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Yoni Netanyahu
led the IDF raid on
Entebbe and was the
only military fatality.

“It was a meeting made in heaven. We
were both Jewish and spoke Hebrew and
English. I showed him around, and we
socialized together, making every moment
count. He told me that if I ever made it to
Israel, to look him up.”
Months later Smargon was in Israel, and
Netanyahu showed him around the coun-
try, connected him with a kibbutz in the
north and worked on getting him to move
there and join the Israeli army.
“He told me, ‘You are in the wrong
army. You should be doing what you are
supposed to be doing: defending your
people.” Smargon remembers hearing this
every time they got together.
"Mickey Marcus was on my mind as I
listened to Yoni trying to convince me to
make aliyah,” he says. “It was a combina-
tion of Mickey, Yoni and their passion
which helped me decide.”
When his contract with the U.S. Army
was up, he moved to Kibbutz Shamir near
the northern border with Lebanon. “I was
welcomed with open arms,” he recalls,
and he went to work as a beekeeper.
Adopting Israeli citizenship, he trained to
serve under Netanyahu in the elite com-
mando unit, Sayeret Matkal. After more
training, he made the unit and went on
many operations with Netanyahu.
Neither Smargon, nor his kibbutz, were
religious; they were having a barbecue on
Yom Kippur in October 1973 when they
saw Israeli Phantom jets in a dogfight
overhead. While Netanyahu was sent to
the north, Smargon served with the para-
troopers in the south under the command
of Gen. Ariel Sharon, who decades later
would become prime minister. He crossed
the Suez Canal in a dinghy as part of a bold
move that allowed the Israelis to surround
the Egyptian Third Army, which hastened
its surrender. He was wounded by shrapnel,
but returned to his unit within weeks.
In June 1974, he and Netanyahu were

12 June 30 • 2016

returning from an anti-terrorist action
when Yoni told him to return to his kib-
butz, which was being attacked by terrorists.
Three women were murdered, and Smargon
recalls how he reacted. “I began throwing
myself, more and more, into my work.”

ENTEBBE ACTION
“I’ll never forget that day,” Smargon says
about June 27, 1976, the day Palestinian
and German terrorists hijacked the Air
France plane and threatened to kill the
240 passengers and crew if dozens of ter-
rorists weren’t released by Israel, Germany
and Kenya.
Smargon says his unit was in the mid-
dle of exercises, and Netanyahu was in his
office when word of the hijacking came
over the IDF radio. As the unit gathered
to hear the reports, Netanyahu got a call
directing him to develop a rescue plan.
When they learned the plane had been
flown to Entebbe, Uganda’s main airport,
they began rehearsing scenarios based
on the intelligence they had. Ironically,
Israel had helped train the Ugandan army,
and one of the unit members had been a
trainer and had much to share.
Additionally, the terminal where the hos-
tages were held had been built by an Israeli
company and they soon had the blueprints.
When the hijackers released the non-Jewish
hostages, they learned more from them.
They built models of the terminal and
worked on perfecting the plan.
“Yoni was a perfectionist,” Smargon
says. “He had us practice and practice and
practice. We had to be correct to a fault.
By July 1, we were almost ready, and I was
sure I would be going.”
By this time, Israeli Gens. Mordechai
Gur and Dan Shomron had given
Netanyahu command of the assault team,
and they held an all-nighter working on
the most-minute details. The generals
came to watch the preparations to be sure

they could back the plan.
Smargon was energized and ready, but
Netanyahu had decided to tell his friend
he couldn’t go.
“Yoni noticed that I was struggling and
called me aside,” he says. Smargon had
suffered a severe ankle injury in an anti-
terror operation and was not moving at
full speed. “He said he was taking me off
the assault because I presented a danger
to successfully completing the mission.
“I was devastated. ‘This is what I had
been born for,’ I told him. But to no avail.”
Discouraged, but prepared, he was sent
to Nairobi, Kenya, to help secure an air-
strip so the Israeli planes could refuel to
return to Israel.
The Israeli planes had been painted
over, a condition of the Kenyans who
tried to hide their cooperation with Israel.
When the planes arrived, he learned the
mission had been carried out in just 58
minutes and had been a magnificent suc-
cess, but also that Yoni, his commander
and best friend, was killed in action —
the only IDF fatality during the operation.
“We were told that Yoni was gone,
but we thought it was another person,”
Smargon says. “It couldn’t be Yoni; we
thought he was invincible, to be honest. I
thought so, anyway. From that day, there
isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think
of him. On his yahrtzeit, even though I
don’t have to, I say the Mourner’s Kaddish.
“I came back in a deep depression,
though I was still happy and proud of
what we did. No one in the world would
have done such a thing,” he says.
Smargon stayed in the IDF, but after 20
years in Israel he returned to the States,
ending up in Detroit. He met his second
wife, Sylvia Leib, through a Jewish News
classified ad. A blended family, he says
“we are a true Brady Bunch with eight
children.” He teaches Hebrew to bar
mitzvah students, especially the learning

disabled, also using Hebrew Braille for the
blind and Hebrew sign language for the
hearing impaired. He also teaches naval
personnel readying for deployment to the
Middle East. He enjoys it and is always
seeking new students.

HONORING YONI
“Yoni was brilliant to a fault. That’s why he
went to Harvard. He came from a brilliant
family,” Smargon said, mentioning Yoni’s
father, Benzion, a renowned scholar and
author, and his brothers Benjamin (“Bibi”),
prime minister of Israel, and Iddo, a doctor.
All three brothers served in Sayeret Maktal.
“Yoni was a selfless person. He would
go out of his way to help you even if it was
an inconvenience to him,” Smargon says.
“He loved life and knew what he wanted
from life. He knew he belonged in Israel,
and he knew he belonged in the army.
His father didn’t like it that he went back
into the army after he was wounded in an
operation, but he did.
“I never met anyone like that,” Smargon
said. “If I ever said I loved another man, it
would be him. I would have followed him
anywhere.”
The rescue captured the imagination of
the United States, and several films were
made about it, but Smargon says the Israeli
film, Operation Thunderbolt, is the best of
the bunch. Each July 4, amid celebrating
American independence, he sits down to
watch to pay tribute to his friend with a
familiar mixture of pride and sadness.
Smargon lit a candle at the Detroit
Jewish community’s annual Yom
HaZikaron service in May and had Yoni
included in the list of soldiers remem-
bered by name. He would have liked more
to be said about Yoni.
“It was the greatest military recue in the
history of the world,” Smargon maintains.
“Yoni was a national hero and deserves
the credit and the respect.”

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