Israel Matzav

Yoni Netanyahu HY"D (may God avenge his blood)

This past week marked the 35th anniversary of the raid on Entebbe in which four Israeli hostages (out of more than 100) and the commander of their rescue operation - Yoni Netanyahu, the brother of our present Prime Minister - were killed. There were some nice tributes to Yoni published this week, and I'd like to point you to two of them.

One is a reprint of an article about Yoni that appeared in the Harvard Crimson shortly after Netanyahu was killed. It includes interviews with some of his friends from Harvard, where he spent a year and a summer. Netanyahu could not tear himself away from the IDF and ultimately did not finish his degree there.

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.

“This place does attract some pretty unusual individuals,” Malin says, “so it is not therefore a big deal to say you’ve come across somebody who is going to be a future senator or a bigwig in national or international life. But there are few people that you do meet whom you genuinely feel add to you as a person and really make being here and being associated with them in some way a fuller development of your own life.”

In that sense, Malin adds, Netanyahu’s death left an “emptiness because he was a person who lived a kind of exemplary personal life, without being schmaltzy about it, that made you kind of feel warm when you were with him. A conversation with him always made you think about your own life in a way you wouldn’t have thought about it if he hadn’t popped in to see you.”

Read the whole thing.

The other article is this one from the Daily Caller, which talks about some of Yoni's letters to his father, his brother the Prime Minister, and his wife.

Writing to brother Benjamin after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Jonathan wrote about how he refused to become part of the “wandering Jewish people.”

“I would rather opt for living here in continual battle than for becoming part of the wandering Jewish people.,” he declared. “Any compromise will simply hasten the end. As I don’t intend to tell my grandchildren about the Jewish State in the twentieth century as a mere brief and transient episode in thousands of years of wandering, I intend to hold on here with all my might.”

In another letter to Benjamin in 1974, Jonathan expressed his anxiety about Israel’s long term prospects for survival.

“I feel profoundly apprehensive about the future of the Jewish State. Shedding illusions, I see that the process aimed at annihilating us is gathering momentum and the noose is tightening. It won’t be a rapid process, though our strength will diminish from one war to the next,” he wrote.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, Raid on Entebbe, Yoni Netanyahu

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:44 PM