Holy War in Judaism:The Fall and Rise of a Controversial Idea by Firestone Reuven

Author:Firestone, Reuven [Firestone, Reuven]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14 1967 to 1973

The Miracle of Conquest and the Test of Yom Kippur

The Eternal One of Israel will not deceive and will not change His mind.

I SAMUEL 15:29

1967: The Messiah Is on His Way

Menachem Friedman observed that “If Israel’s 1948 War of Independence is viewed as a Zionist war for the establishment of an emergent secular Jewish state, the Six-Day War can be defined as a Jewish war that reflected a substantive historical change in dialectic between Exile and Redemption. … [I]t marked the point at which a substantially different religious reality came into existence.”1 The June war of 1967 sparked a revival of secular as well as religious ideologies to justify the establishment of Jewish sovereignty over the captured lands,2 but particularly among religious Zionists it opened a floodgate of emotions that had been pent up and hidden, often even from those who held them.

The emotionality of the war’s extraordinary military success needs to be placed in context. The state of Israel had experienced tremendous economic and demographic growth between the 1956 and 1967 wars, and it enjoyed a sense of confidence that was remarkable given the destruction of millions of European Jews twenty years earlier. The “years of hardship” (shenot hatzena`) that followed the establishment of the state had passed and the intolerable infiltrations of Arabs across the borders had been reduced, though not stopped. Despite the anxiety of existence surrounded by hostile Arab states, there was a growing sense of comfort among the Jewish population. But some marginalized political and religious groups continued to aspire to a Jewish state that would comprise all of the biblical Land of Israel.

On the eve of Independence Day on May 12 at Yeshivat Mercaz Harav (“The Rabbi’s Center Yeshivah”) named after Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook,3 occurring exactly one day before the beginning of the crisis leading up to the 1967 War, Rabbi Kook’s only son, Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook, “delivered a festive sermon, in the midst of which his quiet voice suddenly rose and he bewailed the partition of historic Eretz Yisrael and the inability of the Jews to return to the holy cities of Hebron and Nablus.”4 Three weeks later, his students would consider his words truly, not merely metaphorically, prophetic.

Part of the reason for their prophetic assessment of his message lies in the astonishing events of the following weeks leading up to the outbreak of war on June 5. Israel found itself surrounded by millions of Arabs who were being exhorted to destroy it. Egypt’s President Gamal Abdul Nasser had received and absorbed massive Soviet military armament during the previous decade. With the blessing of the USSR, he expelled the United Nations’ Expeditionary Force (UNEF) that had been established in the Sinai Peninsula after the 1956 War, concentrated over a hundred thousand troops in the Sinai Peninsula, and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. He persuaded Syria and Jordan to join the preparations for war, and even Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia offered at least token use of their armies and communications.

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