Saving Sergeant Netanyahu
How Israel’s future prime minister was nearly killed in his first battle, as recalled by the comrades who rescued him while under Egyptian fire in the waters of the Suez Canal
October 25, 2012, 4:21 pm
0- THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
On May 13, 1969 Sgt. Benjamin
Netanyahu made his way west through the marshlands of northwestern
Sinai. He was seated in an armored half-track. Night had just fallen and
the future prime minister would soon be in a battle for his life in the
warm, tidal waters of the Suez Canal.Speaking before a joint session of Congress in
2011, Netanyahu made a terse and uncharacteristic mention of that
evening. “I remember what it was like before we had peace,” he told the
ardently hospitable crowd. ”I was nearly killed in a firefight inside
the Suez Canal. I mean that literally.”
Benjamin
Netanyahu, back row, third from left, in tank top, with his platoon
mates on a command car (Photo credit: Courtesy: Avi Feder/ reproduction
prohibited)
Israel’s prime minister, who was inducted into
the army two months after the end of the Six-Day War and returned from
MIT to fight in the Yom Kippur War, was twice wounded in battle but has
never been closer to death than on that night, 43 years ago. It is hard
to say that it shaped him as a leader, or made him into the man he is
today. But surely his prolonged fight in those dark waters, struggling
with an impossibly heavy pack and a life vest that wouldn’t inflate, as
he got passed from hand to hand and was brought to the surface only to
be lost again amid the deadly fire and the bedlam of an ambush, brought
to the fore qualities he already possessed – fierce determination and
uncommon strength. Those, along with the devotion of his friends, are
what stood between him and a watery grave.Time has weathered and eroded the memories of
the men who saved him. The details of the mission do not always match
up. There are holes and contradictions within their stories. Some, for
instance, remember the long retreat, in the face of the dawning day and
the certain artillery fire that would follow, as spread out and
disorderly, much “like Napoleon’s army leaving Russia.” Others say they
rode back in the half-tracks. But all have a clear memory of that awful
moment when the Egyptians lit up the night with machine gun fire, and
all remember the “dreadfully slow” moments that ensued during which
Netanyahu nearly sank to the bottom of Ferdinand de Lesseps’
manually-dug canal.
Joining the Unit
Netanyahu left 12th grade at
Cheltenham High School in Pennsylvania several days before graduation
and returned to Israel in June 1967. Ben, as he was known to his
American friends, wanted to one-up his older brother, Yoni, and join not
just the Paratroops but Sayeret Matkal (the General Staff
Reconnaissance Unit), a commando unit whose name, like God’s, was not to
be spoken. The Unit, then still making a name for itself as Israel’s
top outfit and forever seared into the public consciousness for the
daring raid on Entebbe that cost Yoni Netanyahu his life, was at the
time a Skull and Bones-type society: you had to be tapped by someone
else in the unit in order to be accepted.Netanyahu was also straight laced
and uncompromising, to the point of being ‘a bit of a nerd,’ said Avi
Feder, another team member.A Jerusalemite who had served in the unit
recommended Netanyahu, and Uzi Yairi, the commander at the time,
interviewed him at the induction center and approved the endorsement.
Five months later, in January 1968, after completing Paratrooper
training with the 202nd battalion, he and 19 other men showed
up in Haifa, in civilian clothes, and met their officers, Amiram Levin,
a future general and deputy director of the Mossad, and Rafi Bar-Lev,
the nephew of the Chief of the General Staff. They were split into two
groups of 10 – to this day, Sayeret Matkal always drafts two parallel
teams that train with, and compete against, one another.The young men were given boots, uniforms and
gear and then told to follow their officers. Levin, without much
preamble, proceeded to hike for 120 kilometers (75 miles), mostly along a
wet and stormy coastline, until they reached the gates of the unit.
Netanyahu, Ronit Vered wrote in a 1997 biography, fell into a sewage
ditch on the way but soldiered on.
Benjamin Netanyahu, right, training in 1971 (Photo credit: Wikicommons/ GPO)
Force and fortitude: those were the
outstanding characteristics that nearly all of the men who knew him then
used to describe him.
“He was incredibly motivated, really in an
extraordinary way,” said Doron Salzberg, the manager of a gas station
near Kibbutz Einat and one of the five remaining men from his team. “He
was very strong, too, wouldn’t ever let anyone switch him when carrying
the stretcher.”Netanyahu was also straight-laced and
uncompromising, to the point of being “a bit of a nerd,” said Avi Feder,
another team member. Feder recalled a long navigation hike they did
together during a particularly hot day in the desert. Toward the end,
they reached a water tank filled with dozens of gallons of water.
Netanyahu initially refused to drink, Feder said, because he believed
the water was meant for the other team even though there was more than
enough for everyone.For Netanyahu, as someone who had spent his
formative high school years in the US and as the son of a man who served
as secretary to the father of Revisionist Zionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky,
integration into the unit, which was redolent with a kibbutz ethos, was
not smooth. “I remember the look on his face, the way he went pale, when
I told him what I thought about the Vietnam War,” said another team
member, Michael Kovner, a leading Israeli artist and son of Abba Kovner,
a poet, socialist, and partisan leader during WWII. “As far as I was
concerned, the Vietcong were freedom fighters and the Americans were
occupiers,” said Kovner, who was raised in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh.
Netanyahu, Kovner said, told him that he “had met” people who opposed
the war in Vietnam but never anyone who actually rooted for the other
side.
Benjamin Netanyahu as a soldier in Sayeret Matkal (Photo credit: Wikicommons/ GPO)
In March, just two months after entering the
unit, two of the men in the team, Zohar Linik and David Ben-Chamo, were
killed during a training accident. Netanyahu held Ben-Chamo in the back
of a command car as Levin sped to the hospital. “He died in my arms,”
Netanyahu said earlier this year during his Memorial Day speech.Several months after that, in September,
Levin’s jeep rolled over a mine; he suffered third degree burns on his
face. Alone in the field, it took him nine hours to crawl to help.In December 1968, the team took part in one of
the IDF’s more bizarre missions: in response to several Palestinian
attacks against El Al planes and passengers, a group of Paratroopers and
commandos, in dress uniforms and with red berets on their heads, were
airlifted to Beirut’s international airport, where they removed
passengers from 14 Arab-owned civilian airplanes and blew up the planes.Still, by May 1969, they had yet to face enemy fire.
The Mission
On May 11, 1969, several dozen soldiers from
the unit headed out from Baluza, in the Israeli-controlled Sinai near
the Mediterranean Sea, to the Suez Canal. They crossed at night and
waited in ambush for Egyptian troops. The War of Attrition was in full
swing. The Israeli and the Egyptian armies faced each other on either
side of the canal and each side sought to extract a price, in blood and
psychological damage, from the other. Deadly artillery from the
Egyptians was the norm. Israeli air attacks deep in Egypt were common.
Egyptian commandos laid ambushes along the Israeli road that connected
the frail and distant strongholds; Israelis responded in kind.
An American helicopter sweeping the canal several years after the ill-fated mission (Photo credit: Wikicommons)
The troops waited for an Egyptian army
vehicle, opened fire, killed the men inside, hurried back across the
water and were home well before first light.The army top brass were so pleased with the results, they decided to do it again.After a day of rest and organization, several
dozen soldiers from Sayeret Matkal and seven frogmen from the Naval
Commandos left Baluza as evening thickened into darkness. There was no
moon during the early hours of the night. They made their way to the
canal on armored half-tracks.The soldiers gathered on the eastern bank of
the canal, near al-Tina, and lay down on their stomachs as the frogmen
began to work. Three of them each tied a thin parachute cord around
their waists and slipped into the water. On the other side they probed
the ground for mines and then scrambled up the bank and watched for
enemy movement. Satisfied that there was none, they screwed an anchor
deep into the dirt and pulled the cord taut. Slowly and silently,
without so much as the dip of a paddle, the thin cord would pull
Netanyahu and his mates across the water.The mission commander positioned three heavy
machine gun squads on the east bank of the canal. One each to the north
and south, to cut off possible reinforcement troops, and one opposite
the crossing point. Then the 24 Sayeret Matkal soldiers and three Naval
Commandos walked the already inflated rafts down a cobblestone ramp and
into the water.Israel Asaf, later the deputy commander of the
Naval Commandos, was the captain of Netanyahu’s boat. He fed the cord
through a metal contraption at the helm of the raft and then through a
wheel under his seat in the back. By peddling, the wheel spun and the
boat glided across the water.
Israel Asaf, sketching the battle on a piece of paper (Photo credit: Mitch Ginsburg/ Times of Israel)
Amos Danieli, a member of Bar-Lev’s team, said
that for the duration of the 180-meter crossing he “felt like a duck,”
utterly susceptible to whatever the night might hold.There were three boats in total, with the
middle boat in the lead. Netanyahu, seated second from the helm on the
right side of the southernmost raft, alongside Doron Salzberg, carried a
leaden crate of 7.62 ammunition and the brutal but unwieldy Belgian FN
MAG machine gun, generally assigned to the strongest and most committed
members of a platoon.
Slowly they moved across the water. Danieli
and Salzberg, 43 years later, were still visibly impressed with the
discipline and capabilities of the Egyptian troops. “There were all
kinds of stories after ’67, about boots being left in the sand and that
kind of thing, but from what I saw they were very skilled soldiers,”
said Danieli.
The Egyptians soldiers, who Salzberg said
received a commendation for their efforts that night, waited until the
Israeli boats were at the western edge of their killing zone – far from
the Israeli shore and still under the gaze of their guns.When the lead boat was 30 meters away, the
Egyptians opened fire with long hard blasts of machine gun and anti-tank
fire. In the lead boat, one of the best soldiers in the unit, Chaim
Ben-Yona, a member of Bar-Lev’s team who had recently returned from
officer’s school, was shot in the head. The impact was so forceful that
it catapulted him out of the boat and into the water. Without so much as
a noise, he was gone. One soldier later testified to having seen a
flash of his boots as he went over. (Frogmen searched for his body
throughout the night and into the day. Several days later the Egyptians
found and returned his remains.)In Asaf’s boat, the one ferrying Netanyahu,
the soldiers instinctively rushed toward the back of the boat, away from
the oncoming fire. Slowly the nose of the boat rose into the air until
all eight soldiers were dropped into the water.Netanyahu, Asaf said, made a last ditch effort to throw his machine gun on board as he went over.As soon as the soldiers were deposited in the
water, the boat righted itself. On the Israeli side, 18 heavy machine
guns sprayed tracers across the water, creating what Asaf called “a
river of light” some six to 10 feet above his head. The reflection lit
up the black water and he immediately counted heads.Netanyahu was in the water,
nowhere near the lifeline, fighting to keep his head up. He was trapped
by his pack, expiring under the weight of it. ‘For us soldiers in the
unit,’ Danieli clarified, ‘ditching equipment into the water was the
type of offense you’d be killed before doing’“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,” he
showed me in a café near Caesarea, punching the air with his index
finger. Then he counted again, frantically, “like a mother goose” and
realized he was missing one of his men. “When they are on the water,
they are under my command. My responsibility,” said Asaf, who later
commanded the Israeli landing at the mouth of the Awali River on the
first night of the Lebanon War in 1982.Under fire, Asaf raced to the front of the
boat, lay on his stomach, and looked out at the shimmering water. He saw
a dimple surrounded by a larger circle – the type of impression that a
rock might leave after being tossed in a well. Grabbing the line on the
side of the boat, he leaned over and plunged his arm deep into the
water, above the elbow. On that first attempt he hit the bushy curls and
hard head of Benjamin Netanyahu. “He had curls like Yoni’s,” Asaf
recalled.Netanyahu was motionless, dead weight. “He did
not even grab my hand, which is what drowning men usually do. They
cling fiercely,” Asaf said.Asaf hooked Netanyahu’s arm to the rescue line
on the side of the boat and tried to propel them back to the eastern
shore, a task that was complicated by the fact that the commando on the
other side had cut the cord, perhaps so that the Egyptians would not
reel in the boat. From Asaf’s perspective, Netanyahu was safe.Netanyahu’s ordeal, however, was far from over.
Asaf said that when he hooked Netanyahu’s arm
through the lifeline, all eight men were hanging on to the side of the
boat. The only question as far as he was concerned was how to get the
untethered craft back to the eastern shore and away from the Egyptian
fire.
Doron Salzberg at the gas station he manages near Kibbutz Einat (Photo credit: Mitch Ginsburg/ Times of Israel)
As always in combat situations, however, the
individual memories of the people who took part in the mission do not
neatly fit together. Salzberg remembers jumping into the water under
fire, not sliding in, and sitting on the left, not the right. He said
that today he knew a Naval Commando had pulled Netanyahu out of the
water by his hair, but that he had first encountered Netanyahu in the
water, nowhere near the lifeline, fighting to keep his head up.Salzberg had been carrying an anti-tank mine
and other heavy equipment in his pack. He managed to dive down, struggle
free of the pack which was under his life vest, inflate the vest and
come up for air.Netanyahu, though, was trapped by his pack,
expiring under the weight of it. Salzberg wiggled it free, hoisted the
pack out of the water, and threw it back on board. “For us soldiers in
the unit, ditching equipment into the water was the type of offense
you’d be killed before doing,” Danieli clarified.Then Salzberg went back to Netanyahu and tried
to inflate his vest, which only partially filled with air — and anyway,
it was insufficient to float the weight they carried. “He fought the
whole time to keep his head above water and was already completely
spent,” Salzberg said.Somehow, in the dark, under fire, amid the tug
of the northerly currents in the canal, Salzberg, who spoke to me in
short sentences and kept trying to minimize his role and end the story,
lost his hold on his nearly drowned friend.Once again, Netanyahu was left to fend for himself.
Danieli was in the lead boat. He recalls the
return to the Israeli shore, without Chaim Ben-Yona and under fire
throughout, as an awful ordeal. Near the very western edge of the water,
just as they were preparing to jump out of the boats, he saw the
still-drowning Netanyahu. “Bibi was in the water, fighting for his life.
I could barely pull him out. As though he didn’t want to cooperate. He
was completely depleted.”
Amos Danieli in his home in Karmei Yosef (Photo credit: Mitch Ginsburg/ Times of Israel)
Danieli dragged Netanyahu, who seems to have
kept himself alive by sheer willpower, out of the water and onto solid
ground. They crawled up the stone ramp. A few feet away was a raised
dirt bulwark that would provide cover. Before they could reach it, an
RPG anti-tank rocket exploded beside them, the shrapnel absorbed by the
soft earth. “There was a massive boom and Bibi went flying backward,”
said Danieli, a writer and real estate developer who received me in his
home in a teal t-shirt and red Crocs.At this point the stories diverge. Some recall
taking the rafts with them; others say they were left behind. Salzberg,
Danieli, and Kovner recall a brutal retreat through the mud swamps on
the eastern shore of the canal, sinking in up to their knees with each
step; Asaf and Feder remember riding home on half-tracks. Some said
there was enemy fire throughout the operation, with Egyptian artillery
tracking them all the way home. Others said there was but one blast in
the beginning and little additional fire.What they all agreed on, though, was that they had done nothing special in saving Netanyahu.Kovner was on the far shore, serving as
Levin’s radio operator. Clearly left-wing himself, he said that today
the prime minister “sickens him.” He likened Netanyahu to the bramble in
the Jotham’s parable
in Judges – the least worthy of the trees, who rules over all others
and burns them to the ground for showing insufficient trust. Never, he
said, does he think of that night as the night the future prime minister
was saved, but as the night Chaim Ben-Yona was lost.Salzberg said that saving Netanyahu’s life was “just part of my army service” and not anything “that I think about.”Danieli echoed that sentiment, saying that his
actions were “normal” and that when the guys get together they talk
about “Chaim and about the operation and not the little details.”Asaf, originally a kibbutznik from Degania
Bet, described Netanyahu’s situation when he pulled him out of the water
as having “one-and-a-half feet in the grave.” Several years ago, he
said he received a phone call from Netanyahu. There had been some
confusion as to who initially had saved his life. Asaf called Sara
Netanyahu’s brother, Matanya, whom he knew, and asked to pass on to the
Netanyahus that it was he who had found Netanyahu under the water.Soon enough, Asaf said, Netanyahu was on the
other end of the line: “Your friends must be cursing you,” Netanyahu
said, before thanking him and assuring him that he knew exactly who had
pulled him to the surface.
(FILES) In this photo taken on
October 16, 2012 the Finnish ship SV Estelle is seen during an operation
off the southern Greek island of Gavdos, south of Crete. The Israeli
navy on October 20, 2012 boarded a boat carrying pro-Palestinian
activists and parliamentarians seeking to breach Israel's naval blockade
on Gaza, a statement from the military said. "A short while ago,
Israeli navy soldiers boarded Estelle, a vessel which was en route to
the Gaza Strip, attempting to break the maritime security blockade," it
said, indicating the Finnish-flagged vessel was being led to the
southern Israeli port of Ashdod. (AFP)Israeli troops on Saturday boarded
a boat carrying
pro-Palestinian MPs and activists seeking to run its naval blockade on
the Gaza Strip, blocking the latest attempt to reach the enclave by sea,
the military said.The operation, which the military said was concluded
peacefully,
ended the latest bid by activists to breach Israel's tight maritime
embargo on Gaza which prohibits all naval traffic in and out of the
Palestinian coastal territory."A short while ago, Israeli navy soldiers
boarded (the MV) Estelle, a
vessel which was en route to the Gaza Strip, attempting to break the
maritime security blockade," the military said in a statement,
indicating the Finnish-flagged vessel was being led to Ashdod port in
southern Israel."There was no violence," a military spokeswoman told
AFP, saying
troops had taken control of the 53-metre (174-foot) vessel. "The
passengers did not resist."On board the ship are 17 passengers, among
them five parliamentarians
from Europe and a former Canadian lawmaker, organisers said. It was
also carrying a shipment of humanitarian aid and 30 doves, which
the passengers had been intending to release on arrival in Gaza.The
announcement came shortly after organisers told AFP that the ship
had "come under attack" after being approached by navy vessels some 38
nautical miles off the Gaza coast.The military said the boarding was
carried out only after "numerous calls to the passengers onboard" which
went unanswered. "As a result of their unwillingness to cooperate and
after ignoring
calls to change course, the decision was made to board the vessel and
lead it to the port of Ashdod," the military said, indicating that
troops "did not need to use force."On arrival at Ashdod, the ship's
passengers would be handed into police custody and then onto the
immigration authorities.Activists on previous Gaza-bound flotillas which
were stopped by the
navy have all been taken to Israel and immediately deported. The vessel
had set sail from Sweden several weeks ago, stopping off
in Finland, France and Spain before leaving the Italian port of Naples
on October 6. "The Estelle is now under attack -- I have just had a
message from them
by phone," Victoria Strand, a Stockholm-based spokeswoman for the Ship
to Gaza-Sweden campaign told AFP at 0830 GMT.Among those on board are
parliamentarians Ricardo Sixto Iglesias from
Spain, Sven Britton from Sweden, Aksel Hagen of Norway, and Vangelis
Diamandopoulos and Dimitris Kodelas, both from Greece. Former Canadian
lawmaker Jim Manly is also on board.Strand said the Estelle, which has
previously been used in Greenpeace
missions, had been expected to dock in Gaza late Saturday
afternoon.Activists organised a major attempt to break the Israeli
blockade in
May 2010, when six ships led by the Turkish-owned Mavi Marmara tried to
reach Gaza. 
