On June 27 of that year, Palestinian and German terrorists hijacked an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris with more than 200 passengers. It was an era of hijackings: Benjamin Netanyahu, also in Sayeret Matkal, had been wounded during the freeing of a hijacked plane in Israel in 1972.

But the terrorists had learned from that one. This time they had the jet flown farther away than they thought the Israelis could ever reach, to the main airport in Entebbe, Uganda, which was in the grip of one of the most destructive and cartoonish characters to ever rule in Africa, Idi Amin.

Amin, who called himself the uncrowned king of Scotland and the “Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas,” had recently thrown in his lot with the Arab world, and he dispatched his soldiers to surround the hostages at the Entebbe airport.

The Israelis, at first, were inclined to meet the terrorists’ demands and free dozens of prisoners. It seemed impossible to stage a rescue.

Uganda was more than 2,000 miles away. Few of Israel’s planes had that range, and if anything went wrong, there was no backup. This was before cellphones and satellite images became ubiquitous: The Israelis did not even know how many Ugandan soldiers were guarding the airport or exactly where the hostages were being housed.

“The distance was long, time was short, and the situation was blind,” recalled Shimon Peres, 92, who was Israel’s defense minister at the time and went on to be prime minister and president.

It was when the terrorists began separating the Jews from the non-Jews, readying them for execution, that things changed. Mr. Peres, who lost members of his family in the Holocaust, remembered saying: “What? Again? Now that we have an independent Israel? No way.”