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Commentary;
Journalist and author Uri Dan, of blessed memory, who was niftar one year ago, wrote the piece excerpted below commemorating the 30th anniversary of the rescue at Entebbe less than 6 months before passing away.
Dan’s assessment nearly 1 1/2 years ago seems as valid today as it seemed then, despite the Olmert regime’s fiasco in Lebanon and ongoing snafu regarding protection of the southern towns from Kassam, mortar and possible Katyusha bombardments and the rooting out and eliminating the terrorist threat.
This author understands Dan as indicating that there are two factors which are attributeable to a government’s committment of armed forces to a campaign;
- 1/ An capable army which instills a government with confidence.
- 2/ A government courageous enough to act, based on their army’s capability to successfully carry out an operation, and thus commit to an operation.
But while it seems unarguably obvious that the military capability of the IDF to instill confidence is there, a protexia regime with a political agenda in the way lacks the courage to commit to an action on behalf of the security of the governed.
This fits in with the point this author makes in recent blog posts here and here. MB
by Uri Dan (Jerusalem Post, original column 6 July, 2006 )
Excerpts;
The operation was the result of a daring decision on the part of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and the army’s outstanding capability to carry it out.
I knew about the Entebbe operation ahead of time. I had bumped into Brig.-Gen. Dan Shomron, the chief paratrooper officer, at a private party held on the evening of June 29, 1976. For the previous three days, the world had been holding its breath in fear for the fate of the hostages of the Air France plane that had been hijacked to Entebbe. The general feeling at that time was that the Israeli government would capitulate to the hijackers’ demands. After all, Entebbe was so far away; how could anyone get there?
I asked Dan Shomron if that feeling on the part of the public was correct. Dan, to his credit, immediately responded that in his opinion it was possible to rescue the hostages in a military operation – if the government were to give the order to the army to do so.
And indeed, if the army does not instill the government with the confidence that such an operation is feasible, I added, the government might capitulate to the terrorists’ demands.
It was Dan Shomron who convinced then chief of General Staff Mordechai Gur, and they both went to Rabin to convince him that “there is a military option.” Yonatan Netanyahu, the brilliant head of the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, volunteered to lead the operation.
I kept my eye on matters and learned that the operation was to be launched on Saturday, July 3. I didn’t say a word to anyone. I only mentioned to my colleague at Ma’ariv, Tommy Lapid, that there was a possibility that the hostages might be rescued by force. In response, he sneered in his usual rude manner saying, “You and your friend Arik Sharon are delusional nutcases.”
In the meantime, I collected every available scrap of information so that my newspaper would have the most complete story when the time came, in the hope that the operation would be a success. The lives of so many people hung in the balance.
Only when I discovered from my sources that the operation was over and that it would be a few hours until an official announcement would be made did I alert Shalom Rosenfeld, Ma’ariv’s editor in chief.
Today, too, it is clear that as the IDF is once again fighting Palestinian terror in Gaza, it has field soldiers and commanders of a caliber similar to those who fought in Entebbe.
The accumulated experience of the past 30 years, the highly improved sophisticated military equipment, but most importantly, the younger generations of soldiers now serving in the Israel Defense Forces are all a guarantee that today’s soldiers are in every way the equal of the Entebbe commandos. If there is good intelligence, as there was in Entebbe, and if the army’s top command bolsters the government’s courage, Israel will ultimately vanquish the Hamas.