How Entebbe Changed Bibi

Benjamin Netanyahu has been a fixture in public life for so long, it’s hard to imagine Israeli politics without him. But a new documentary about the death of Netanyahu’s older brother underscores the extent to which Bibi’s trajectory was not inevitable. As commander of the Israeli Army’s elite Sayeret Matkal unit in 1976, Yoni Netanyahu died rescuing Israeli hostages hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists to Entebbe, Uganda. At the time, Bibi had been scaling the corporate knoll at the Boston Consulting Group, having graduated from MIT (he met Mitt Romney at BCG, and the two have kept in touch). He returned to Israel after the tragedy to start an antiterrorism foundation in his brother’s name, a detour that eventually led him to politics. “I thought I would be either in the academic world or the business world,” the Israeli prime minister told Newsweek in an email interview to mark the film’s release in Los Angeles this week. “My brother’s death changed my life and directed it to its present course,” he said. As for an ideological impact, Netanyahu added: “It didn’t shape my worldview. It reaffirmed it.”