Half a century on from Entebbe, the world has forgotten why Israel is vital for Jews

The hijackers took an Air France flight, not an El Al jet. They didn’t sort by passport. On Idi Amin’s Entebbe tarmac they separated the Jews, re-staging a “selection” scene Jews knew from the Third Reich. They knew the echo of the camps and the ramps.

This was July 4 1976. Twenty-eight-year-old Israel sent its commandos, men around the same age as the state itself, to bring them home.

At their head was Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu. Yoni who? Yes, Netanyahu—Bibi’s elder brother. Before politics ever attached to that name, he was one of Israel’s most seasoned special-forces officers, who had led mission after mission and, at thirty, died at the front of the assault team in Entebbe. The logic was blunt: if Jews are held at gunpoint because they are Jews, Israel goes.

Some of the hostages were Israelis. Most were not. The gunmen selected Jews. Or, Jewish sounding names.

Israel flew across Africa to save them anyway. The message was clear: if you pick out Jews as Jews, you have chosen to confront the Jewish state, whatever passports those Jews carry.

By sorting the hostages this way, the hijackers revived the Nazi method: separation, inspection, life and death — for being a Jew. For Jews watching in 1976, this was not symbolism; it was a live replay of the Shoah. But this time it was different.  In the 1940s, selection led to trains and death, while across much of Europe states turned on their Jews, delivered them, or closed their doors. There was no Israel. But in 1976, there was. Sovereign Israel’s commandos were ready.

Sovereign Israel had tracked down Adolf Eichmann living under a false identity outside Buenos Aires in May 1960. Israeli agents seized him and brought him to Jerusalem to be tried not for crimes against Israelis. Israel hadn’t existed at the time of his crimes. Israel tried him, above all, for crimes against the Jewish people.

That was Zionism as the revival of Jewish responsibility in and through Israel. Not only religion, language or culture, but power based on a new covenant: Jews do not leave other Jews to be sorted and slaughtered. “Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh”—all Israel are responsible for one another—meant rescue.

Some say 7 October was “like” the Shoah. I don’t. I say it was the Shoah again. Not that it matched the Shoah in scale, or in its machinery, but that it carried the same exterminating idea — Jews marked for murder because they were Jews, and the presence in Israel of people who were not Jewish made them collective Jews, because the ground they stood on was Israel. That was why.

Families butchered in their homes. Children taken as trophies and leverage, to break a people’s will. The Shoah reappeared eighty years later under different flags with the same aim. And again, large parts of the world looked away, explained, “contextualised”, denied and minimised. And still do.

Entebbe’s 50th anniversary is bound to bring Netanyahu comparisons. But this story isn’t about politics. Not about coalitions and oppositions. The point is not to reduce Entebbe to today’s arguments about Palestinians, Gaza, Lebanon or Iran. It is about why, regardless of our politics, Israel needs to exist. It is about people who seek out Jews because they are Jews, and the one state that has taken on the responsibility to stand between those people and their prey. There was no Israel when, across much of Europe, states turned on their Jews, delivered them, or closed their doors. What if there had been?

In 1976 Entebbe looked like self-defence by a small state under threat. Today, would it be seen as justified rescue, or condemned as raw power?

It isn’t just that Israel has changed and is not twenty-eight anymore. It is also that the world has changed. The world is less willing to see Jewish danger but more willing to feed it. Sometimes, too often, it says that Israel brings that danger on to Jews. But, to believe that you have to believe that Israel created the danger. The truth is that danger to Jews created Israel.

On 4 July, fifty years on, remembering Entebbe is not sentimentality. It is a way of reminding ourselves that Zionism means more than a Homeland and State, more than self-determination, more than return from exile. It means revival of Jewish life, from the dry bones, and the centrality of Israel to Jews. Regardless of politics.