The Six-Day War, and the Hand of God

Judaism is not simply an amalgam of national concepts, moral and ritual laws, subjective emotions. Jewish existence is an engagement to what is greater than ourselves. It is sustained by numinous powers; it is carried on the wings of a hidden Presence in history. That Presence, often passive and suppressed, breaks forth in rare moments. (Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Israel: An echo of eternity,” p. 96. Heschel was an American rabbi, theologian and author. Several of his books are important to me, and this book, listed below, started the train of thought leading to this essay.)

Heschel, Abraham Joshua: Israel: An echo of eternity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1969
Pressfield, Steven: The Lion’s Gate: On the front lines of the Six Day War (Penguin Group, New York, 2014)
Dayan, Moshe: Living with the Bible (William Morrow and Company, New York, 1978)
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A reminder: as stated in the sidebar, the opinions here expressed are mine, and may not reflect the teachings of the parish where I work.
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In 1967, I was a young teenager and a young Christian, still reading the Old Testament for the first time. Perhaps because of my youth, I found it horribly unfair that, as pressure mounted against Israel from all of its neighbors that spring, the United States dithered. The Soviets were arming Egypt with their most modern weapons; the U.S. would not even send Israel the weapons they had already purchased.

The United Nations had a force of peacekeepers in the Sinai, which was supposed to be a demilitarized zone. When President Nasser of Egypt ordered them out, they packed up and left while the Egyptian tanks moved in.

It was not fair. Why didn’t we do something? Why didn’t the U.N. stand up to this aggression, as they did in Korea? It was blindingly obvious that the Western world would stand by, wringing its hands while the Jewish nation was obliterated. They were badly outnumbered, surrounded by enemies, with no friends.

As it transpired, Israel did not need help from the United Nations, nor the United States. They had a helper who was considerably more reliable:

Behold, he who keeps watch over Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. (Psalm 121:4)

I have lived to see the Hand of God in action among the great deeds of the world one time, perhaps two. The one of which I am certain is the Six Day War, June 5 through 10, 1967.

The events of this time could have been lifted straight from the pages of Judges, First Samuel, and the Maccabees where the LORD of Hosts rescued his people from the hand of enemies that surrounded them on every side, enemies who appeared to be far stronger. That was clearly the situation in the spring and summer of 1967, with the entire Arab world united in determination to destroy the “Zionist entity.”

I have come to more fully understand what the Hand of God looks like in action by reading Steven Pressfield’s account of the war: “The Lion’s Gate,” which is mostly a collection of personal accounts by Israeli veterans who fought in that conflict. The Hand of God in action is for the most part individual people doing what is right (led, I would say, by the Spirit of God), in accord with Divine Providence.

Even the three supreme instances of the Hand of God, where He acted with the most glorious and surprising power, required human cooperation. The deliverance of the Children of Israel from Egypt depended on the sometimes hesitant obedience of Moses (Exodus 3, especially vv. 9-12). The Incarnation depended upon the free assent of Our Lady to what was asked of her (St. Luke 2:38). And the greatest of all the mighty acts of God hinged upon one person, alone in his prayers one night in Gethsemane (St. Luke 22:39-44).

Although the United States did not sufficiently support Israel in the wars of 1948, 1956, and 1967, we were better in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, resupplying the Israelis as fast as the Soviets were resupplying the Egyptians and Syrians, and ultimately facing down the Soviets to keep the war from spiraling into something larger. The work of President Carter in brokering the Camp David accords a few years later (1978) was important. The courage of the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in seeking peace by means of this agreement is something to be remembered through the generations. Carter and Sadat are further examples of men simply doing what seemed right at the time, despite what it might cost them. For Sadat, it cost him his life in 1981.

I support the Zionist cause insofar as I am able, which means primarily by prayer, and (when needed) letters to my elected representatives, and by speaking up for Israel. That can be hard, because it is fashionable in the circles in which I work and live to support the Palestinians, and to consider the Israelis to be the Bad Guys. The best I can understand the liberal position, the State of Israel is one last relic of colonialism, inflicted upon the innocent Arab residents of Palestine by the British Mandate. For liberal Christians, there is the additional notion that the Old Testament (like the New) is largely pious fabrication. The Israelites were simply one of many Canaanite peoples. They invented a “back-story” involving supposed promise of the Land to the Patriarchs (fictional persons, no doubt) to justify their genocidal seizure of Canaan. For example, this from an encyclopedic source:

The Abraham story cannot be definitively related to any specific time, and it is widely agreed that the patriarchal age, along with the exodus and the period of the judges, is a late literary construct that does not relate to any period in actual history. A common hypothesis among scholars is that it was composed in the early Persian period (late 6th century BCE) as a result of tensions between Jewish landowners who had stayed in Judah during the Babylonian captivity and traced their right to the land through their "father Abraham", and the returning exiles who based their counter-claim on Moses and the Exodus tradition (Wikipedia, s.v. “Abraham,” accessed 9/9/2016)

For whatever reasons, there are periodically workshops and lectures in our college town, advertised on our parish's bulletin boards, concerning the righteous struggle of the Palestinian freedom fighters against oppression. Not a word about the Israeli side.

The U.S. has remained one of Israel’s allies. I must do my small part to help keep it that way.

The Israelis are not the Bad Guys. Neither are the Palestinians. But the Land belongs to the Jewish people by express gift from God, and Jerusalem most of all. It is impossible to read the Old Testament without seeing the promise of the Land to the children of Israel. The Land was a part of the first thing that God said to Abram (Genesis 12:1), and the promise is repeated from Genesis to Malachi (Mal. 3:12, for example: “And all nations shall call you blessed; for ye shall be a delightsome land, saith the LORD of hosts.”)

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In the first weeks of June 1967, the situation appeared hopeless. By the end of the month, not only had Israel survived, but they had recovered their lands on the west side of Jordan, and most of all, Jerusalem.

July, 1967… I have discovered a new land. Israel is not the same as before. There is great astonishment in the souls. It is as if the prophets had risen from their graves… My ancestors could only dream of you—to my people in Auschwitz you were more remote than the moon, and I can touch your stones! Am I worthy? How shall I ever repay for these moments? (Heschel, p. 7, speaking of the return to Jerusalem.)

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I have known Avremale [Schecter, sergeant, “A” company, Battalion 71] and his brothers since we were boys. His father was the kindest, most simple and modest man. He worked all his life for the Tnuva Dairy in Tel Aviv, riding his bicycle to work, raising his boys, asking nothing but to be here as a Jew in this land, but feeling always that our people’s return remained incomplete, with the Wall and the Old City in the hands of those who hated us.

Now I see Avremale, with his Uzi with its folding stock under one arm and the tefillin in place on his head and other arm. I know he is thinking of his father.

The others want to pray, too, but none of them knows how. Avremale has to teach them. (Pressfield p. 343, quoting Yoram Zamosh, “A” company's commander, describing the scene when the first Jewish soldiers reach the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem)

[Zamosh continues, describing Moshe Stempel, one of his officers] … Stempel held my arm in a grip of iron. Twice he tried to speak and twice his voice failed. He pulled me so close that the brows of our helmets were touching.

“Zamosh!” Stempel said, with such emotion that I can hear the words still, though he spoke them almost fifty years ago. “Zamosh, if my grandfather, if my great-grandfather, if any of my family who have been murdered in pograms and in the death camps… if they could know, somehow, even for one second, that I, their grandson, would be standing here at this hour, in this place, wearing the red boots of an Israeli paratrooper… if they could know this, Zamosh, for just one instant, they would suffer death a thousand times and count it as nothing.”

Stempel gripped my arm as if he would never let go. “We shall never, never leave this place,” he said. “Never will we give this up. Never.” (Pressfield p. 406)

I worry about the Israelis, which puts me in good company:

Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me. (Isaiah 49:15-16)

But there is this:

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! (St. Matthew 23:37)

That is why I worry. From this distance, it does not seem to me that the Israelis treat the “strangers within their gates” (that is, the Palestinians) as they ought. Nor are their actions as individuals and a nation especially righteous. (Neither are ours, and our treatment of the “strangers” within our gates, the undocumented and mostly Hispanic immigrants who do much of the hard work of this country, leaves much to be desired.)

We have the unshakable promise of God that he will look after Israel forever. But even a cursory reading of the Old Testament shows what that can look like. It can at times look very much like what is not much beyond living memory: the Shoah.

The attack [in the 1948 war, against a formidable Egyptian position] was ready to go. At the last minute a half dozen trucks rumbled up, bringing reinforcements. The men got off. They were pale and thin. They had numbers tatooed on their arms. Someone said they had spent the last two years in relocation camps—under the British, of course—in Cyprus. They had got to Israel just a week earlier and been given only a few days of military training. They came up and were issued rifles. I will never forget their faces. They were certain they were going to die. But their eyes were shining… (Pressfield p. 82, quoting Lou Lenart, an American Jew who was a major figure in the newborn Israel Air Force during the 1948 war. Lenart describes elsewhere how he came to an enduring hatred of the British, for setting the new Israeli state up to fail as soon it was born. Pressfield dedicated this book to Lenart.)

Pressfield’s book led me to what he calls an “extraordinary personal testament,” “Living with the Bible” by Moshe Dayan, minister of defense during the Six Day War. His mode of “living with the Bible” was new to me, and I suspect possible only for an Israeli. Dayan was not an observant Jew; he never even did his Bar Mitzvah. But his faith leaps from the pages of this book, a faith that is that of a warrior. It is a faith in the God who revealed Himself to Abraham, to Isaac and Jacob, the God who carried His people through the wilderness, gave them the Land, has stayed with them through thousands of years, and remains with them today. He delights most of all in the battles described in the Scripture, giving insights to them that one does not hear from the scholars -- especially the liberal Christian scholars, who mostly gloss over these passages or deplore them as barbaric. His characterization of Samson brought him to life for me in a way that nothing else has: a man who loved his strength and freedom, walking where he would through the countryside with the wind in his hair, even when it was the land of his enemies the Philistines, for whom he had no fear.

My Bible consists of the books of the Patriarchs and the Judges. Its pages narrate the stories of Joshua and Gideon, of Saul and David and Jonathan. Say these names: Galilee, Mount Carmel, Beersheba, the Vale of Sharon. These sites are not theoretical to me… They comprise the hills and flats that I have plowed and planted, tramped over and slumbered upon. A field at Ramat Yohanan has soaked up the last of my brother Zorik’s blood. I left my own eye in the dirt across the border with Lebanon. How many thousands have given the same and more?

The treads of a half-track rend a slope that has no name and is known to no one. Up comes an arrowhead three thousand years old… Into the sunlight emerges a shard from the era of Joshua, the handle of a vessel from which a soldier of Israel once drank. Who was that man? He was myself. I am that man.

He shivered on watch, this fellow thirty centuries gone; he marched through the night; he defended his fields and flocks. (Pressfield p. 162, quoting Dayan)

Dayan viewed it as his responsibility to defend this Land, and the idea of Israel, with all of his being. There were many like him then, and hopefully now:

[Menachem] Begin is curt, humorless, intractable. But he is without fear. He has endured political imprisonment under the Soviets, from which ordeal he emerged tougher than ever and more passionately dedicated to Jewish nationhood and to political autonomy for the Jewish people. He is a good man, possibly a great one. The nation needs men like him as much as she needs visionaries like Ben-Gurion and poets like Natan Alterman.

‘To the banks of the Jordan’ is Begin’s party signature. His vision is of the Israel of the Bible. He speak passionately at this cabinet meeting [which made the decision to launch the pre-emptive strike on June 5, destroying most of the Egyptian air force on the ground], citing numerous biblical passages, to which [Levi] Eshkol [the prime minister] with good humor appends, “Amen, amen.” (Pressfield p. 158, quoting Dayan)

For the Israelis and Palestinians and their neighbors, there are still no clear solutions. There have been too many wrongs, too much bloodshed. How can the two peoples ever live at peace?

[quoting Dayan, Pressfield writes] All the same, I am no hater of Arabs. I grew up with Bedouin herders and farmers. We have plowed together, and planted, and sat side by side in the furrows to take our noon meal.

Who is the Arab? No man makes a better friend than he. None will stand his ground with greater courage. To the Arab, honor is all. He will drain his blood for the clan and the tribe, and for the stranger he has taken in at the gate. No one laughs like an Arab, or loves his children with such tenderness; no one dances like him or worships God with greater devotion, and none is more compassionate to the weak and the helpless.

The modern world, in which the sons of Ishmael have fallen behind and become a backward people, is a nightmare of shame from which the proud Arab cannot awaken. This is the source of his violent and inextinguishable rage. (Pressfield, p. 162)

Many have come to hate the United States, too – partly because of our support for Israel, but we have given people many more reasons to despise us. Hatred boils in our own land, between races, between rich and poor, between political factions. It seems hopeless.

But the Hand of God worked in the summer of 1967, and in the collapse of the Soviet empire some years after. It is through such actions as were taken by ordinary people in those times that God’s purposes prevailed. It is through our actions, here and now, that God may again bring to pass what seems impossible.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours… (St. Teresa of Avila)

The ultimate meaning of the State of Israel must be seen in terms of the vision of the prophets: the redemption of all men. The religious duty of the Jew is to participate in the process of continuous redemption, in seeing that justice prevails over power, that awareness of God penetrates human understanding. (Heschel, p. 156)