PM recalls telling parents of brother’s death

Speaking at the official Memorial Day ceremony on Mount Herzl, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recalls telling his parents that his brother Yoni Netanyahu had been killed during the 1976 raid at Entebbe.

“That terrible knock on the door by the bearers of bad news, I got as an Israeli student in Boston, by way of a telephone call from my brother, Ido, who told me about Yoni’s death — our older brother. This was the worst moment in my life, except for one — when I became the one to tell my father and mother. I was the one who knocked on my parents’ door in New York,” he says.

“Through the large window peering into the house, I saw my father pacing to and fro, lost in thought, his hands behind his back in his typical fashion. Suddenly he averted his gaze when he saw me coming up the path. Without saying a word, his expression changed at once, and he let out a bitter cry. I went inside. As long as I live, I will not forget his screams, and the screams of my mother. To receive the knock on the door from my brother, and to knock on my parents’ door — it was as if Yoni had died twice.”

Netanyahu says that for the bereaved, “the wounds don’t ever heal.”

“When I need to decide whether to send our soldiers out to battle, I think about every soldier and every family as if it were my son, as it were my family,” he says.

“We are one family — Jews and our non-Jewish brethren — Druze, Muslims, Bedouins, Christians. We are partners in good times and bad, in suffering and joy.”