Amir Ofer

Amir Ofer: Everybody jumped from the jeeps and the Mercedes. My knees collapsed [laughs]. It took me a second to recover. And I didn’t see my commander. I didn’t see my commander, so I thought that he already ran to the terminal. So I started to run as fast as I can, and bypassing everybody, because I thought that I have to catch up with my commander. As a matter of fact, he was two-three meters behind me, and when I approached the terminal, suddenly the… on my left, I heard someone shouting that Yoni was hit, and I saw him falling. And, give or take in the same time, the glass of the wall was broken and someone was in the terminal surrounded with many hostages, and he was shooting at me. I shot him through the glass. I saw his head falling. He was hit. I jumped into the terminal, and I thought that I’m not the first. I was sure that my commander is already inside, but I suddenly saw that I’m alone in a huge room with hundreds of hostages and several terrorists. So I immediately changed my place, turned to the other side, and I saw two terrorists that were aiming at my back, and at this very moment, my commander, who was running after me, came in through the door and shot them.

Mishy Harman: So you were the first Israeli soldier to enter the terminal at Entebbe?

Amir Ofer: Yes [laughs]. Unintentionally, I was the first one to storm the building and to hit the major terrorists there. That’s it.

Mishy Harman (narration): Hey, I’m Mishy Harman and this is Israel Story. The man we just heard, a man who likes to end most of his understated sentences with “that’s it,” is Amir Ofer. Amir’s a businessman from Mevaseret Zion, who – back in July of 1976 – participated in the heroic rescue of over one hundred Israeli hostages from the Entebbe Airport in Uganda.

Forty-five years after that triumphant military operation, in 2021, at an Ivri Lider rock concert, Amir met, and later befriended, a young officer from the YAMAM, the Israeli Border Police’s elite counter-terrorism unit. That officer was Arnon Zmora, who exactly a year ago this week, was the sole Israeli casualty of yet another heroic rescue operation in Nuseirat, Gaza. The operation, which was later named “Operation Arnon” in his honor, successfully freed four living hostages – Noa Argmani, Shlomi Ziv, Almog Meir Jan and Andrey Kozlov.

Though, as you’ll be able to hear, he’s a man of few words, Amir Ofer – the Entebbe hero – came into our studio to tell us about his unlikely inter-generational friendship with Arnon. Mitch Ginsburg and I spoke to him. Here he is.

Mitch Ginsburg: Amir, if we could just start… if you would introduce yourself, please.

Amir Ofer: Amir Ofer, age 70… that’s it.

Mitch Ginsburg: That’s a very full bio, Amir.

Amir Ofer: Yeah.

Mitch Ginsburg: You did a great job on that. Maybe give us a couple more details?

Amir Ofer: MSc in Computer Sciences, three startups, serving in two special units, the Israeli Navy Seals and Sayeret Matkal. What else? That’s it.

Mitch Ginsburg: OK… Ummm… Can you tell us, like describe, when you first met Arnon Zmora?

Amir Ofer: Emm-hmm. It was a very interesting event. I was in a show. There were about 3000 people there. I was with my wife and a few friends, and suddenly someone approached me – a young, nice guy. And he asked if I’m Amir. And I said, “yes, I’m Amir.” And he said, “I recognized you.” And at first, I thought that someone is cheating me.

Mishy Harman: How did he recognize you?

Amir Ofer: He later told me that he saw me in some book or something else, and he identified the face, which is very impressive. I mean, so many people there and identifying someone like me, and I’m not a public person, but he identified me. And he said, “I am an officer in the YAMAM. My name is Arnon, and if you don’t mind, if you can come and give us a lecture about Entebbe, it will be great. And I said, “OK, of course.” And we set a time for the meeting. That’s it.

Mishy Harman: So then you went to give a talk at the YAMAM?

Amir Ofer: Ken. Yes. I came there several weeks later, and they left a very good impression on me, because, you know, sometimes I’m asked to be to give a lecture to this unit or that unit, and you can look at the faces and the people, and you know if they’re professional or if they’re standard, let’s say, and they were really professional.

Mitch Ginsburg: Hmmm.

Amir Ofer: They knew what questions to ask. Everything was what I expected from this unit, and it was a very good lecture. It was about technical details. And they were very happy, and I was very happy too, because I think that I really contributed something to their experience. And that’s it.

Mishy Harman: OK and then, Amir, two years passed, and October 7th happened. And the YAMAM were of course extremely active on that day. They were basically the first intervention force to arrive at many different scenes of action in the South. And, if I’m not mistaken, nine of their fighters, nine of those soldiers who sat through your lecture, were killed on October 7th.

Amir Ofer: Yeah.

Mishy Harman: Were you thinking about them on October 7th?

Amir Ofer: No, I didn’t think anything about them. But then after a week, I got a phone call from Arnon, and he told me, “I must meet you.” And I said, “whenever you want,” and of course, I will help him in anything that he needs. I didn’t know what he wants to do, and we set a meeting a week after the war started. The meeting was on the street in Beit HaKerem, and we sat two hours, and he described everything that happened to them in the first day. You could see that he is in a… some type of not shock, but he was still under the impression of this first day.

Mitch Ginsburg: Yeah.

Amir Ofer: I mean, they were called at the early morning, they went to the South, and he decided to stop few kilometers before Yad Mordechai and asked everybody to put his gear on himself, which was amazing, because there was nothing there, and nobody knew what’s happening, but he expected that maybe they will meet the enemy a little bit earlier than they expected. And then suddenly they came to the Yad Mordechai Junction, and he saw a few unrecognized motorcycles and cars or whatever. And suddenly three RPGs passed – one from the right, one from the left, and one from above. And they all jumped from their vehicle, and they started the fighting. They killed everybody there. In this first day, they moved from Yad Mordechai to Sderot to Ofakim to here to there. They reloaded their magazines four times. This means that each one of them shoot about seven or eight hundred bullets in this very day. And it was not shooting to an unrecognized target. It was shooting when you see someone, you see the white of their eyes. And then at last, they came to the… what is called the House of Pessi.

Mitch Ginsburg: In Kibbutz Be’eri.

Amir Ofer: In Kibbutz Be’eri.

Mitch Ginsburg: Amir, can you describe for us though what the situation was there? Just like, I don’t know if our listeners will know about what was happening there at Pessi’s house. I don’t know if I know.

Amir Ofer: To the best that I know, it was a house. And there were about ten or twelve hostages there, and about fifty terrorists. They were shooting from the windows, and they… all the methods that they used to rescue those hostages failed. The… failed? They didn’t fail. The terrorists killed all the hostages and also all the terrorists were killed. And… it was impossible. I mean, I know it, professionally I can tell you there was no way that anyone in the world, even God, wouldn’t be able to save those people. Impossible.

Mishy Harman: And you know all this because he, Arnon, reached out to you a few days later to tell you about it and seek your advice?

Amir Ofer: Right. And what bothered him, and all the time he repeated – “how did it happen that you were able to save hundred hostages, and we were not able to extract those twelve guys in the house?” And I saw that he… morally, he was so affected by this situation that he failed. This was the way he considered it – failure. It was not a failure. And I explained it to him that – professionally speaking – there was no way that they could rescue them. And I think that it helped him a little bit to absorb this conflict. And I told him, “look, the best thing to do is take a time, if you have, sit and write everything, everything that you did in this very day, use the smallest details.” And he said, “I will try to do it.” Now, I’m not a shrink or something like that. I simply know because I did it and my friends did it about Entebbe, and it really helped us. It helped us to synchronize between ourselves and to… it was a positive experience. So I told him, “why not you try to do it?” And after a week or so, I got a message from him, and he told me, “you have no idea how helpful was this advice.”

Mishy Harman: Was he looking for a mentor or a role model or father figure or…

Amir Ofer: I have no idea…. Ehhh… I think that he was looking for some… someone to… someone that will convince him that he didn’t make any mistake (and he didn’t make any mistake!). But he had a feeling of… he felt guilty without any justification, and he needed someone who was professional that will tell him, ‘look, you didn’t make any mistake,’ and he didn’t. So I was very happy that I was able to help him, and I gave him one more advice… Never mind. And…

Mitch Ginsburg: Why never mind? Let’s hear.

Amir Ofer: No… I told him, “listen now that you are almost three weeks or four weeks in fighting, you tend to become careless and don’t lose your focus and don’t lose your attention, and be ready all the time. The enemy is not becoming weaker and weaker. No, they’re the same. So whenever you meet the enemy, be very focused.” And I know that now… now I know that he didn’t need this advice at all. He knew it, of course. Later on, he called me, he asked for the book of Entebbe, and we set a meeting. It didn’t happen, because he was called back to his unit. This book is still waiting for him. And I told about all this story to my wife, and suddenly she’s calling me. I was upstairs, and she’s calling me, “come, come to see the television.”

News Broadcast: And we begin this Saturday with breaking news as we take a live look at the Israel-Gaza border. Just moments ago, Israeli forces rescued four Israeli hostages from Gaza. They are alive.

News Broadcast II: Very emotional day. A lone Israeli soldier was killed in the Gaza raid, Arnon Zmora was a commander in the country’s elite counter-terrorism unit. Israel says…

Amir Ofer: And I came and I saw his picture.

Mishy Harman: If Arnon would have called you the night before the operation in which he lost his life, what would you have told him?

Amir Ofer: Good luck. That’s it.

Mishy Harman: Did you, um, you see in Arnon Zmora a little bit of yourself?

Amir Ofer: It’s a good question. I never thought about it, but now that you’re asking it, maybe… but I was luckier. That’s it.