On July 4, 1976, as America celebrated its bicentennial, four C-130 aircraft flew blind over the dark waters of the Red Sea and across the Horn of Africa. The pilots took their planes beneath the sweep of commercial radar, their crews relying on basic radio, manual navigation, and raw nerve. The planes were carrying Israeli commandos to a disused airport-terminal building in Uganda, on the shores of Lake Victoria.Inside that terminal were 106 hostages. Two of them were my American parents.For nearly a week, Palestinian and German terrorists had held the passengers from a hijacked Air France flight hostage inside the airport terminal, threatening to kill them unless imprisoned terrorists held in five countries were released.I was six months old, blessedly oblivious to the hijacking, staying with my grandmother in New York and waiting for my parents to come home from their first international trip.As the planes touched down, the commandos launched their rescue mission. One hundred and two of the hostages were rescued; three were killed in the process; and one, a 74-year-old woman who had been taken to a nearby hospital several days earlier, was murdered after the rescue byorder of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who supported the hijacking. Growing up as the child of Entebbe hostages, I knew my life was a gift bestowed by the courage of strangers. Had those planes not taken off or had the mission failed, my family’s story would have been very different. I grew up with parents to raise me. I never take that for granted.[Anne Applebaum: Trump and Vance ruined the Fourth of July]My parents’ rescue on America’s Independence Day was especially meaningful because my family is proof that the promise of American freedom is real. Seven of my eight great-grandparents were murdered in the German death camps of Europe. The grandmother who watched me when my parents were held hostage had survived Auschwitz. After World War II, my father and his parents had been trapped in Hungary as it fell to communism. Yet in coming to America, they were given an opportunity to build a better life, a life in which they were free to practice their faith without fear.Courtesy of the Israel Defense Forces and Defense Establishment ArchivesIn this video (edited for length by The Atlantic), the author's parents are seen disembarking a plane at Ben Gurion Airport, in Tel Aviv, on July 4, 1976.The passage of time has only sharpened the lessons of Entebbe for me. There is a price to be paid for freedom. Capitulation to terror doesn’t work; it is not in the nature of terrorists to compromise. And I grew up understanding that I had a responsibility, a duty, to protect innocent people from terrorism. That, along with my family’s gratitude for America, is why I pursued a career in the U.S. intelligence community. I knew from the time I was little that the world is not inherently safe. Safety is given to us by intelligence analysts reviewing threats 24 hours a day, by commandos ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, and by leaders who find the courage to make the toughest calls. We will always have among us those ready to take hostages, and we will always require good people who are willing to stand up to them and capable of doing so.We are marking the 50th anniversary of the Entebbe rescue—and soon the 25th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in history, on September 11, 2001. Our intelligence services and military have made technical advances in data collection and analysis, in satellite surveillance, and in hostage rescue. But even as democratic governments have become more proficient and more technologically adept at thwarting terrorists, some in our societies have become insensitive, or even callous, about the civilizational consequences of terror and violence.Today, a rescue operation on the scale of Entebbe’s would be monitored in real time from a secure operations center, streamed via high-definition drone feeds, and supported by encrypted satellite networks and teams of intelligence analysts. I’ve observed those operations firsthand.In 1976, the men who flew to Entebbe were very much alone. They traveled nearly 2,500 miles from home into a hostile country, landing on a blacked-out runway with a decoy Mercedes designed to mimic Amin’s limousine. A radar glitch, a malfunctioning fuel gauge, or a watchful guard could have meant failure. Indeed, the mission’s commander, Colonel Jonathan Netanyahu, was killed by a shot from a Ugandan guard in the airport’s control tower.When we talk about military service, we often speak in the abstract language of patriotism and duty. But service is each individual’s decision to risk their life for something they believe in. Those paratroopers knew that this operation was proceeding with extremely limited training and intelligence. Yet they went anyway, driven by the chance to save lives.Before the commandos could board those C-130s, their political leaders had to make the decision to send them. The hijackers had threatened to execute the 106 captives if their demands were not met. In the chaotic days following the hijacking, the path of least resistance was obvious: negotiation and compromise.The prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, however, knew that negotiating with terrorists would encourage the next hijacking. Rabin and his defense minister, Shimon Peres, argued against negotiations, noting that if Israel gave in, “everyone will understand us, but no one will respect us.”The political courage required to make that call was immense. Families of the hostages were actively demonstrating, demanding that the government negotiate. The odds of failure were sizable. Yet true leadership requires the courage to absorb risk when the long-term stakes are high. The ultimate responsibility of a leader is to choose not the easiest option, but the one that best preserves the state’s security and core interests. In that vein, the Kenyan government also showed political courage by allowing the rescue planes to refuel in Nairobi and the injured to be treated there.Terrorism evolved from the 1970s era of hijackings and hostage-takings, designed to capture global media attention, to the religiously motivated, large-scale bombings of the early 2000s. Post-9/11, aggressive counterterrorism fractured those centralized networks. Yet a dangerous intellectual effort continues that romanticizes terrorism and rebrands the deliberate slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of civilians as a justifiable, even an aesthetic, form of “resistance.” We see this in the Middle Eastern context, and we see it here at home: Just consider the number of people who express sympathy for the murderer of a health-care executive or the would-be assassins of President Trump.The irony is that even as we have advanced in our technical ability to discover and disrupt terrorism, some in Western societies have grown forgiving of violent people who feel that the only way for them to achieve their goals is through murder.[From the July 2026 issue: How America gave up on its own history]Fifty years ago, the hijackers at Entebbe also cloaked themselves in the language of liberation. But my parents did not see freedom fighters in that terminal; they saw captors who were willing to use the lives of grandmothers and children as currency. Nothing justified their threats to turn a civilian airport terminal into a slaughterhouse. When we tolerate the romanticization of political violence, we cede the moral high ground and pave the way for another 9/11 or another cowardly attack on a school or music festival.Every time I’ve worked on a policy or an operation designed to disrupt an attack, I have thought of those C-130s flying through the African night to rescue a young couple with a six-month-old baby at home. During the period when I led the NSA’s intelligence operations, I would stop into the 24/7 operations center, especially at night and during holiday weekends, to visit those who were “on the watch” as their fellow Americans were enjoying time with family and friends. One team, devoted to recovering hostages, continuously monitors intelligence regarding American or allied-citizen hostages around the world. It can be tedious work, sometimes spanning years. At times, I would convey to them my parents’ story and how a family waiting somewhere was grateful for their dedication.My parents came home that July Fourth 50 years ago. My family’s history taught me that freedom is fragile. Entebbe taught me that it survives only because people choose to defend it. As we celebrate America’s founding and freedoms, let us take a moment to reflect on those lessons and the link between them. It is not just our technical skills and our brave men and women in uniform and in America’s intelligence services who keep us safe. Leadership matters, and so does the recognition that terrorism should never be excused or tolerated.