Sharansky: In Prison, I thought about Yoni Jewish Agency head says he had Prime Minister's heroic brother in mind, when held in Soviet jail.

At a Memorial Day ceremony in Latrun Sunday evening, Jewish Agency head Natan Sharansky told Masa program youths that the thought of the Prime Minister's heroic brother Yoni helped him through the most difficult moments, when he was held in Soviet jail.

"All those years that I was in prison, whenever I was told that I can be sentenced to death, I thought about Yoni Netanyahu. He was 29 when he fell and I was 29 when I was arrested. If he did it, I also have to do it.

"And each time when I heard the engine of the airplane in Siberian [skies], I thought about Israeli airplanes. And I remembered about Entebbe. And I knew that a day will come when an Israeli airplane will come to take me out of prison. And this day came.

IDF Chief of Staff: 'Entebbe's Yoni Netanyahu Was a Hero'

IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz and President Shimon Peres both spoke at last week’s memorial service for Yoni Netanyahu, brother of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who was killed 35 years ago during an IDF operation to rescue passengers from a hijacked Air France flight in Entebbe, Uganda.

“Unfortunately, I never met Yoni, since I am the first chief of staff that joined the army after Yoni fell,” said Gantz, adding, “Even though I didn’t know him, I knew of him. As a 17-year-old boy, about a year before I volunteered for the paratroopers, I looked up, like many others had done, to the celebrated commander who fell as he led one of army’s greatest operations.

“If I had to choose one of Yoni’s sayings which especially touched me at the time,” continued Gantz, “I’d go back to that letter he wrote as a young officer and which read: ‘The responsibility lays on me, on us, the youth in Israel, to guard the state’s welfare. It’s a heavy responsibility which matures us ahead of time. It seems though Israelis belong to a special kind of people. It’s hard to explain it but easy to feel it.’

"This sentence expresses a feeling which is felt by almost every fighter and commander: the burden and the privilege inherent in the duty to guard the people and country. This feeling accompanied me throughout my years of service, as a sort of reminder which hovers above the daily routine. This is also the feeling which accompanies the IDF’s fighters and commanders today.

“In the last few years we hear more and more sayings that the youth of the 2000s has developed a blanket of indifference and is reluctant to volunteer, to contribute and to make a difference,” added the Chief of Staff. “But as someone who sees the fighters in the field, as someone who has looked into their eyes and has seen in them that special race which Yoni was talking about, I can tell you that they are ready for any challenge and any task because they are committed and imbued with a sense of mission no less than Yoni.”

President Peres, who served as Israel’s Minister of Defense during the operation, recalled finding out that Yoni Netanyahu had been killed.

“At 3 a.m. I heard a knock on the door,” he said. “[Then IDF Chief of Staff] Motta Gur stood there, pale as a sheet. ‘Shimon, Yoni is gone. A bullet hit him in the back and pierced his heart.’ I couldn’t stop my tears. Yoni for me was a representative of the strong and the beautiful within us.”

Turning to the Netanyahu family, Peres said: “Yoni was a hero. Yoni was a man of spirit. The first to join a mission and, this time, also the first to die.”

Yoni Netanyahu HY"D (may God avenge his blood)

This past week marked the 35th anniversary of the raid on Entebbe in which four Israeli hostages (out of more than 100) and the commander of their rescue operation - Yoni Netanyahu, the brother of our present Prime Minister - were killed. There were some nice tributes to Yoni published this week, and I'd like to point you to two of them.

One is a reprint of an article about Yoni that appeared in the Harvard Crimson shortly after Netanyahu was killed. It includes interviews with some of his friends from Harvard, where he spent a year and a summer. Netanyahu could not tear himself away from the IDF and ultimately did not finish his degree there.

Netanyahu’s Harvard friends, like Seamus P. Malin ’62, his adviser in 1967-68 and the current director of financial aid, are wary that their eulogies be mistaken for run-of-the-mill posthumous praise, and they offer eerily similar descriptions of Netanyahu’s extraordinary qualities.

“This place does attract some pretty unusual individuals,” Malin says, “so it is not therefore a big deal to say you’ve come across somebody who is going to be a future senator or a bigwig in national or international life. But there are few people that you do meet whom you genuinely feel add to you as a person and really make being here and being associated with them in some way a fuller development of your own life.”

In that sense, Malin adds, Netanyahu’s death left an “emptiness because he was a person who lived a kind of exemplary personal life, without being schmaltzy about it, that made you kind of feel warm when you were with him. A conversation with him always made you think about your own life in a way you wouldn’t have thought about it if he hadn’t popped in to see you.”

Read the whole thing.

The other article is this one from the Daily Caller, which talks about some of Yoni's letters to his father, his brother the Prime Minister, and his wife.

Writing to brother Benjamin after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Jonathan wrote about how he refused to become part of the “wandering Jewish people.”

“I would rather opt for living here in continual battle than for becoming part of the wandering Jewish people.,” he declared. “Any compromise will simply hasten the end. As I don’t intend to tell my grandchildren about the Jewish State in the twentieth century as a mere brief and transient episode in thousands of years of wandering, I intend to hold on here with all my might.”

In another letter to Benjamin in 1974, Jonathan expressed his anxiety about Israel’s long term prospects for survival.

“I feel profoundly apprehensive about the future of the Jewish State. Shedding illusions, I see that the process aimed at annihilating us is gathering momentum and the noose is tightening. It won’t be a rapid process, though our strength will diminish from one war to the next,” he wrote.

Read the whole thing.