Episode # 150--A Tale of Two Netanyahu Brothers

Summer is over and we’re back to our biweekly schedule. The topic for this week is how Benjamin Netanyahu has dishonored the memory of his brother, someone over whose dead body he built his career. That is what Benjamin Netanyahu did. He began building his entire career on the legacy of his dead older brother, Jonathan (Yonatan in Hebrew), whom the IDF calls “one of Israel’s greatest soldiers.” Yoni Netanyahu put hostages before his own safety. It cost him his life at Entebbe. Bibi Netanyahu puts Bibi and his political career before the safety of hostages. He will say and do whatever he deems necessary to stay in office for as long as possible. Friday marks the start of his 18th year as prime minister, albeit not consecutively. Every day that he stays in office, because of his hubris, he not only trashes Yoni’s memory and leaves the 101 hostages in the hands of Hamas murderers, he risks the safety and security of the State of Israel.

Transcript

Shammai's September 6, 2024, Podcast
Welcome to Keep the Faith, the podcast returning to its biweekly schedule after our summer break in which contemporary issues are explored through the prism of Jewish law and tradition. This week, the “contemporary issue” is Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, the man who seems unconcerned about the fate of the 101 hostages still being held by Hamas in Gaza, 35 of whom are believed to be dead. At least, the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who took to the streets this week believe Netanyahu is unconcerned, and the roadblocks he’s been putting up to any deal seem to support that.

 And so the topic for this week is How Benjamin Netanyahu Has Dishonored The Memory of His Brother, Over Whose Dead Body He Built His Career.

 That is what Benjamin Netanyahu did. He began building his entire career on the legacy of his dead older brother, Jonathan (Yonatan in Hebrew), whom the IDF calls “one of Israel’s greatest soldiers.”

 “Yoni” Netanyahu put hostages before his own safety.

 “Bibi” Netanyahu puts Bibi before the safety of hostages.

 Bibi does so because he is determined to set a record as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister that almost certainly will never be broken. The previous record-holder was David Ben-Gurion, who served as prime minister for a total of 4,875 days, or 13 years and 107 days—not all of it consecutively. Bibi beat that record way back on July 20, 2019, and every day he remains in office he adds to that record, and he has no intention of leaving office anytime soon. As of today, Friday, September 6th, he has served as prime minister for a total of 6,225 days, or exactly 17 years—again, not all of it consecutively.

 Most of you remember Yoni’s story, even if his name is unfamiliar to you, because that story has a name: Entebbe. Even if his name is familiar, though, you may not know how it played into Bibi’s grand plan—a plan he may not have even dreamed of until fame turned his head.

 On June 27, 1976, four terrorists belonging to a splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) boarded Air France Flight 139 at Athens Airport along with 244 other passengers and 12 crew members. A short time later, the four terrorists hijacked the flight. After landing to refuel in Libya, they forced the plane’s pilots to fly the Airbus A300 to Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where they were joined by several other terrorists.

 Under the protection of President Idi Amin Dada, they escorted the passengers to one of the airport terminals. There, they separated out the 94 mostly Jewish and Israeli passengers, and let the non-Jewish ones go free. The Air France crew refused to leave the hostages behind, and so all 12 crew members remained hostages at Entebbe.

 The PFLP made a series of demands, and set a deadline for meeting them: The terrorists would begin killing the hostages on the morning of Sunday, July 4th, unless the demands were met. Israel was also told that all the hostages would be killed immediately if there was even a hint that a rescue mission was underway.

 You may have heard that Hamas this week instructed those holding the Gaza hostages to kill each one if there were signs that the IDF was about to rescue them.

 Anyway, Entebbe was a brilliant choice for this operation, or so thought its mastermind, the PFLP’s military wing leader Wadie Haddad. After all, the Entebbe Airport was over 2,500 miles away from Israel. Even if the Israelis were to launch a rescue operation, its planes would have to fly almost that entire distance over Egypt and Sudan, enemy territory. The hostages would be dead long before the rescue planes cleared Egyptian airspace.

 Almost immediately after the news of the hijacking broke, Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu went into action. As commander of the elite special forces unit known as Sayeret Matkal, he began planning a rescue mission, which he then had his men rehearse over and again until the morning of Saturday morning, July 3. Yoni did this without anyone having asked him to do so. The government, in fact, was more inclined to try to negotiate with the terrorists than to launch a rescue mission that had so little chance of succeeding.

 In Yoni’s mind, however, Israeli hostages, wherever they were held, had to be set free as soon as possible regardless of the risks to him and his men.

 He had demonstrated his penchant for putting hostages first in May 1972’s Operation Isotope, which involved the hijacking of Sabena Flight 571 by Yasir Arafat’s Black September terrorists. Yoni and his Sayeret Matkal team disguised themselves as aircraft technicians, giving them the ability to storm the plane after it landed at Ben Gurion Airport. That operation was a success, although unfortunately two passengers were killed during the rescue.

 The following year, in April 1973, Yoni was part of Operation Spring of Youth, a covert mission that took place in Beirut that targeted key leaders of Black September and others in Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) hierarchy. This mission was part of the broader Operation Wrath of God, which targeted those believed responsible for the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972.

 After much debate and the realization that negotiations were fruitless, Israel’s cabinet reluctantly agreed to sanction the hostage rescue mission Yoni and others had planned and rehearsed.

 The rescue planes did manage to avoid detection—thanks in large part to a series of storms that covered the route to Uganda, and disappearing as the planes flew over Lake Victoria, at the other end of which the Entebbe runways began. Anyone who doesn't believe in miracles needs to consider that series of storms and cloud cover and their sudden disappearance very carefully. The mission resulted in 102 hostages being freed (including the Air France crew), and seven terrorists killed. Unfortunately, three hostages were killed during the rescue mission. A fourth hostage, Mrs. Dora Bloch, who had been taken ill earlier and was in a Ugandan hospital, was later murdered in her hospital bed on the orders of President Amin.

 There was only one fatality among the Sayeret Matkal rescuers: their leader, Yoni Netanyahu. He was shot by a sniper as he led his unit into the Entebbe terminal. The rescue mission had been given the codename Operation Thunderbolt. In his honor, the IDF renamed it Operation Yonatan.

 In 1979, Benjamin Netanyahu and his father, the historian Benzion Netanyahu, founded the Jonathan Institute, named after Yoni. The institute was dedicated to studying terrorism and Bibi was its point man. He organized several highly influential international conferences on terrorism in Jerusalem that year, which began to raise his profile in and out of Israel.

 He also caught the attention of producers at ABC News, who had begun airing a late-night program, America Held Hostage, which debuted on November 4, 1979, after 52 American diplomats and citizens were taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The hostage crisis ended, but the program, hosted by Ted Koppel, stayed on, now called ABC’s Nightline.

 Netanyahu’s articulate and knowledgeable commentary on terrorism had so impressed the ABC producers that they made him a frequent guest on the show, which further raised his profile. He appeared on Nightline upwards of a dozen times during that period, establishing his reputation as a leading voice on the subject of terrorism and how to combat it.

 Throughout the 1980s, as knowledgeable and articulate as he was, Bibi was living beneath Yoni’s shadow. In 1988, he decided to come out from under that shadow by securing a spot on the right-wing Likud Party’s election list. Likud won that year, Bibi entered the Knesset and was given the post of Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, which he held until 1991.

 His star kept rising, and on June 18, 1996, he became prime minister for the first time.

 Bibi is no Yoni. His personal agenda is to keep himself in office for as long as possible—and he will say and do anything to keep that record growing. He’s doing that now in his insistence that Israel must remain in the Philadelphi Corridor, the strip of land that runs for nine miles along the Gaza-Egypt border. It is considered no-man’s land, but Bibi says it’s essential to Israel’s security—something members of his own coalition dispute.

 In February 2004, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed withdrawing Israeli settlers and personnel from Gaza, including from the Philadelphi Corridor. Bibi was Finance Minister at the time. The plan was submitted to the cabinet, and Bibi voted for it. It was then put before the Knesset, and Bibi again voted for it.

 Bibi continued to support the plan for 18 months, until August 2005. Just days before the Gaza Disengagement Plan was to be implemented, and with opposition to it having grown within the Likud Party, Bibi saw it as his chance to push Sharon aside and return to the party leadership. He announced his opposition to the withdrawal he had supported for so long and resigned from the government.

 In December 2005, Bibi succeeded Sharon as Likud leader. Since then, Bibi has served as prime minister for 15 of his 17 years in the post. At no time in those 15 years has he said anything about the need for Israel to reoccupy the Philadelphi Corridor. He said nothing about reoccupying it since the Gaza War began, and it was not part of his earlier proposals for a cease-fire. Only now has it become an issue because his extremist ministers insisted on it, and he wants to stay in office.

 Here’s another example. When he needed moderates to vote for him and Likud in 1996, 2009, 2013, 2016, 2018, and 2020, he forcefully argued that “two states for two peoples” was the only way to achieve peace and security for both Israelis and Palestinians.

 In 2022, though, he knew he could no longer count on moderate voters, so he abandoned any thought of a two-state solution to win the support of two extremist right-wing parties headed by two avowed racists—Bezalel Smotrich, now Israel’s Finance Minister, and Itamar Ben Gvir, to whom Bibi gave the National Security portfolio.

 Because Bibi wants to go down in history as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, his successful appeal to the extreme right in 2022 very quickly put the very survival of Israel at its greatest risk.

 Bibi and Company are directly responsible for Hamas’ bloody success on October 7th. Bibi’s right-wingers decided to crack down unmercifully on the West Bank, the bulk of what is supposed to be their dream of a Greater Israel. To do so, however, meant moving IDF units and intelligence operations from the southern border with Gaza into the West Bank. Bibi did so despite the fact that Israeli officials knew since the summer of 2014 that Hamas was developing an attack plan, and that this knowledge had grown exponentially during 2023 leading up to October 7th.

 Because Bibi has thus far refused to allow a government commission to be appointed to investigate how Hamas was able to carry out what is the greatest tragedy in Jewish history since the Holocaust, a civilian commission of inquiry was initiated by families of the victims, joined by representatives from communities affected by the attacks, and by various civil society groups. The commission is composed of legal and security experts who are tasked with investigating the failures of the Israeli military and political systems that led to October 7th.

 A week ago, opposition leader Yair Lapid, himself a former prime minister, testified before the commission in order “to debunk the claim” that Bibi and Company had been kept in the dark about the threat Hamas posed, a claim Netanyahu has often made since October 7th. Said Lapid, “It is not true that the political system was not alerted to the October 7 disaster. For months, the prime minister and cabinet ministers received a series of severe and unprecedented warnings and did nothing.”

 In fact, Lapid said, there were “repeated strategic warnings of an eruption of violence and the loss of deterrence.”

 The warnings were coming because of the Netanyahu government’s assault on the judiciary, which had brought hundreds of thousands of protestors onto Israel’s streets, and had led to a movement among reservists to declare that they would not report for duty if they were called up if the overhaul was approved. The defense establishment, Lapid said, was warning that a demoralized citizenry posed a serious security concern.

 “From the middle of 2023, there were more and more voices within the terrorist organizations who said that the moment they had been waiting for had arrived, and these voices appeared in the intelligence assessments, and in discussions in the IDF, Shin Bet, and Mossad.”

 All of it fell on deaf ears.

 Among other examples of such warnings, Lapid cited a joint briefing he attended on August 21, 2023, with Netanyahu’s military secretary Brig. Gen. Avi Gil. Gil reported that Israel’s defense establishments had determined that Israel’s enemies had concluded that “now was the time” to bring Israel to its knees. Lapid was shocked by Bibi’s response to what certainly sounded like a very serious development. Said Lapid to the commission, “The prime minister—and here I am giving only a personal impression, so it can be disputed—seemed bored and indifferent to the issue, and did not comment on it.”

 The independent commission has heard similar testimony from current and former officials of the security establishment.

 That brings us to the 101 hostages still being held by Hamas and others in Gaza and the mounting outrage in Israel over the killing of six hostages by Hamas whose bodies the IDF retrieved late last week.

 On Sunday of this week, for the first time since the October 7th massacres, the Histadrut Labor Federation joined the anti-Netanyahu protest movement because of the government’s failure to secure the release of the hostages still being held in Gaza. It did so by declaring a 24-hour general strike that began at 6 a.m. Israel time on Monday. Ben Gurion Airport was shut down on Monday because of the strike, and all incoming and outgoing flights were canceled. The government’s reaction to the Histadrut action was to denounce it as “illegal,” and a Tel Aviv Labor Court agreed, but the strike went on.

 Histadrut called for the strike at the urging of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which also called on the public “to join a massive demonstration, demanding a complete shutdown of the country” on Monday and Tuesday.

 In a statement released on Sunday, the Forum said that “Netanyahu [had] abandoned the hostages. It is now a fact.” It added, “Starting tomorrow, the country will tremble. We call on the public to prepare. The country will grind to a halt. The abandonment is over.”

 Also answering the Forum’s call were Lapid, the Tel Aviv, Kfar Saba, and Givatayim municipalities, and the Israel Business Forum, which represents most private-sector workers from 200 of the country’s largest companies.

 The hundreds of thousands of protestors who answered the call are furious because they believe that Netanyahu has sabotaged every effort to achieve a deal for the return of the hostages. One protestor, whose son was killed at the Supernova music festival on October 7th and then had his body taken captive to Gaza, put to words what many Israelis are thinking. Netanyahu, he said, is “scared of losing his job, and we’re paying the price—and that’s more important to [Bibi] than the lives of the hostages. My boy was killed, he won’t come back alive, but those who are still alive in the tunnels of Hamas, we have to bring them home alive, now.”

 Yoni Netanyahu put hostages before his own safety and gave his life to rescue the ones held at Entebbe. His brother built his reputation on Yoni’s sacrifice, but Bibi is no Yoni. As the hundreds of thousands of protestors have come to believe, Bibi puts Bibi before the safety of hostages.

 Jewish law is very specific when it comes to bringing hostages home. The mitzvah known as pidyon shevuyim, the ransoming of hostages, is considered a “mitzvah rabbah” (a great mitzvah). The Talmud designated it that way because it said that captivity is worse than starvation and death. Maimonides, for his part, listed a number of Torah commandments that anyone who fails to ransom a captive is guilty of transgressing.

 Just as is the case with every commandment or principle, religious or secular, there are exceptions. The relevant one here is if the price being paid is too high. Putting the security of the state at risk would be a price too high, except that in the current situation that the security of the state is more at risk if the war in Gaza isn’t resolved and soon.

 In any case, I believe that Yoni Netanyahu has a coveted place under the protective wings of God’s holy spirit. I also believe he had not stopped crying since October 7th because of that horrific tragedy, because of his brother’s inaction to prevent it from happening, and because of his brother’s actions once the war began.

 Yoni Netanyahu has not stopped crying since October 7th.

 When will we?

 This is Rabbi Shammai Engelmayer. I do hope you come back for my next podcast in two weeks, God-willing, and I’d like to hear what you have to say about this or my other podcasts. Go to www.shammai.org—w-w-w-dot-s-h-a-m-m-a-i-dot-o-r-g—and email me, please.

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