Israel — Then & Now

Israel's Military Survival: The Ancient Promise of Divine Protection

No nation in the modern world has lived under the threat of annihilation so continuously as the State of Israel. From the hour of its rebirth it has been surrounded by neighbors who declared, often in plain language, their intention to destroy it. Smaller than many American states, with a population that for decades could be counted in the low millions, it has faced coalitions of nations many times its size and has, against every reasonable expectation, survived and prevailed. The military analyst explains this by training, technology, and doctrine, and there is truth in that explanation. The Christian who reads the Scriptures sees something underneath it — the keeping of an ancient promise that the One who watches over Israel does not sleep.

It is the disproportion that arrests the honest observer. Three times in twenty-five years — in 1948, in 1967, and in 1973 — the young state faced odds that, set down on paper, should have ended its existence. The casualty figures alone tell the story of how lopsided the survival was. In the war of independence Israel lost roughly six thousand of its people, nearly one percent of the entire population, yet inflicted far greater losses on the invading armies and held its ground. In 1967 the imbalance grew starker still; in 1973, attacked without warning on its holiest day, the nation came within a hair of catastrophe and then turned the tide. A skeptic may assign all of this to strategy and circumstance, and a believer need not deny the role of either. But the pattern itself — the few standing against the many, again and again, and not being consumed — is precisely the pattern the Scriptures had described long before there was a modern state to fulfill it.

Surrounded From the First Day

The Israel Defense Forces were formally established in May 1948, in the very week the state was declared and invaded. There was no time to build an army in peace; the army was assembled in the act of survival. A community of some six hundred and fifty thousand, lightly armed and encircled by the regular armies of five nations, was expected by the world’s strategists to be overrun within days. It was not. The young state held, and at terrible cost secured its existence. From that first war onward, a pattern emerged that has held for three quarters of a century: Israel does not fight for territory or empire; it fights, again and again, simply to continue to exist.

The scale of the disadvantage in 1948 is difficult to overstate. The infant state had no air force to speak of, no armored corps, and an arsenal cobbled together from whatever could be smuggled past an international arms embargo. Its soldiers included Holocaust survivors who had stepped off refugee ships and gone almost directly into battle, men and women who had lost everything in Europe and now stood to lose the one refuge that remained. Arrayed against them were the established armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, with armor, artillery, and aircraft, supported by irregular forces already operating inside the land. The Secretary-General of the Arab League spoke openly of a war of extermination. By every measure that strategists use to predict the outcome of wars, the verdict was clear: the Jewish state would not last the summer. That it not only survived but emerged with its borders secured is the first entry in a ledger of improbabilities that has only grown longer with the decades.

This is the essential context for understanding the Israeli military. It is not the instrument of an expansionist ambition. It is the shield of a people who have learned across two thousand years of exile and persecution that when they are defenseless, no one comes to save them. The memory of the Holocaust — of a Europe that watched six million Jews murdered — is woven into the very purpose of the modern Jewish state and its army. “Never again” is not a slogan in Israel. It is a defense doctrine.

The individual stands of 1948 read almost like episodes from the book of Judges. At the kibbutz of Degania, in the valley below the Sea of Galilee, a handful of defenders faced advancing Syrian armor with little more than rifles and improvised explosives. When the first tank rolled into the settlement, a defender disabled it with a thrown firebomb; the Syrian column, apparently convinced it had run into a well-armed anti-tank position, broke off and withdrew. At Mishmar Haemek, a few hundred residents and lightly armed fighters held off a far larger force of the Arab Liberation Army equipped with artillery, and then turned the defense into a counter-offensive that secured the surrounding villages. These were not the victories of a great war machine. They were the desperate stands of farmers and refugees, outnumbered and outgunned, who held because they had nowhere left to retreat. That such stands succeeded as often as they did is the kind of fact that makes even secular historians reach, almost involuntarily, for the language of the miraculous.

Six Days in June

In June 1967, with the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan massed on its borders and Arab leaders openly promising to drive the Jews into the sea, Israel struck first and, in the space of six days, achieved one of the most decisive victories in modern military history. Outnumbered in men, tanks, and aircraft, the nation emerged not destroyed but enlarged — and for the first time since the Roman destruction, the whole of Jerusalem, including the Old City and the site of the Temple, was once again under Jewish sovereignty. Hardened soldiers wept at the Western Wall. Whatever one’s politics, the speed and completeness of that deliverance left even secular observers reaching for words like “miraculous.”

The Christian Zionist must be careful here, and honest. The Bible does not hand us a formula by which every Israeli military victory is a fulfilled prophecy and every setback a divine rebuke. To read events that way is to presume upon God. What Scripture does give us is a settled theme, repeated from the Law to the Prophets: that the God of Abraham has bound Himself to preserve the people of Israel, and that He will not allow them to be erased from the earth. The events of 1967 do not prove that theme. But they are remarkably consistent with it.

Honesty requires acknowledging the other side of the ledger as well. Serious historians, including prominent Israeli ones, have pointed out that the 1967 victory can be explained in ordinary military terms: Israel struck first, destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground in the opening hours, and fought a far better led and better coordinated campaign than its divided and poorly commanded adversaries. The Six-Day War is taught at West Point not as an inexplicable wonder but as a case study in how a smaller force can defeat a larger one through surprise, initiative, and competence. The believer gains nothing by pretending the natural explanations do not exist. But there is no contradiction here. Scripture does not generally describe God overriding the natural order; far more often it shows Him working through it — through the courage of a defender, the timing of a decision, the failure of an enemy’s nerve. To say that 1967 can be explained militarily and to say that the God of Israel preserved His people in 1967 are not rival claims. The question is simply how deep one is willing to look beneath the surface of events.

Out of the Depths: 1973

If 1967 tempts the believer toward triumphalism, the war of 1973 is its sober corrective. On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, when much of the nation was at prayer and fasting, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack. In the opening days Israel reeled; its lines were nearly broken; its losses were grievous. Only after desperate fighting did the tide turn and the assault was thrown back. The lesson of 1973 is not that Israel is invincible. It is that survival is never automatic, that the cost is always real, and that confidence in chariots and horses — in tanks and aircraft — is never a substitute for dependence upon God. Israel learned in 1973 the same lesson the psalmist had recorded three thousand years before: that the salvation of the nation rests finally not in its army but in its God.

The detail of those October days makes the point vividly. The attack came with such force and such surprise that Prime Minister Golda Meir later admitted she had contemplated the unthinkable; the chief of staff spoke in those first hours of the possible destruction of the Third Temple, his grim shorthand for the state itself. On the Golan Heights a thin line of Israeli tanks stood between the Syrian armored divisions and the heart of the country, holding through exhaustion and against staggering odds until reserves could reach them. In the south, after the initial Egyptian success across the Suez Canal, Israeli forces under daring commanders recrossed the canal, encircled an entire Egyptian army, and reversed the course of the war. When Israel’s stocks of munitions ran dangerously low, an emergency American airlift — authorized in a way that surprised even those who arranged it — resupplied the nation at the decisive moment. Israelis who lived through it described the outcome not in the language of strategy but in the language of the Psalms: stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord. The nation had been brought to the edge of the abyss, looked over it, and been drawn back.

The spiritual significance of the timing was lost on no one. The attack had been launched on the Day of Atonement precisely because Israel’s enemies knew the nation would be at its most vulnerable, its soldiers home, its cities quiet, the whole people turned toward God in fasting and repentance. What was intended as the moment of maximum weakness became, in the believer’s reading, the moment in which the nation was driven to its knees before the only One who could deliver it. There is an old pattern in the Scriptures by which God allows His people to be brought low, stripped of every false confidence, so that when deliverance comes there can be no doubt about its source. The war that began on Yom Kippur ended with Israel standing, chastened and grateful, having learned again the lesson that the psalmist sang three thousand years before: that the horse is prepared for the day of battle, but safety is of the Lord.

Five Shall Chase a Hundred

There is a particular promise in the Law of Moses that the history of modern Israel seems to illustrate with uncomfortable precision. In the book of Leviticus, among the blessings pronounced upon an obedient people, the Lord declares that five of them shall chase a hundred, and a hundred shall put ten thousand to flight. In the song of Moses in Deuteronomy the same theme appears as a question: how should one chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight, except their Rock had sold them, and the Lord had shut them up? The point of these passages is not arithmetic but disproportion — the deliberate, visible imbalance by which a small and outnumbered people prevails, so that the victory cannot be credited to their own strength.

This is exactly the shape that Israel’s wars have taken. A handful of defenders turning back an armored column; a nation of a few million holding off the combined armies of a region; a thin line on a mountain ridge stopping a force many times its size — the disproportion is not incidental to the story but central to it. One need not claim that every engagement was a supernatural intervention to notice that the overall pattern matches the biblical description with eerie fidelity. The believer is not required to abandon his reason and call every tactical success a miracle. He is invited, rather, to step back and ask why the broad sweep of this history looks so much like the thing the Scriptures said would happen to this people in their land.

The pattern did not end in 1973. In 1976, when terrorists hijacked an airliner and held its Jewish and Israeli passengers hostage at an airport in Uganda, more than two thousand miles from home, Israel mounted a rescue that military professionals around the world still study in disbelief — a night raid across a continent that freed the captives and returned them home. The operation was led at the cost of its commander’s life, and the nation received its rescued citizens with a mixture of grief and wonder that captured the whole paradox of Israel’s survival — deliverance purchased at a price, joy shadowed by sacrifice. Time after time, in operations large and small, the same improbable preservation has repeated itself. The army is real, its soldiers are skilled and brave, and they have paid in blood for every success. And yet the believer who knows the promise reads the long record of survival and sees in it the faithfulness of the One who said He would keep this people, and has. The pattern is too consistent, and the odds too long, to be waved away as the mere good fortune of a well-run state.

The Ancient Promise of Protection

Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures runs a thread of divine commitment to the preservation of Israel. The Lord promised through Zechariah that He Himself would be a wall of fire around Jerusalem and the glory in her midst. He declared through Isaiah that no weapon formed against His servant would prosper. He told a discouraged people through the prophets that though the mountains might depart and the hills be removed, His covenant of peace would not be removed from them. These are not promises that Israel will never suffer, never be attacked, never bleed. The history of the Jewish people forbids any such reading. They are promises that Israel will not be destroyed — that the covenant people will endure to the end of the age, because the One who made the promise endures.

It is worth dwelling on the distinction, because so much confusion flows from missing it. The Bible nowhere promises the Jewish people a life of ease, a freedom from suffering, or an unbroken record of triumph. The opposite is nearer the truth: the prophets foretold exile, oppression, scattering, and sorrow, and the long centuries between the fall of Jerusalem and the rebirth of the state fulfilled those warnings to the letter. What the Scriptures promise is something more stubborn and more astonishing than mere prosperity — survival itself. Empires that set out to destroy the Jewish people have themselves passed into the dust: Egypt of the pharaohs, Assyria, Babylon, the Rome of the Caesars, and a long succession of persecutors since. The people they meant to erase are still here, still praying in the same ancient tongue, still reading the same Scriptures, restored at last to the same land. That endurance, spanning millennia against every probability, is the deepest sign of all that a promise is being kept.

An Army Unlike the Armies of the Nations

There is something distinctive about the army that grew out of these wars, and it is worth pausing to consider it, because it bears on the deeper question of what kind of people Israel is. The Israel Defense Forces are not a professional caste set apart from the population, as armies in many nations are. They are a citizen army — sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, drawn from farms and universities and city streets, who serve and then return to ordinary life, remaining on call as reservists for decades after. When Israel mobilizes, it does not send a separate warrior class to fight on the nation’s behalf; it summons the nation itself. The teacher, the engineer, the shopkeeper, and the student put on the uniform together. This is why every war touches every family, and why the cost of survival has been felt in nearly every home in the land.

That character has roots that reach back into the Scriptures themselves. The armies of ancient Israel, as the Law describes them, were never meant to be instruments of conquest and plunder in the manner of the surrounding empires. They were a people called to defend the inheritance God had given them, sent home to their fields in times of peace, forbidden to trust in mere numbers of horses and chariots. The modern Israeli soldier, whatever the failures of any individual or any operation, stands in a tradition that has always understood the army as a shield rather than a sword of empire — a means of preserving a people in their land, not of building a dominion over others. The contrast with the openly genocidal aims of those who have repeatedly attacked the state could hardly be sharper, and it is a contrast the believer should not be shy to name.

A Word of Caution and a Word of Confidence

Before drawing the threads together, a word of caution is in order, for the theme of divine protection is easily abused. There are those who would turn it into a triumphalist formula, treating every Israeli military action as automatically sanctioned by heaven and every critic of any policy as an enemy of God. That is not Christian discernment; it is a failure of it. Israel is a modern nation-state, governed by sinful men and women as every nation is, and its governments make decisions that may be wise or foolish, just or unjust, like the decisions of any government. To say that God has promised to preserve the Jewish people is not to say that He has endorsed every act of the Israeli cabinet or every operation of its army. The covenant is with a people across the ages, not a blank check for a particular administration.

Nor should the believer fall into the opposite error of treating each battlefield outcome as a direct scorecard of divine favor, as though a victory always meant approval and a loss always meant judgment. The book of Job exists precisely to forbid that crude arithmetic. God’s purposes run deeper than the result of any single engagement, and the faithful have often suffered while the wicked prospered for a season. The right posture is neither triumphalism nor superstition but something humbler and steadier: a quiet confidence that the broad arc of this people’s history is held in faithful hands, combined with a refusal to claim more certainty about any particular event than the Scriptures actually give. The believer reads the survival of Israel as a sign, not as a slot machine.

With those cautions in place, the confidence remains, and it is well founded. The God who promised Abraham that his descendants would be as the stars of heaven, who swore to give them the land, who foretold their scattering and their regathering, has shown Himself faithful across four thousand years. The same faithfulness that carried the people through Egypt and Babylon, through Rome and the long exile, through the unspeakable horror of the twentieth century, has carried them through the wars of the modern state. The army is the visible instrument; the faithfulness is the invisible cause. And the believer who grasps this will neither idolize the soldier nor despise him, but will give thanks to the God who has, thus far, kept every promise He made.

Neither Slumber Nor Sleep

How then should the Christian regard Israel’s army? Not with the worship that belongs to God alone, and not with the naive assumption that every Israeli soldier is a saint and every decision of its government beyond question. Israel is a nation of men and women, and like every nation it is capable of error. But the believer who reads his Bible may regard the survival of the Jewish state, against all the odds of a hostile region and a hostile century, as one of the visible signs that the God of Abraham keeps His word. The same hand that brought the people back to the land has, thus far, preserved them in it.

Consider how strange the very existence of the question is. There is no other ancient people that one can speak of in this way. The nations that surrounded Israel in the days of the kings — the Moabites, the Edomites, the Ammonites, the Philistines, the great empires of Assyria and Babylon — have all vanished utterly, their languages dead, their gods forgotten, their descendants absorbed without trace into other peoples. By every law of history the Jews should have shared that fate many times over; smaller and weaker peoples have disappeared after a single conquest, and Israel endured conquest after conquest, exile after exile, across thousands of years. That there is a Jewish people at all in the twenty-first century, speaking the language of the patriarchs and reading the books of Moses, is already an anomaly without parallel in the human record. That this people should also have returned to the precise land it was promised, and there defended itself against annihilation through three great wars in a single generation, moves the matter from the merely improbable toward the frankly inexplicable — unless one is willing to take seriously the explanation the Scriptures themselves offer.

The proper response is not boasting but gratitude, and not complacency but prayer. We are commanded to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. We are invited to stand with the people through whom the Scriptures, the Messiah, and our own salvation came to us. And we are given the quiet confidence of the psalmist, who looked at a small and vulnerable nation and declared that its true Keeper neither slumbers nor sleeps. The armies of men have their hour, and Israel’s soldiers have paid in blood for every year of the nation’s life. But the final security of Israel was never lodged in its weapons. It rests, as it always has, in the faithfulness of the God who called her into being and has promised never to let her go.

There is a comfort in this for the Christian that reaches beyond the affairs of one nation. The God who has kept Israel through every assault is the same God in whose hands the believer’s own life is held. If He has been faithful to the promises He made to Abraham across four thousand years, through exile and slaughter and against the combined will of empires, then His promises to His people in every age may be trusted with the same confidence. The survival of Israel is not merely a geopolitical curiosity or a subject for the evening news. It is a standing demonstration, written in the history of our own time, that the word of God does not fall to the ground. The Keeper of Israel who does not sleep is the same Lord who has said that He will never leave nor forsake those who are His. To watch over the one and to watch over the other is, for Him, no different thing. And so the believer looks at the small and embattled nation on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, sees it still standing after all that has been hurled against it, and finds in that endurance not only a reason to give thanks but a ground for his own unshakable hope.