Speech Reflecting on Yonatan Netanyahu's Legacy After Entebbe

loss. As I prepared my notes, I also spent time working out how to square what I felt I needed to say, with what many in the audience, and certainly Ben-Zion and Bibi, would expect me to say. Not only was Yoni being mourned across Israel after Entebbe. He was being elevated — in the spirit of Shimon’s words at the funeral —to something approaching sainthood. I did not want to detract from his evolving status as national hero, or his importance as a symbol of a commando success which had, for the first time since the 1973 war, restored a measure of Israeli sense of self-confidence. A victory, over all logic and all odds. But I also wanted to find a way of capturing Yoni as he really was: a brave man, an extraordinary fighter and officer. But also a man sometimes feeling torn inside, and alone. I began with words of ancient rabbinic wisdom about the path which all of us travel from birth to death, and to whatever comes after. The quotation I chose — from the 2,000-year-old volume known as Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of our Fathers — seemed right to me. “Know where you came from: a putrid drop... Know where you are going: to a place of dust, maggots and worms... And know before whom you are destined to give your final account, the King of Kings.” I spoke of the loss of Yoni, and said it was impossible not to think about the meaning of what lay between the “putrid drop” where each of us begins our life and our final reckoning. “I believe that life is not just a sum of the hours and days between the beginning and the end. It is the content we pour into the space in between,” I said. ?d known people who were given the gift of a long life but who, by that definition, had hardly lived at all. There were also people like Yoni. He’d lived only briefly. But he had learned and loved. Fought and trained others to fight. Grappled with the most profound puzzles of existence, and yet remained open “to the wonders of a smile. A journey. A flower. A poem.” If there was any consolation for a life ended cut off at age 30, I said, that was it. But I wanted to give a more personal, nuanced picture of the life that he, and we, and lost. “Our Yoni... We have seen him torn between his passion for knowledge on the one hand, and the sense of mission and of personal fulfillment that he found in uniform. There was the Yoni of history and philosophy books: Plato and Marx. Who saw the history of Israel not just as a compendium of facts, but a source of inspiration, and a call for action. The Yoni who rebuilt a tank battalion reduced to ashes and dust on the Golan. And there was the Yoni at peace. Tranquil. At home. With his pipe and his phonograph records, out of uniform. We saw him in his hours of supreme achievement and satisfaction. We saw him, too, sometimes standing alone, with pain in his heart, biting his teeth, 178 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011649