India’s Entebbe Moment?

In the shock and fury that followed the massacre in Pahalgam, I reached almost instinctively for an old paperback on my shelf. It was a Bantam edition of ‘90 Minutes at Entebbe’ by William Stevenson. I had first read it in college. Now, more than two decades later, the pages had yellowed, but the story still moved with the same iron-boned precision as if the commandos might burst into the pages at any moment.

On June 27, 1976, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked and flown to Entebbe, Uganda. The hijackers - members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the German Baader-Meinhof gang - were given safe harbour by Uganda’s dictator, Idi Amin. A deadline was issued. Israel had 72 hours to release Palestinian prisoners or watch its citizens die.

In 90 Minutes at Entebbe, Stevenson collates eyewitness accounts, cables, radio intercepts, and military briefings into a narrative that still grips. There are arguments within the Israeli cabinet, coded briefings and one question that rises through the tension like smoke: what happens to a nation when it is faced with a stark choice between capitulation and principle?

Israel’s answer was decisive and breathtaking in its audacity. It struck on July 4, 1976 in the dead of night as the rescue mission codenamed ‘Operation Thunderbolt’ landed at Entebbe. The raid took just under an hour. All the hijackers were killed. 102 of the 106 hostages (four were killed) were freed. Current Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s elder brother, Yonatan ‘Yonni’ Netanyahu was the only Israeli commando killed in the operation that has since become a byword for audacity. Israel’s message to the world was clear: a nation only stays sovereign if it is willing to act.

A year later in 1977, NBC released ‘The Raid on Entebbe,’ a made-for-TV film – the best of the three films on the subject that came out at the same time. Directed by Irvin Kershner, the film stars Peter Finch as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in his final screen role. Finch’s wonderful performance is all restraint and quiet fury.

In the film, Rabin is exhausted: worn down by memory, shadowed by the Holocaust, cautious in the face of action. But when the moment comes, he does not hesitate. Finch plays him not as a war hawk, but as a man who knows history. In one scene, he listens as his advisers debate. His eyes narrow. His hands do not move. Then, with a voice barely above a whisper, he says: “If we don’t go now, we’ll never go again.”

It is not a triumphant line. It is a line spoken by a man who understands what forgetting looks like. The film is taut, its tension coiled not just in the action sequences but in the corridors of power and the clipped urgency of phone calls. YaphetKotto plays Idi Amin with terrifying charm while Horst Buchholz, as the lead hijacker, evokes both menace and a flicker of sympathy. Among the film’s illustrious cast, Charles Bronson is the big name, bringing a steely determination and quiet sympathy to his role as Brigadier General Dan Shomron who leads the mission.

Watching the film today, in a world where terror is ambient and wars blur into hashtags, ‘The Raid on Entebbe’ feels almost foreign. Not because it glorifies war (it doesn’t) but because it portrays clarity. A clarity that most democracies, including ours, have lost.

Post-Pahalgam, I could not help reflecting on India’s contrasting record of humiliations endured and opportunities squandered. The nadir came in December 1999, when Indian Airlines flight IC-814 was hijacked en route to Delhi and diverted to Kandahar. For days, the world watched as India - paralysed, pleading and ultimately surrendering - released three of its most dangerous terrorists including Masood Azhar in exchange for the passengers’ lives. Azhar would go on to mastermind the 2001 Parliament attack and the 2019 Pulwama bombing among others. The decision to capitulate at Kandahar is still paying dividends in blood.

Reading and watching the book and film on the Entebbe operation made me reflect that where Israel sends special forces, India sends negotiators. Where Israel says “never again,” India has largely said “let’s move on.”

Perhaps that’s why I turned back to 90 Minutes at Entebbe after Pahalgam. Not for nostalgia. But for memory. For a time when democracies were able to answer back with steel and speed.