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Today, Israelis are being almost literally sacrificed for public-relations points.

Twenty-five years ago this week, Israel stunned the world with a daring and impressive operation. On July 4, 1976, an elite Israeli commando unit flew 3,500 kilometers over four enemy countries and freed more than 100 hostages held at the Entebbe airport in Uganda.

The story began on June 27, 1976, when an Air France plane flying from Tel Aviv to Paris via Athens was hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists. There were 246 passengers on board – 105 of whom were Jewish and most of them Israelis – and 12 crew members. The hijackers landed the plane in Uganda and demanded the release of 53 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel and elsewhere.

Loyal to their principle of never negotiating with terrorists, the Israelis rejected this demand and began planning a high-level rescue operation.

Time was not on Israel’s side. Four Hercules aircraft and a Boeing 707 carrying Israeli commandos took off for Uganda even as the Israeli cabinet was debating the mission. It finally voted unanimously in favor.

As they approached the Entebbe airport, the commando planes identified themselves, respectively, as an Air France flight delivering the Palestinian prisoners and an East African Airways flight scheduled to arrive in Entebbe a few minutes later. After landing, a black Mercedes-Benz, similar to the one owned by Uganda’s dictator Idi Amin, who collaborated with the terrorists, followed by several Land Rovers, sped toward the airport terminal where the passengers were held captive. After a five-minute exchange of fire, the elite Israeli squad managed to kill the terrorists and free the hostages. The operation left casualties: three hostages were killed in the shooting spree; an elderly woman hostage who had been taken to a Ugandan hospital later was murdered by a furious Idi Amin; and the leader of the rescue operation, Yonatan Netanyahu, was shot dead in the fighting.

In a sense, not much has changed for Israel in the last quarter century. These words, written in 1968 by Yonatan Netanyahu to his family, could easily have been written today: «The real cause is a sense of helplessness in the face of a war that has not ended…. it seems to me that it will go on and on…. it continues with every mine and killing and murder.
«This is the quiet before the next storm. I have no doubt that war will come. Nor do I doubt that we will win. But for how long? Until when?»

At the same time, significant changes have occurred in Israel, and the world, since then. Today, it is almost impossible to fathom a similar operation taking place – not because Israel lacks the means to carry it out, but because it now lacks political will and courage at the governmental level. Take, for instance, the infamous concept of «victims of peace» originated by the Rabin-Peres administration during the Oslo days. Or take the current policy of restraint initiated by Ehud Barak and later taken to absurd levels by Ariel Sharon.

This concept was predicated on the cold assumption that if a few Israelis had to pay with their lives on the altar of peace at the hands of Palestinian rejectionists who opposed the peace process, then so be it. Today, Israelis are being almost literally sacrificed for public-relations points. We could call them «victims of ratings.» This concept is dictated by the need to please a Western world increasingly – and shockingly – insensitive to Israel’s predicament. It is as if the decisions concerning the lives of the Israeli population are being made in the studios of CNN and the BBC rather than at the Israeli cabinet table.

Natan Sharansky, a former prisoner of conscience in Communist Russia and a current Israeli minister, warned the Sharon government that «as important as it is to want to gain understanding abroad, at some point the government will have to say that fateful decisions affecting the Jewish people are in its hands and not in the hands of the rest of the world.»

It is imperative for Israel to restore its lost self-confidence. Not for the sake of honor, national pride or glory – but for the sakeof its very survival.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Jerusalem.