or so from the terminal, Yoni was hit. He’d been shot from the control tower. I realized that unexpected setbacks or slip-ups were inevitable in any operation. But the crucial first stage of the attack had not only gone wrong. It had gone wrong in exacrly the way that we had first discussed back at the sayeret base, and now Yoni was dead because of it.
I had to remain in Kenya for a few more days. Though we’d rescued 102 passengers and crew, three of the hostages had been killed in the crossfire. While most of the injuries to the others were minor, we arranged to have several of the more seriously wounded taken to a Nairobi hospital. So I was unable to join the gathering of hundreds on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem for Yoni’s funeral. Or to hear Shimon Peres praise him in terms I knew must have filled his parents and Bibi, too, with enormous pride. Shimon described him as “one of Israel’s finest sons, one of its most courageous warriors, one of its most promising commanders.”
The first evening I was back, however, I visited the Netanyahus at their family home in Jerusalem: Ben-Zion and Tzila, the parents; Ido, the youngest of the three children, and Bibi, who was still at MIT. It was a few nights in the shivah, the seven days of mourning, and there were dozens of other well- wishers there as well. I spoke to Bibi first, outwardly strong but I sensed still overwhelmed by their loss. Hugging him, I said the weeks ahead would be tough, not just because of Yoni’s death, but because much of the responsibility of providing emotional support for his parents, both in their sixties, would fall on his 26-year-old shoulders. This was the first time I’d met the father, Ben- Zion, face to face, but I was struck by how this balding, professorial figure seemed able to keep inside the pain and loss he must have been feeling. He did clearly know of me, both from Bibi and from the frequent letters always wrote to him at Cornell. Now, after I’d said what I could to comfort him, he asked whether we could meet again. When we did, a few days later, he was clearly conscious of the his late, lost son’s bourgeoning place in Israel’s pantheon of national heros. He asked me to be one of the speakers at Yoni’s shloshim, a commemorative event in Jerusalem which, in Jewish religious tradition, would mark the end of the first month of mourning. “You knew him well,” he said, and proceeded to stress the importance of using my remarks to explain, and elaborate on, Yoni’s powerful accomplishments and personal legacy.
I thought about what he wanted, and about Yoni himself, in the days ahead. About the tragedy of his death, but also the way in which all of us now had to draw meaning, value, and ideally something of permanence from the feelings of
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