protection, whereas after October 7th many Jews suddenly felt fear again – in Europe, America, Canada, Australia. People removed mezuzahs from their homes, Israelis abroad stopped speaking Hebrew publicly, and Jewish communities felt vulnerable in ways they had not experienced for decades.
And then there is the hostage issue itself. In 1976, Israel launched a rescue operation within days, whereas today the reality in Gaza was infinitely more complicated – underground tunnels, fragmented intelligence, dispersed hostages, and a massive battlefield. But what troubles me most is not only the military complexity. It is the internal division within Israeli society itself. In 1976, Israelis woke up united after Entebbe. Religious and secular, left-wing and right-wing – none of those distinctions mattered that morning because the hostages had returned home. There was no societal debate about what to do, as the operation had happened before anyone could imagine. Today, after October 7th, we have lived through years of internal arguments while heroic soldiers continue fighting and dying, but Israeli society spent two years tearing itself apart over the question of hostage release operations, negotiations and more.
I increasingly believe that Israel now faces two enormous challenges simultaneously: physical survival and internal unity, and I’m no longer certain the second challenge is any less important than the first.
Because ultimately the essential question is not only political. The deeper question is why we live here together at all, why we raise children here, and what kind of future we want to build together despite our disagreements.
At Entebbe, I never asked whether the hostages were religious or secular, left-wing or right-wing, kibbutzniks or city people. They were Jews in danger, and we went to bring them home. That understanding feels even more urgent to me after October 7th, because Jewish history teaches us something difficult but unavoidable: our fate remains shared whether we like it or not.
If you would like to invite R to your community, please reach out to aronwhite@mizrachi.org