TWENTY-FIVE years ago today, America was basking in the glorious celebration of the nation’s bicentennial, a commemoration of the world’s most successful establishment of freedom and liberty.

Thousands of miles away, Israelis were also rejoicing: Their armed forces had given the world its own concrete declaration of the imperatives of freedom.

Hours earlier, a crack unit of the Israel Defense Forces had staged a daring and unprecedented rescue of 102 hostages – most of them Israelis – whose Air France jet had been hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists and flown to Uganda’s Entebbe Airport, where they were under the malevolent “protection” of the brutal dictator Idi Amin.

As a fitting symbol of the lightning-like swiftness and precision of the mission, the rescuers and the newly freed hostages were already heading back home before Amin knew that the raid had taken place: He only learned about it in a telephone call from Uri Dan, then Israel’s leading military reporter and now The Post’s Middle East correspondent, whose subsequent story was one of the century’s great news exclusives.

Only one soldier was killed during the rescue – Yonatan Netanyahu, commander of the raid, whose younger brother Benjamin would later become Israel’s prime minister.

Over the past quarter-century, the raid on Entebbe has maintained its place in Israeli national consciouness. “Something about Operation Entebbe apparently touched a very deep chord in the national psyche,” the Israeli paper Haaretz said in an editorial Sunday. “It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of the fact that Entebbe retroactively turned into a kind of multi-layered, multi-level intersection of great importance to our lives.”

The fallen Netanyahu himself quickly became the subject of a public adoration cult unprecedented in Israeli history; not even the nation’s founding fathers have achieved the almost mythic – yet entirely deserved – hero status of Yoni Netanyahu.

These days, in the face of Yasser Arafat’s continued use of terror as a diplomatic tool, Israel has good cause to remember Entebbe. For it was a moment, as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said this week, “when Israel stood up and, in the face of the entire community of nations, waged a battle against violence and terrorism, proving that we can win.”

Indeed, added Sharon, Israel’s leaders at the time understood Entebbe’s long-term implications: “This was not only an operational decision but a strategic one,” he said. “The risk of surrendering to terrorism is a great strategic risk, much higher than the risks involved in a difficult and complex military operation.”

It was that same risk that led then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin five years later to overrule Israel’s intelligence establishment and order the military strike that destroyed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak – to the world’s condemnation then, and its gratitude later.

Israel has long understood the need to confront terrorism and to constantly maintain the military capability of doing so. That’s why a mission like Entebbe was possible.

Yet other nations, including the United States, offer little more than lip service to the neeed to actively wage war against terrorism. Which is one reason why a mission like the aborted 1980 Desert One rescue attempt of American hostages in Iran (in which helicopters collided, killing eight U.S. soldiers) ended in failure.

True, the nature of international terrorism has changed since 1976. As retired Israeli Gen. Ephraim Sneh notes in the Jerusalem Post, such terrorism is now rooted in religious concepts rather than strictly political ones. Moreover, it is now mostly state-sponsored and designed to inflict maximum casualties.

But its ultimate objective is the same. And the world has largely retreated in fear from openly and effectively confronting it.

Shimon Peres, who as Israel’s defense minister was the most forceful advocate of the Entebbe raid, spelled out at the time how much was at stake: “Once Israel capitulates to terrorists,” he warned, “the real extortion begins.”

That’s the reason why Sharon today refuses to negotiate under fire from Arafat and his allies. But it’s a lesson that the world at large still fails to understand.