Historical blind spots - Entebbe

There are blind spots in the educational process, no matter what type of schooling you take, whether you're in the public schools, or private schools, or, like my kids, schooled at home. There's a transition period that you live through in your youth, that you live through but never learn. It's a period that is current events when you're too young to care, and not history yet when you begin to study history.

My youngest brother, who's now in his early 30s, has been working his way through college over the past decade-plus. He's also hung a lot of sheet rock and siding, covered a lot of roofs, and pulled a lot of lobster traps. Last fall, he was talking about one of his classes where a professor had been talking about the Berlin Wall, and one of the girls in the class, probably 19 or 20, had interrupted with "you keep talking about a Berlin Wall. Is this a figurative expression, or is there a real wall?" And, of course, to anyone who was of age after before 1990, it sounds like an absurd question. But if you were five years old in 1990, you weren't paying much attention to current events when the Berlin Wall fell. The Berlin Wall wasn't news when you were studying Current Events. And it was too recent to have been integrated into your history curriculum. So you've got a massive blind-spot, a perspective on the world that is un-impacted by what was a seminal event to someone just 10 years older.

I'm thinking of this, because I watched, last night, the 1977 TV movie "Raid On Entebbe." On July 4th, 1976, I was 13 years old, and watching the fireworks in Canandaigua, New York, at my grandmother's house on the lake. Halfway around the world, Israeli special forces were raiding the airport at Entebbe in Uganda, and rescuing 105 (or 106 - I've seen different numbers) Jewish and Israeli hostages. The hostages had been taken 7 days earlier, on an Air France flight from Athens to Paris. On July 1st, the non-Jewish, non-Israeli hostages had been released. The French flight crew had also been released, but chose to stay behind with the rest of their passengers.

I've heard of Entebbe. I vaguely recall the made-for-TV movies airing in the late 70s. But I didn't know what it meant, where it was, what had happened. At some point in the last 10 years, I became aware that there had been a hostage-taking and a rescue. At some point I learned that former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's brother had been one of the leaders, and had been killed. But it's a fascinating historical event that I really hadn't much awareness of. It was, for me, one of the historical blind spots.

The movie was actually pretty well done. It was apparently the second made-for-TV version of the story, and much better than the first. It tells the story in a very straightforward fashion, without an excessive amount of over-the-top drama or emotional music. It's just a historical recounting that seems, from what I'm able to find right now, to be pretty accurate.

One of the things that never gets mentioned, however, is something that I think has to have had some emotional impact on the people planning and carrying out the rescue. There is talk in the cabinet meetings about whether the attempted rescue will cause international problems, and I'm sure that those issues were genuine concerns at the time. But less than four years earlier, Palestinian terrorists had taken 9 Israeli Olympians hostage in Munich, and all of the hostages were killed in a rescue attempt by the Germans at the Munich airport. (Another historical event about which I hadn't much knowledge until relatively recently.) While I'm sure that the security forces took lessons from that attempt, it's hard to believe that there wouldn't have been some consideration of the possibilities for disaster based on the Munich events.