The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear—to wipe Israel off the map.
President Aref of Iraq, May 31, 1967
I believe that what we’re seeing in the world today is the fulfillment of these ancient prophecies written between 2,000 and 3,500 years ago. As the world staggers from one crisis to another, I believe that we’re racing on a countdown to the end of history as we know it.
Hal Lindsey, The Late, Great Planet Earth
The summer of 1967 was also the setting for one of the most dramatic conflicts in twentieth-century history, Israel’s Six-Day War. Aside from its strategic geopolitical importance—interpreted in a variety of ways—Israel’s astonishing war in the land of Abraham had direct repercussions for the budding Jesus Revolution in America. Chuck Smith, in particular, tied the war directly into Old Testament prophecies and the end times; it galvanized his urgency to spread the gospel.
Ever since its establishment as a nation in 1948, Israel had been threatened on all sides by its Arab neighbors. Its War for Independence had concluded with a cease-fire that left Jerusalem divided in two. The entire Old City, including the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and other holy sites, had been put under the control of the Jordanians. Jews were not allowed to enter Jerusalem’s walls or pray inside the city.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Egypt had blockaded the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran to shipping destined for Israel. In 1956, a United Nations emergency force was deployed in the Sinai Peninsula, and the straits were reopened. But by the late spring of 1967, President Nasser of Egypt had again closed the waterways to Israeli vessels, evicted the UN peacekeepers, and mobilized troops along his border with Israel.
“Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel,” President Nasser declared.1 The chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization described the impending fate of the Jews in Israel: “I estimate that none of them will survive.”2
Egypt and Syria activated a mutual defense pact, and Syria massed troops on its forty-mile border with Israel. The Syrians occupied the high ground, including the area known as the Golan Heights, which the Syrians had been fortifying for eighteen years. Meanwhile, the nation of Jordan had deployed ten of its eleven brigades to defend its densely populated territory on the West Bank, as well as the Old City of Jerusalem, with its Temple Mount and other holy places that had long been denied to the Jews.
The tension grew. The Soviet Union knew that Israel’s ally, the United States, was preoccupied with the ongoing debacle in Vietnam. The USSR disseminated a fair amount of disinformation, fueling the fire in the Arab world. President Johnson publicly urged caution and appealed for the Middle East to find solutions aside from war.
With hostile forces amassed on his borders, Meir Amit, the enterprising head of Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, flew to Washington, DC, in disguise, using a false passport. His country had to move forward, he told President Johnson’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. Almost all Israeli men under the age of fifty were mobilized for war. The dark jokes among them were that the last one to go should not forget to turn out the lights, or that after the war all the Jews left in Israel would fit in a single phone booth. Their enemies were pressing in.
“I read you loud and clear,” McNamara responded.
Amit took that as the implicit approval of the United States of America. He and the Israeli ambassador flew back to Tel Aviv in an airplane full of gas masks.
On the morning of June 5, 1967, small groups of Israeli jets took off from bases in their homeland. Their Air Force had amassed extensive reconnaissance of every air base in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The pilots cleared their country’s airspace and flew fifty feet above the Mediterranean Sea. They knew that their Egyptian counterparts were on alert at dawn, but now, at 7:45 a.m., most senior Egyptian military and political leaders would be caught in Cairo’s notorious traffic jams and thus would be out of touch. (Though cellular communications have improved immensely since 1967, Cairo’s traffic has not.)
Still, Egyptian officers based at the radar station in northern Jordan did pick up the scrambling Israeli aircraft. They sent a red alert message to Cairo. The sergeant in the decoding room of the supreme command there tried but failed to decipher the message using the usual code. He neglected to note that a new code had been put in place the day before.
Israeli pilots bombed more than three hundred Egyptian fighter planes and rendered runways throughout the country unusable. In separate raids, their brother pilots took out two-thirds of the Syrian air power and most of the Royal Jordanian Air Force. Israeli ground troops took on the Egyptian army forces in the Sinai Peninsula, the Syrians in the Golan Heights, and the Jordanians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
On June 11 a cease-fire was signed. Israel lost less than one thousand fighters, while the Arab forces lost twenty thousand troops. For the first time in almost two millennia the Jewish holy places in Jerusalem were under the control of Jews. Israelis considered it a miracle of biblical proportions. Israel had crushed her enemies to the north, east, and south, and tripled her territory.
President Nasser of Egypt resigned, but was persuaded to remain in office after millions of his citizens protested in the streets. He served as Egypt’s president until his death in 1970 and was succeeded by Anwar Sadat, who would later be assassinated by his own troops for signing a peace treaty with Israel.
King Hussein of Jordan lost East Jerusalem for a time, but kept his throne. He made peace with Israel in 1994.
And in Syria, the air force commander who had been in the ruling junta seized sole power in 1970. His name was Hafez al-Assad. He died in 2000 . . . and his son, Bashar al-Assad, bled and bullied the region, massacring innocents from the day he took on his father’s reins of power.
The Six-Day War was not the last word, by any means, in Israel’s complicated history and the anguishing issues surrounding her borders for both Israelis and Palestinians. But at that moment in time, many American Christians saw the war’s conclusion as a fulfillment of biblical end times prophecy. Even as academics scoffed, preachers told stories of angels defending Israeli troops and guiding their artillery. For the nation of Israel to face—and crush—the much bigger armies of the Arab world was a modern-day David and Goliath story and a signal that human history was drawing to completion. Recapturing Jerusalem for the first time in two thousand years seemed to be a direct fulfillment of Luke 21:24: “Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled” (emphasis added).
Some commentators pointed to complex prophecies in Daniel 8 that looked ahead to Alexander the Great’s defeat of the Persian Empire in 334 BC.3 Daniel’s vision went on to describe a timeline of 2,300 “evenings and mornings” from that Gentile occupation until Jerusalem would be freed from the control of foreign nations. Many Christians, applying the time scale that one day equals one year (see Ezek. 4:6), and bearing in mind that there is no date 0 AD, did the math and saw the fulfillment of Daniel’s vision in—you guessed it—1967.
At Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, 7,586 miles from Jerusalem, the Six-Day War was not just some faraway news story for Pastor Chuck Smith. He started a special Bible class on Israel and biblical prophecy. His church had not yet grown in the ways that it would in just a few years, but Chuck preached and taught his flock with a new urgency: the Bible was true, its interpretation of human history was real and relevant, Jesus was going to return soon, and evangelism and discipleship were more vital and imperative than ever in these “last days” that were now upon the citizens of Earth, circa 1967.