Israel — Then & Now

The Six-Day War of 1967: God's Hand in History and the Return of Jerusalem

The military facts of the Six-Day War of June 1967 are recounted elsewhere on these pages: how a tiny nation, outnumbered and encircled, prevailed in less than a week against the combined armies arrayed against it. But the deeper question for the Christian is not how the war was won. It is what the war means. For in those six days something happened that reaches beyond strategy and tactics into the realm of prophecy and providence — something that has caused believers across the world to look at the modern history of Israel and ask whether they are watching the hand of God move openly in the affairs of nations.

Yet to weigh what the war means, one must first recall what the war was — how close the young nation came to destruction in the spring of 1967, how total and how swift the reversal proved to be, and how a conflict that began in dread ended with the recovery of the most longed-for city on earth. The story is worth telling plainly before we turn to its meaning, for the meaning rests upon the facts, and the facts themselves are extraordinary enough to give any reader pause.

The Gathering Storm of May 1967

In the weeks before the war, it seemed to many in Israel and beyond that a second catastrophe was approaching, barely two decades after the first. Through the spring of 1967 the rhetoric from the surrounding Arab states grew openly genocidal. The president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, massed his armies in the Sinai on Israel’s southern border, demanded and obtained the withdrawal of the United Nations peacekeeping force that had stood between the two countries, and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping — an act Israel had long declared it would treat as a cause of war. The radio broadcasts from Cairo and Damascus left no doubt as to the intention: the existence of Israel, they declared, had gone on too long, and the hour had come to destroy it and drive the Jews into the sea.

The noose drew tighter day by day. Jordan placed its army under Egyptian command; Syria massed its forces on the Golan Heights above the Galilee; contingents from Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria moved to join the coalition. Israel, a nation of fewer than three million people, found itself encircled on three sides by armies that together vastly outnumbered its own in men, tanks, and aircraft, and whose leaders spoke unashamedly of annihilation. Inside the country, the mood was grim; parks were consecrated as potential cemeteries against the casualties that were expected, and the survivors of the Holocaust among the population understood better than anyone what defeat would mean. For three weeks the nation waited, mobilized and surrounded, while the world looked on and wondered whether the Jewish state was about to be extinguished a mere nineteen years after its birth.

That waiting period — the Israelis later called it the hamtana, the waiting — was an ordeal of its own. Reservists were called up and much of ordinary life ground to a halt as the working-age population put on uniforms and waited at the front. Diplomatic efforts to reopen the Straits and defuse the crisis came to nothing; the great powers wrung their hands and offered no rescue. Day after day the threatening broadcasts continued, and the population, including the many among them who carried the memory of Europe in their flesh, steeled themselves for a fight on which the very survival of the nation would turn. When at last the order to strike came, it came not from confidence but from the grim calculation that a small nation surrounded by enemies sworn to its destruction could not afford to let them strike first. Israel went to war in June 1967 not in a spirit of conquest but in the conviction that it was fighting, once again, simply to exist.

Six Days That Changed the Middle East

On the morning of the fifth of June, 1967, Israel struck first. In a meticulously planned operation, almost the entire Israeli air force took to the skies at once and flew low over the Mediterranean, beneath the reach of radar, to fall upon the Egyptian airfields in the opening hours of the day. In the space of a single morning the Egyptian air force — the most powerful in the Arab world — was very largely destroyed on the ground, hundreds of aircraft reduced to wreckage before they could leave their runways. The Israeli planes then turned upon the air forces of Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, and by the end of that first day Israel had won command of the skies. With it, in large measure, the war was already decided, though five more days of hard fighting remained.

On the ground the Israeli columns drove into the Sinai and broke the Egyptian army, sweeping across the desert to the Suez Canal. When Jordan, disregarding Israel’s appeal to stay out of the fight, opened fire across the old armistice line and shelled Jewish Jerusalem, Israel turned eastward, drove the Jordanian forces from the West Bank, and fought its way into the Old City. In the final days, Israel stormed the fortified Golan Heights from which Syria had for years shelled the farms of the Galilee below, taking the high ground after fierce fighting. When the guns fell silent on the tenth of June, after just six days, the map of the region had been transformed. Israel had more than tripled the territory under its control, taking the Sinai and Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. A nation that three weeks earlier had been bracing for annihilation now stood victorious on every front, its borders secure for the first time since the state was founded.

The completeness of the reversal is difficult to convey. In the space of less than a week, a nation that had been encircled and given up for lost by much of the watching world had broken three armies, won mastery of the skies, and taken control of territory several times its own size. The casualty figures told the same lopsided story that had marked Israel’s wars from the beginning — grievous losses, every one of them mourned, but a fraction of the losses inflicted upon the armies that had set out to destroy her. The defense minister, addressing the parliament in the days after the victory, spoke of a campaign in which the very existence of the state had hung in the balance, and in which the threat had been lifted, at a stroke, from every border at once. It was the kind of outcome that, had it been written in a novel, would have been dismissed as wishful fantasy. That it happened in sober fact, before the eyes of the whole world, is the reason so many who witnessed it reached for the language of the miraculous.

The Day Jerusalem Came Home

The single most significant event of the Six-Day War was not a battle in the desert but the recovery of a city. On the third day of the fighting, Israeli soldiers entered the Old City of Jerusalem, and for the first time in nineteen hundred years the heart of the ancient capital — including the Western Wall, the last remnant of the Temple — passed once more into Jewish hands. Hardened paratroopers who had never wept in battle stood at the Wall and broke down. They understood, even those who were not religious, that they had walked into the center of their people’s longing, the place toward which every prayer of two thousand years of exile had been directed.

The moment was captured in words that have passed into the memory of the nation. As the paratroopers fought their way through the narrow streets toward the Temple Mount, their commander’s voice came over the radio with the announcement an entire people had waited two thousand years to hear: the Temple Mount is in our hands. The chief chaplain of the army, carrying a Torah scroll and a ram’s horn, reached the Western Wall and sounded the shofar, its ancient blast echoing off the stones that had stood since the days of the Second Temple. Soldiers pressed their faces and their written prayers into the cracks between those stones, as Jews had longed to do across the long centuries when the Wall lay just beyond a line of barbed wire, visible and forbidden. For nineteen years, under Jordanian rule, no Jew had been permitted to pray there. Now the holiest accessible place in the Jewish world was open again to the people for whom it was the heart of all their longing.

What Israel did with its victory in the city is part of the story, and it is to the nation’s lasting credit. The Israeli leadership moved at once to guarantee freedom of worship and access to the holy places of all three faiths, and passed a law protecting the sacred sites and making their desecration a criminal offense. The administration of the Temple Mount itself, sacred to Muslims as well as Jews, was left in Muslim hands, where it remains. The defense minister, standing at the newly recovered Wall, extended the hand of peace to Israel’s neighbors and promised that the religious rights of Christians and Muslims would be faithfully preserved. A divided city, in which one people had sealed the others out, became an open city, in which the shrines of all faiths were protected and accessible — a freedom unknown in Jerusalem during the years of its division.

The depth of feeling the moment unleashed can be measured in a song. Just weeks before the war, an Israeli songwriter had composed a wistful ballad about Jerusalem — a lament for a golden city whose ancient heart lay beyond reach, its market squares and the road down to the Dead Sea closed to the Jewish people for nineteen years. The song spoke of cisterns gone dry and a marketplace empty of pilgrims, of a city aching to be whole. When the Old City was recovered, the songwriter added a new and final verse: the cisterns were filled again, the marketplace and the squares restored, the ram’s horn calling once more from the Temple Mount. The song became, almost overnight, an unofficial anthem of the reunified city, sung by a nation that could scarcely believe what it had lived to see. It expressed what the headlines could not: the sense of a two-thousand-year homecoming compressed into a single, unbelievable week. The golden city, so long lamented, had been made whole again.

It is difficult to overstate the prophetic weight of that moment. The Lord Jesus had spoken of a time when Jerusalem would be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. For nineteen centuries the city had indeed been trodden down, ruled by one foreign power after another. In June 1967 that long trampling was, in a visible and dramatic way, reversed. Whatever one’s precise understanding of the prophecy, no thoughtful reader of the Gospels could watch Jerusalem return to Jewish hands and feel nothing.

The Victory That Defied the Odds

Even apart from the recovery of Jerusalem, the scale and speed of the victory astonished the world and unsettled the calculations of every military expert. A nation that had been encircled and outnumbered, that the surrounding states had confidently expected to crush, instead defeated three armies at once in six days, with losses on the enemy’s side many times its own. Those who fought in that war, and many who merely watched it, came away convinced that something more than tactical brilliance had been at work. The honest historian can point to real and natural causes — the surprise of the opening air strike, the superior training and initiative of the Israeli soldier, the divided and poorly coordinated command of the Arab coalition — and the believer need not deny any of them.

And yet the natural explanations, true as they are, did not feel sufficient to those who lived through it. Soldiers and commanders told afterward of a long string of what they could only call coincidences — of plans that should have failed and did not, of the enemy’s warnings that went undelivered, of moments when the whole course of a battle seemed to turn on a thread. The point is not to catalogue particular wonders, for such accounts are easily exaggerated and hard to verify, and the friend of truth should be cautious with them. The point is the cumulative impression, felt by religious and secular Israelis alike, that the deliverance had been too complete and too swift to be accounted for by their own strength. As in 1948, so in 1967: a people who had braced for annihilation found themselves, six days later, victorious beyond anything they had dared to hope, and many who had trusted only in their army came away wondering whether a higher hand had been at work.

It is worth being careful here, for the line between faith and superstition is easily crossed. The believer is not asked to credit every dramatic story that circulated in the war’s aftermath, nor to deny the genuine skill and courage of the soldiers who fought, nor to pretend that the natural causes of the victory were not real. What the believer may say, soberly, is this: that the outcome was so improbable, so swift, and so complete that it drove even hardened skeptics to wonder; and that the reader of Scripture, who already knows that God had promised to preserve and restore His people, is entitled to see in such an outcome not a violation of the natural order but the providence of God working through it. The hand of God in history is most often hidden in the ordinary causes of events, guiding them to His appointed ends. In June 1967, for a brief and dazzling moment, that hand seemed to many to come very near the surface.

The Set Time to Favor Zion

The believer who looks at 1967 reaches naturally for the language of the psalmist, who foresaw a day when God would arise and have mercy upon Zion — for the set time, he wrote, the appointed time, had come. The psalm goes on to say that the Lord would build up Zion and appear in His glory, that He would regard the prayer of the destitute and not despise it, and that this would be written for the generation to come, that a people yet to be created might praise the Lord. The Christian Zionist does not claim to know the full timetable of heaven. But he reads of a “set time” for the favor of Zion, and he looks at the restoration of the city in his own century, and he is not ashamed to wonder whether the appointed hour the psalmist foresaw has drawn near.

This is the proper way to read the hand of God in history — not with the reckless confidence that decodes every event as a fulfilled verse, but with the reverent attention of a servant who knows his Master’s word and watches for its outworking. The Six-Day War did not fulfill all prophecy. It did not usher in the kingdom. But the return of Jerusalem to the Jewish people, after nineteen centuries, in the lifetime of people still living, is precisely the kind of event the prophets taught us to watch for. To shrug at it is not humility. It is inattention.

The words of the Lord Jesus give the point its sharpest edge. Speaking of the destruction that would fall upon Jerusalem, He said the city would be trodden down of the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled — and that little word until carries a world of meaning. It implies a term, a limit, an appointed end to the trampling. For nineteen centuries the city passed from the hands of one Gentile power to another — Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, British, Jordanian — and through all those centuries the word until hung over the long humiliation like a promise waiting to be kept. In June 1967, for the first time since the Roman destruction, the whole of Jerusalem returned to Jewish sovereignty. The believer does not claim to know precisely how that event fits within the unfolding of prophecy. But he cannot read the Lord’s word about an until and then watch the trampling so dramatically reversed, and feel that nothing of significance has occurred.

Providence, Not Presumption

How then do we speak of the hand of God in the Six-Day War without falling into presumption? We speak as the Scriptures themselves speak of God’s providence: with confidence in His sovereignty and humility about His timing. The Bible everywhere affirms that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men, that He removes kings and sets up kings, that not a sparrow falls without the Father. If God governs the rise and fall of all nations, then He governs the history of Israel most particularly of all, for it is the nation He bound to Himself by covenant. The believer need not claim a private revelation about 1967 to affirm the plain teaching of Scripture: that the God who promised to restore His people is the same God who orders the events of history to His own ends.

And so the Six-Day War teaches us less about military genius than about divine faithfulness. It is one more chapter in a single, coherent story — the story this series has tried to trace.

Honesty requires the believer to acknowledge that the war’s consequences remain bitterly contested, and that a great deal of the world’s quarrel with Israel traces back to those six days. The territories that came under Israeli control in 1967 — and above all the status of Jerusalem and the lands beyond the old armistice lines — have been the subject of conflict, negotiation, and grief ever since. The friend of Israel does no service to the truth by pretending these difficulties away, or by treating every question about the disposition of the land as though it were an attack upon the faith. Reasonable people, including reasonable Christians, hold differing views about the political questions that flow from the war, and the Scriptures do not hand down a detailed map of modern borders.

But the central thing the believer affirms is not a political claim; it is a theological one. It is that the God who rules the nations was not absent from those six days — that the restoration of the Jewish people to their ancient capital, in the lifetime of the generation that had survived the Holocaust, belongs to the pattern of God’s faithfulness to His covenant people, whatever political complexities followed in its train. One may hold that conviction and still long and pray for a just and lasting peace; indeed, the believer who reads his Bible will long for it most of all. To see the hand of God in the return of Jerusalem is not to bless every policy of a modern state. It is to recognize, with gratitude and with awe, that the word the prophets spoke is being worked out in the history of our own time.

The Whole Story, in Our Own Generation

Across this series we have followed a single thread through the modern history of Israel. We saw a nation born in a single day, exactly as Isaiah said a nation could be. We saw the very stones of the land confirm the record of the Book. We saw a people preserved through every army sent to destroy them, and their ancient capital restored after nineteen centuries. We saw a worldwide exile gathered home from the four corners of the earth, a dead language raised to living speech, a desert taught to bloom, and a people that should have vanished from history instead stand up as a sovereign nation. No single one of these wonders compels belief. But laid side by side, across the maps and the headlines of a single century, they form a testimony that the honest heart cannot easily dismiss.

It is the convergence that arrests the attention. Any one of these events, taken alone, might be explained away — the rebirth as an accident of post-war diplomacy, the military survivals as the fruit of courage and good generalship, the agricultural revival as the reward of ingenuity, the linguistic revival as the work of dedicated reformers. But the prophets did not foretell a single event; they foretold a whole pattern — a scattered people preserved, regathered from the four corners of the earth, restored to their ancient land, their ruined cities rebuilt, their desert made to bloom, their holy city returned to them. And it is that whole pattern, not any isolated piece of it, that the world has watched unfold within the span of a single lifetime. The Six-Day War is one thread in that tapestry; but it is the thread on which the most longed-for of all the promises — the return of Jerusalem — was at last drawn through.

This is what the Six-Day War, and the whole modern story of Israel, finally tells us about the hand of God in history: that He is still at work in it. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has not retired from the affairs of nations. He keeps His covenants. He fulfills His word. And He has chosen, in our own generation, to make bare His holy arm in the sight of all the nations — restoring His ancient people to their land, their language, and their city, that the ends of the earth might see and know that the Lord has spoken, and the Lord has done it. The friends of Israel watch, and give thanks, and pray for the peace of Jerusalem — until the day her King returns to reign.

There is a final lesson in all of this that reaches past the borders of Israel and into the heart of every believer. The God who made bare His arm in the six days of June 1967 is the same God who governs every life that trusts in Him. If He kept His covenant with Israel across two thousand years of exile and brought her home in the sight of all the nations, then His promises to His people in every age stand on the same unshakable ground. The hand that returned Jerusalem to its people after nineteen centuries is not too short to reach into the smallest circumstance of any life laid open to it. The Six-Day War is, in the end, not only a chapter in the history of a nation; it is a demonstration, written across the headlines of the modern world, that the God of the Bible is faithful, that His word does not fail, and that the One who has begun a good work will surely bring it to completion. The friends of Israel read that lesson in the history of the city of the great King, and take heart. The same Lord who returned Jerusalem to His people is able to keep, and will keep, every promise He has ever made.