TEL AVIV (JTA) — For the survivors of Operation Entebbe, marking the 50th anniversary was less a celebration of one of Israel’s most mythologized military operations than a reckoning with the distance between the country that rescued them and the one that failed to prevent another mass hostage crisis decades later.

About two dozen of those rescued at Entebbe and their relatives gathered on Monday at the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation in Jaffa for an event honoring Sorin Hershcu, the Israeli paratrooper gravely wounded in the 1976 raid. Teasing and jokes repeatedly broke through the formalities, giving the room the feel of an unruly extended family.

The hijacking began when an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris carrying 246 passengers was seized after a stop in Athens by terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Germany’s Revolutionary Cells. The plane was diverted to Uganda, where the despotic, notoriously unhinged dictator Idi Amin gave the hijackers safe haven. They separated Israeli and Jewish passengers from most of the others, who were released over two days.

On July 4, Israeli commandos flew thousands of miles to Entebbe and rescued more than 100 hostages in an audacious raid that became one of Israel’s defining military operations.

To mark the 50th anniversary, Israel released previously classified protocols from the raid, later renamed Operation Yonatan, after Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother and the operation’s commander who was killed during the mission. (Uganda’s military chief Muhoozi Kainerugaba in February announced plans to erect a statue of Yoni Netanyahu at the airport in the exact spot where he was killed, saying it would strengthen his country’s “close blood relations with Israel.”)

The documents, including cabinet minutes and phone records, show the government abandoning its longstanding policy of not negotiating with hostage-takers even as it prepared the military rescue.

Most of those at the anniversary gathering were the so-called children of Entebbe, the youngest hostages from the raid now in their 50s and 60s who still meet regularly. Three of them — Benny Davidson, who was 13 at the time, Shay Gross, who turned 6 in Entebbe, and Tzipi Cohen Gonen, who was 8 — had just returned from their first trip back to Uganda, where they visited the old Entebbe terminal in which they had been held at gunpoint for a week.

Cohen Gonen’s return to Uganda meant going back to the place where her father, Pasco Cohen, a Jerusalem doctor, was shot and killed, one of four hostages who lost their lives. She was terrified to return, she said, but accepted the Ugandan government’s invitation because she wanted to confront the site directly.

“I wanted to look evil in the eyes,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It closed a circle in that way, because the Ugandans were so nice to us. But there was no closure for my father’s death.”

Standing again near the tarmac where she and the other children had played during their captivity, Cohen Gonen said the memories came back with force, but through adult eyes. The control tower, which had seemed enormous to her........

© The Times of Israel