The Arab-Israeli Conflict
The Six-Day War of 1967: How Israel Reclaimed Jerusalem and Judea
The morning of June 5, 1967, began the way most mornings begin in most cities in the world. But in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the weeks before that morning had been unlike anything most Israelis had ever lived through. Egyptian tanks had massed along the border in the Sinai. The Straits of Tiran, through which Israel’s southern port received its oil and much of its trade, had been shut by decree of Egypt’s president. The United Nations peacekeeping force that had stood between the armies since 1956 had been expelled at Egypt’s demand. Jordan had signed a military pact with Nasser. Iraq had sent troops toward the front. Syria’s Soviet-equipped army waited on the fortified heights above the northern Galilee. The Arab world had formed, in open daylight, a coalition whose leaders announced its purpose without ambiguity: the destruction of the State of Israel.
What happened next is one of the most remarkable military events in recorded history. In six days — one hundred and thirty-two hours — Israel destroyed the combined air forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan on the first morning, then dismantled three armies on three fronts, recaptured the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, reunited the city of Jerusalem for the first time in nineteen centuries, and drove to the banks of the Suez Canal and the peak of the Golan Heights. The nation that the world had written off as likely to perish had instead more than tripled in size.
This article tells the full story of that week — how the war started, how it was fought, and how it ended. But it tells it, as Christians Standing With Israel tells all things, with the eye of faith alongside the eye of history. Because there are things in those six days that military analysis does not fully explain — accounts, testimonies, and outcomes that leave the believing reader in the same place where the soldiers themselves stood when it was over: before a mystery too great for pride and too plain for silence.
The World Israel Faced in June 1967
To understand why the Six-Day War was a miracle, it is necessary first to understand what Israel was up against. The State of Israel in 1967 was nineteen years old. It had been born in 1948 in the fire of five Arab armies that attacked the moment independence was declared, and it had survived — barely, at enormous cost. The 1948 War of Independence had ended not in peace but in armistice agreements that the Arab states refused to call peace, and those agreements had left Israel with a map that military men looked at with alarm. At its narrowest point, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, Israel was nine miles wide — the distance a healthy man could walk in an afternoon. A single armored column, breaking through at the right place, could cut the country in two.
In the years since 1948, the Soviet Union had poured weapons into Egypt and Syria. By 1967 Egypt had amassed some 900 tanks, around 600 aircraft, and approximately 100,000 troops on the Sinai border alone. Syria, though smaller, held the commanding terrain of the Golan Heights — a plateau of Soviet-built concrete bunkers overlooking northern Israel from which Syrian artillery had shelled Israeli farms, towns, and kibbutzim for years with near impunity. Jordan, under King Hussein, controlled the West Bank and the eastern half of Jerusalem, and had signed a defense pact that would bring Jordanian artillery within range of Tel Aviv. Together, the three Arab states could field over 250,000 men, 2,000 tanks, and 700 combat aircraft. Israel’s army at full mobilization numbered roughly 275,000 — but the majority were reservists, and mobilizing them meant halting the national economy.
The Palestinian Liberation Organization had been founded in 1964 under the explicit charter goal of destroying Israel, and Palestinian guerrilla raids from Syrian territory had been a regular feature of Israeli life throughout the 1960s. In the spring of 1967, Soviet intelligence — later determined to have been deliberately falsified — informed Egypt that Israel was massing forces on the Syrian border for an imminent attack. Nasser chose to believe the report, or to use it. Either way, he chose war, and the Arab world fell in behind him.
Three Weeks of Terror — The Hamtana
What the Israelis called the hamtana — the waiting — lasted roughly three weeks, from mid-May to June 5, 1967, and those who lived through it have described it as the most frightening passage in Israel’s history since the War of Independence itself. On May 14, Nasser moved nearly 100,000 Egyptian troops and roughly 1,000 tanks into the Sinai Peninsula, directly on Israel’s southern border. On May 19 he demanded, and received, the immediate withdrawal of the United Nations Emergency Force that had been stationed in the Sinai since 1956. The United Nations complied within days — a withdrawal so swift that it seemed almost designed to leave no barrier between the armies.
On May 22, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and overflights, cutting off Israel’s southern port of Eilat and its oil supply. Under international law this was an act of war. In practice, the world offered words. Israel appealed to the United States, to France, to Britain. President Johnson expressed sympathy and made no military commitment. France, Israel’s main arms supplier, would soon impose an embargo. The United Nations was paralyzed. The international fleet that Israel had been promised would break the blockade never materialized; by early June it was clear that no one was coming.
Israel mobilized its reserve forces, calling in the men and women who made up the bulk of its defense — farmers, teachers, bus drivers, students — and watched its economy grind toward a standstill as those reserves waited at the border. On May 30, King Hussein of Jordan flew to Cairo and signed a military pact with Nasser. On June 4, Iraq formally joined the coalition and sent troops westward. Contingents from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were pledged. Israel was now, in the most literal sense, surrounded.
In the cities, Israelis began to prepare for what they feared might come. Parks in Tel Aviv were quietly designated as emergency mass burial sites. Hospitals were told to prepare for tens of thousands of casualties. Hotels were converted into overflow medical facilities. Rabbis fanned out through the cities to advise on emergency civil procedures. The generation that had survived the Holocaust, and the children of that generation, looked at the massing armies and understood that the threat of annihilation was not rhetoric. Those weeks of waiting were, for many who lived through them, worse than the war itself — the war at least permitted action. The waiting permitted only fear, and the darkening silence of a world that had decided not to help. And still the world did nothing.
Operation Focus — The Preemptive Strike
At 7:45 in the morning of June 5, 1967, Israeli Air Force pilots climbed into their aircraft. What followed in the next three hours was perhaps the most decisive single action in the history of modern aerial warfare.
The Israeli plan, known as Operation Focus (Mivtza Moked), had been in preparation for years. Israeli intelligence had mapped every Egyptian airfield with exacting precision — the layout of the runways, the locations and dispersal of aircraft, the timing of radar shifts, the daily routines of pilots and officers. They had identified a window of maximum vulnerability in the Egyptian morning: after breakfast, when senior officers were in transit between facilities and radar operators were rotating shifts, there was a brief but reliable period when the Egyptian air force was at its most exposed. Israel struck at exactly 8:45 AM.
Flying low over the Mediterranean to avoid radar, then rising to attack from the west — from the direction of the rising sun — the Israeli Air Force hit every major Egyptian airfield in simultaneous waves. Aircraft were destroyed on the ground. Runways were bombed in a precise sequence designed not merely to destroy them but to crater them so that surviving aircraft could not take off. The entire operation was coordinated to arrive at multiple airfields at precisely the same moment, leaving no time for warning to spread from one base to another.
In under three hours, the Egyptian Air Force ceased to exist as a fighting force. Two hundred and eighty-six Egyptian aircraft were destroyed. Israeli planes then turned north and east, striking Jordanian and Syrian airfields. By the end of the first day, approximately 400 Arab aircraft — roughly 80 percent of the combined Arab air power — had been destroyed. Israel lost nineteen aircraft in the process.
The consequence of this single morning was that every battle fought in the following five days was fought under complete Israeli air superiority. Egyptian tank columns advancing through the Sinai had no air cover. Jordanian artillery in Jerusalem had no air cover. Syrian fortifications on the Golan had no air cover. The armies on the ground were fighting the war of an earlier century while Israeli planes owned the sky above them. The question of why the coordinated timing worked so perfectly — why 200 sorties arrived simultaneously at multiple targets without alerting Egyptian air defenses, why the window of vulnerability held open exactly long enough — is one that the believing reader may consider alongside the military analysis.
The Sinai Front — Egypt’s Collapse
With air supremacy established in the opening hours, Israeli armored columns drove into the Sinai on three axes. The pivot of the campaign was the Battle of Abu-Ageila, a heavily fortified Egyptian position guarding the central route into the desert. Major General Ariel Sharon planned and executed one of the most technically brilliant night battles in modern military history: a precisely coordinated assault involving armor, infantry, an airborne force dropped by helicopter directly onto the Egyptian artillery positions in complete darkness, and an engineering assault to breach the defensive sand ramparts. The battle was fought through the night of June 5 and 6; by dawn the Egyptian defenses had been broken.
But the true turning point on the Egyptian front was not an Israeli military action at all. On the morning of June 6, Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer — the commander of all Egyptian forces, personally appointed and trusted by Nasser — panicked. Having received news of the air strike and the early ground battles, Amer ordered a full and immediate retreat of all Egyptian forces from the Sinai. The order was given without consultation, without a measured military assessment, without the command process that would normally precede a withdrawal of this scale. It was a decision born of something that defies normal military analysis: Amer, commanding well-equipped forces in prepared positions that had not yet been overrun, simply broke.
Egyptian units that had not yet been engaged, units holding strong defensive positions, units that had suffered no losses — all received the same order: retreat. The retreat became a rout. Men abandoned their tanks and walked across the desert. Israeli aircraft attacked the withdrawing columns at the Mitla and Giddi passes with devastating effect. Thousands of Egyptian soldiers died in the open Sinai, in fierce heat, without water, attempting to reach the Canal. By June 8, Israeli tanks had reached the Suez Canal. Israel held the entire Sinai Peninsula — a territory four times the size of Israel itself — in three days.
The Battle for Jerusalem — The Hour of Hours
When the Six-Day War began, Israel sent word to King Hussein of Jordan through United Nations channels: Israel was not attacking Jordan, had no desire to fight on the Jordanian front, and urged Hussein to stay out of the war. The message was explicit and sincere. Israel’s generals did not want a two-front war while the Egyptian campaign was still opening.
Hussein did not stay out. What drove him to enter is one of the war’s great ironies. Nasser — whose air force had been destroyed in the opening hours of June 5 — telephoned Hussein and reported that Egypt was winning. He described Egyptian airstrikes on Israeli cities (they had not occurred), Egyptian advances into Israeli territory (which were not happening), and Egyptian successes that were the precise opposite of the catastrophe actually unfolding in the Sinai. Hussein, believing his ally, ordered Jordanian artillery to open fire on West Jerusalem and Israeli military positions throughout the West Bank. An enemy’s lie was the instrument by which Jerusalem was returned to Israel.
The Israeli Cabinet, receiving reports of Jordanian shells falling on Israeli civilians, authorized the counterattack. Paratroopers under Brigadier General Mordechai “Motta” Gur were assigned the most significant military and spiritual objective in the entire campaign: the encirclement and capture of the Old City of Jerusalem. The first night of fighting on the Jordanian front saw some of the war’s heaviest casualties in a single engagement. Ammunition Hill — a fortified Jordanian position north of the Old City — was taken in brutal close-quarters fighting through the night of June 5 and 6. Thirty-six Israeli paratroopers were killed there. The Jordanian defenders fought with a ferocity that earned the lasting respect of the Israeli soldiers who finally overran them. The hill was taken at a price that measured, in flesh, what the city was worth.
The encirclement of the Old City proceeded through June 6. By the morning of June 7, Israeli forces held the heights commanding the Old City walls from the north, east, and south. The Cabinet deliberated. Some ministers argued for delay; international pressure to halt the fighting was building, and the consequences of taking the Old City could not be fully foreseen. Others argued that the moment might not come again for another generation — or ever. The Cabinet authorized the assault.
At 9:45 in the morning of June 7, 1967, Israeli paratroopers broke open the Lions’ Gate and entered the Old City of Jerusalem. Motta Gur’s voice came over the radio, steady at first, then breaking: Har HaBayit b’yadeinu — “The Temple Mount is in our hands.” What followed is one of the most documented moments of mass weeping in modern history. Battle-hardened paratroopers — men who had fought without sleep for two nights, men who were not all religious, men who would not have described themselves as given to sentiment — stopped when they reached the Western Wall and wept. Rabbi Shlomo Goren, Chief Chaplain of the Israel Defense Forces, arrived at the Wall carrying a Torah scroll and a shofar. He blew the ram’s horn at the Wall. He wept. Moshe Dayan, the Defense Minister, a man not given to visible emotion, stood at the stones and placed a written prayer in a crack in the ancient masonry.
Jerusalem — the city of David, the city of Solomon, the city of the Temple, the city where the Lord was crucified and rose and from which the gospel went to the nations — had been under foreign rule since Nebuchadnezzar broke its walls in 586 BC. Through Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, and British eras, no Jewish authority had governed the city. For two thousand five hundred and fifty-three years, Jerusalem had been trodden down of the Gentiles. On the morning of June 7, 1967, that was no longer true.
Judea and Samaria Restored — The Biblical Heartland
The campaign on the West Bank brought Israeli forces into terrain that every reader of the Old Testament recognizes by name. Jenin and Nablus — the ancient Shechem where Abraham first arrived in Canaan and built an altar, where Jacob bought a field, where Joseph’s bones were eventually brought to rest. Jericho — the first city Joshua’s army took after crossing the Jordan. Bethlehem — the city of Ruth, of David, of the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. Hebron — where Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, and Leah are buried in the Cave of Machpelah, the most ancient patriarchal resting place in the world. The Abrahamic Covenant had not expired; the deed to these places had not been cancelled. These were not foreign territories newly acquired by conquest. They were the biblical heartland — the land of the patriarchs and the prophets — returning, after centuries of captivity, to the people whose title to them rests on a covenant older than any modern state.
For nineteen years — from 1948 to 1967 — these places had been under Jordanian rule. In that period, Jews were systematically denied access to their holiest sites. The ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives was desecrated; headstones were removed and used as paving material by Jordanian forces. Synagogues in the Old City’s Jewish Quarter were destroyed or converted to other uses. The Western Wall, the last remnant of the Temple Mount complex, was accessible only to Arabs. For nineteen years, the people with the oldest claim to that Wall could not pray at it.
The West Bank campaign moved with the same speed as the Egyptian front. Jordanian units, having entered the war on the basis of Nasser’s false reports, found themselves without air cover and facing a counterattack they had not anticipated. In sector after sector, the Jordanian defense collapsed. By the end of June 7, the entire West Bank was in Israeli hands, and Israeli forces had reached the Jordan River. The Jordanian artillery positions that had been shelling Israeli civilians were silenced. The cities of Abraham and David were, for the first time since the days of the Babylonian exile, under Jewish governance.
The Golan Heights — The Fortress Falls
For years before the Six-Day War, the Golan Heights had been a daily torment to the communities of northern Israel below. From the commanding plateau, Syrian artillery periodically shelled kibbutzim in the Galilee, driving Israeli farmers from their fields and sending children into underground shelters to wait out the barrages. The plateau itself was fortified to Soviet standards — concrete bunkers sunk into rock, interlocking fields of fire, artillery at commanding elevation, tank traps and minefields on every viable approach. Military planners estimated that assaulting the Golan against prepared defenses would take days of fierce fighting across open slopes that offered no concealment.
On June 9, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan authorized the assault. Israeli infantry and armored units went up the Golan slopes. The fighting was fierce in places — Israeli units attacking uphill against entrenched defenders, taking casualties on open ground. Israeli planes bombed Syrian positions throughout. And then, with a suddenness that stunned the Israeli commanders watching from below, the Syrian army broke. It did not conduct a fighting withdrawal under fire. It broke and ran wholesale. Syrian soldiers abandoned their weapons, left their tanks with engines running, and fled toward Damascus. Entire fortified positions that had never been directly assaulted were simply abandoned. Israeli commanders advancing up the slopes discovered bunkers left with food on the table, artillery intact, ammunition stores undemolished — all abandoned by defenders who, by every standard of military logic, had the advantage of terrain and should have held for days.
The commanding heights of the Golan, which had taken years to build and which should have required at least a week to take, were in Israeli hands by June 10. On June 10, a United Nations ceasefire came into effect. The Six-Day War was over. It had lasted precisely one hundred and thirty-two hours.
The Miracles That Cannot Be Fully Explained
We come now to the part of the story that military history records but cannot adequately account for — the phenomena, the testimonies, and the outcomes that carry the quality of something more than the ordinary fortunes of war.
The believing student of this war begins not with extraordinary testimonies but with the ordinary arithmetic. Four hundred Arab aircraft destroyed in a single day, against a loss of nineteen Israeli planes. A 100,000-man Egyptian army in the Sinai — equipped, provisioned, and in prepared positions — collapsing in forty-eight hours, not primarily because it was outfought but because its field commander ordered it to run before it needed to. A Syrian army holding the most defensible terrain in the Middle East — Soviet-built bunkers, complete elevation advantage, years of fortification — abandoning those positions in a panic that no military logic explains. A war that professional analysts expected to last three to four weeks ending in six days. The numbers alone, without any theological interpretation, are remarkable. They become more so when set beside the accounts from both sides of the line.
Israeli soldiers returning from the West Bank campaign gave accounts — many of them on the record, recorded by journalists and historians at the time — of Arab soldiers in flight crying out that angels were fighting for Israel, that they had seen divine fire, that God had entered the battle on Israel’s side. Michael Oren, whose Six Days of War is the most authoritative scholarly account of the conflict in English, documents multiple testimonies from both Israeli and Arab participants describing phenomena that the soldiers themselves attributed to supernatural intervention. These were not the accounts of religious fanatics; many came from secular Israeli soldiers and from Arab soldiers who had every reason to wish what they experienced had not happened.
On the West Bank, Israeli commanders on multiple fronts reported the same inexplicable pattern: in village after village, Egyptian and Jordanian soldiers were found to have fled not in the face of Israeli forces they had engaged and been defeated by, but in apparent panic at something that could not be identified. Defenders in fortified positions, with every military advantage, had left those positions before Israeli units reached them. The abandonment was not orderly withdrawal; it was flight, and in many cases the soldiers could not afterward give a coherent account of what had driven them out.
The case of Abdel Hakim Amer on the Egyptian front bears close attention. Amer was not a novice. He was the most senior military officer in the Arab world, personally close to Nasser, experienced in commanding large forces. And yet on the morning of June 6, in command of an army that had not yet been decisively engaged, holding positions that had not yet been broken, he issued an order of total retreat that destroyed his own army more thoroughly than Israel could have done from the outside. Military historians have offered multiple explanations — psychological collapse, communications breakdown, poor character under pressure — and none fully satisfies. What is certain is that Amer’s panic was the pivot of the entire Egyptian campaign; without it, the war in the south would have been longer, far more costly, and far less complete. It is the kind of catastrophic decision that changes the course of a war, and it came not from the battlefield but from within the Arab command itself.
The Syrian retreat from the Golan stands in its own category. The tactical situation on June 9 favored Syria on every measurable dimension: fortified high ground, prepared defensive positions, shorter supply lines, an enemy attacking uphill without cover. The Syrians had everything needed to hold. And yet they ran — not selectively in one sector, but wholesale, as if a decision had been made simultaneously across an entire army to abandon terrain that military reason demanded be held. Israeli officers who took Syrian prisoners reported that many were incoherent with fear — a fear that appeared, from the prisoners’ own accounts, to have preceded the Israeli assault rather than been caused by it.
The capture of Jerusalem carries its own layer of testimony that stands apart from military analysis entirely. The soldiers who entered the Old City through Lions’ Gate on the morning of June 7 and made their way through the narrow streets to the Western Wall describe the experience in terms that are not the ordinary vocabulary of battle. Paratroopers who had fought through two nights and were exhausted and combat-hardened stopped when they saw the Wall, dropped their weapons, and wept like children. The reaction was involuntary and universal, transcending religious background: secular soldiers wept alongside the observant, men who had not prayed in years found their lips moving at the stones. The only account many of them could give afterward was that they had not expected to feel what they felt, and that what they felt had nothing to do with victory.
There is also the plain fact of what did not happen. In the weeks before the war, Israelis had steeled themselves for mass casualties. Hospitals had been told to prepare for tens of thousands of dead and wounded. Coffins had been stockpiled. Parks had been designated as burial grounds. The Israel that emerged on June 10 had suffered 679 dead — a grievous loss, mourned by every family it touched, and we do not minimize it by a single name. But set against the combined military power of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq — set against what those weeks of preparation had feared — 679 was a number the hospitals and coffin stockpiles had not prepared for, because they had not dared to hope for it. The believer who reads that number and then reads Psalm 91 is not being dishonest to make the connection.
We do not claim that God suspended the laws of war entirely, or that six hundred and seventy-nine Israeli soldiers are a footnote to a miracle rather than men and women who gave everything they had. War is a furnace, and it consumed the innocent on every side, and the believer does not gild it. But we do say, plainly, that the outcome of those six days is not well explained by the balance of forces on the morning of June 5, 1967. The military arithmetic going in pointed one direction. The military reality going out pointed another. Something intervened. The reader who has studied this account is not forbidden to name what it was.
The Khartoum Resolution — Three No’s
One might expect that a war ending in the complete defeat of three Arab armies — in the loss of the Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights — would produce what most wars produce: a negotiation. The victor, holding leverage, would offer terms. The defeated would negotiate toward them. This is how wars have typically ended in the history of nations.
It is not what happened. Israel, immediately after the ceasefire, signaled through diplomatic channels that it was prepared to discuss the return of virtually all the captured territories — the Sinai to Egypt, the Golan to Syria, the West Bank to Jordan — in exchange for genuine peace, direct negotiation, and Arab recognition of Israel’s right to exist. The offer was real, it was communicated, and it was received.
In August 1967, the leaders of eight Arab states gathered in Khartoum, Sudan, to formulate their official response. The Khartoum Declaration answered Israel’s offer with three sentences that have become known to history as the Three No’s: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with Israel. The Arab world had lost the war decisively. It refused to draw the conclusion that every military defeat in the history of nations has eventually compelled: that the time for accommodation had come.
The friend of Israel who has read the Khartoum Declaration, and who has read the Arab League proclamations of 1948, will recognize the pattern. In 1947, the United Nations offered a Jewish and Arab state side by side; the Arab states rejected it and went to war. In 1967, Israel offered to return the lands won in a defensive war in exchange for peace; the Arab states gathered in Khartoum and refused. The one constant across three decades — across every change of leader, every shift in superpower alignment, every new round of diplomacy — was the refusal to accept the permanent and legitimate existence of a Jewish state. The objection was never to these particular borders, or to this particular government. The objection was to Israel’s existence, and that is not an objection that any map can answer.
Jerusalem and the Times of the Gentiles
The capture of Jerusalem on June 7, 1967, did not take place in a prophetic vacuum. Every Christian who knows the Gospel of Luke knows what Jesus said about that city, spoken in the last week of his earthly life from the Mount of Olives: And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. (Luke 21:24)
The words were spoken to men standing in a city already under Roman occupation. Within forty years of that conversation, Jerusalem had been destroyed by Rome, the Temple demolished, and the Jewish people scattered into the nations — exactly as Jesus had said. And the city had remained under one Gentile power after another ever since: Roman, Byzantine, Arab caliphate, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, and finally British and Jordanian. Not once in those 2,553 years had any Jewish authority governed the city. Each empire gave way to the next, and still the Gentiles kept Jerusalem.
On the morning of June 7, 1967, that changed. We make no claim to know the full prophetic meaning of that morning. We do not announce that the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled in their entirety, or that the return of Christ can be calculated from the hour of Motta Gur’s radio transmission. The Scripture is plain that no man knows the day or the hour. What we do say — and what every honest reader of Luke 21:24 is obliged at least to consider — is that June 7, 1967, was the single most dramatic change in the status of Jerusalem in more than twenty-five centuries. The city that Jesus said would be trodden down of the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles were fulfilled returned to Jewish sovereignty in six days of war in June 1967. To call this a coincidence is a choice. The believer has a different word for it.
The prophet Zechariah described Jerusalem in the last days as a burdensome stone for all people — one that would cut in pieces all who burdened themselves with it. In the decades since 1967, no other city of Jerusalem’s size has consumed more international diplomatic attention, generated more United Nations resolutions, or figured more centrally in the calculations of every major world power. The whole world argues about Jerusalem. The whole world cannot leave it alone. The prophet said this would be so. It is so. The eye that is willing to see may see.
What the War Teaches the Friend of Israel
The Six-Day War teaches, in sharper relief than perhaps any event of the twentieth century, the lesson that the friend of Israel most needs and most struggles to hold: that the conflict between Israel and her neighbors is not, at its root, a conflict about land that diplomacy can resolve by drawing a better line on a map. The prophecies concerning Israel’s final conflict describe nations gathering against her in the land — not as a prelude to Israel’s destruction but as the occasion for God’s decisive intervention on behalf of His people. The Six-Day War is part of the chain of events by which the Israel that prophecy describes has been assembled from exile back into a living nation in a contested land. Whether the final fulfillment lies near or far, the direction of prophetic history — back to the land, back to the city, back to the biblical heartland — has been made plain for anyone willing to read the map with Scripture in hand.
The war also teaches something about the nature of prayer in relation to history. In May 1967, Israel could not defend herself through diplomacy: the diplomats had talked and done nothing. She could not defend herself through international law: the United Nations had withdrawn its peacekeepers on demand. She could not defend herself through the support of allies: those allies had made clear they would watch. She went into that war with what she had: a disciplined army, a desperate and unified people, and — for those who believe in these things — the prayers of Jews around the world and of every Christian who understood what was at stake for the covenant people and the covenant land. Six days later the threat was gone, the enemies were broken, and Jerusalem was home. Whoever arranged those six days, it was not the State Department.
The Keeper of Israel
We end where the believer must always end — not with the battlefield calculations of men but with the faithfulness of God.
The Six-Day War is the story of a people surrounded by enemies who announced their intention to destroy them, abandoned by the nations that might have helped them, who dug mass graves in their city parks and waited in the darkness — and who, in six days, saw those enemies broken in a way that the military history of the world does not adequately account for. It is the story of the recapture of a city under Gentile rule since Nebuchadnezzar, restored in a week of war that no strategist predicted, by a people that no power had chosen to defend. It is the story of Hebron coming home, and Bethlehem, and Shechem, and the Wall — the ancient places of the covenant returning to the covenant people after centuries of exile from their own land.
We do not speak of these things with triumphalism. Six hundred and seventy-nine Israeli soldiers are buried who deserve to be remembered as men and women, not as footnotes to a miracle. Arab soldiers died on those battlefields too, and the sons and daughters of Ishmael are souls for whom Christ died as surely as any others, and the believer’s hope is not the permanent humiliation of Israel’s neighbors but the day promised by the prophets when every sword will be beaten to a plowshare and the nations that have long contended for the land will contend for it no more. We do not know when that day is. But we are not forbidden to watch for it, and to watch with confidence, because of what we have seen.
The dry bones of Ezekiel’s vision rose to their feet in 1948. The heartland returned in 1967. The city came home on the morning of June 7. These are not the ordinary events of nations; they are the visible edge of an invisible faithfulness, the tokens in history of the One who said He would gather His people from the four corners of the earth and plant them again in their own land. He did it. He is doing it. And the Keeper of Israel, who neither slumbers nor sleeps, has not finished what He has begun.
He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. — Psalm 121:4