Battle for Israel: Chapter 3

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In today’s episode, we’re continuing with the next chapter of the audiobook for Battle for Israel by Lance Lambert. Let’s listen to Chapter 3. Chapter 3 Out of Pain, Prayer Of the one thousand two hundred tanks which Syria threw into the attack on the Golan, only two hundred and forty returned. The Israeli defence forces, however, had only seventy tanks on the Golan when the attack came and they fought almost with their bare hands. Most of the men on both fronts were young conscripts, because the rest had been allowed to go home to their families for the Day of Atonement especially those who had been on national service for more than a year or two. So the majority of the soldiers were between eighteen and twenty-one years of age and many were still fasting having had no food or drink for nearly twenty-one hours. General Rafoul described the way the Israelis held back the Syrians on the Golan Heights in these words: ‘We stopped the Syrians by the sheer heroism of soldiers refusing to give way. Each man understood that the choice was either to stand and fight it out or allow loved ones in the valleys behind them to be slaughtered in the case of a full breakthrough.’ There were many true stories of boys who shot down enemy aeroplanes. The first concerns a Tel Aviv taxi driver, twenty years of age. When one of the MIGs came in low shooting everything up, and everyone else dived for cover, he fired his uzzi, a kind of sten-gun and the plane blew up. After that it became quite a popular pastime to see if one could knock planes out of the sky. The same was true of the tanks. One lad was very badly wounded, so that eventually his foot had to be amputated. The tracks of his tank were damaged, but not the gun. The other crew members were critically wounded, but he was in a position to be able to train the tank gun upon each Syrian tank as it came up over the brow of the hill. Before he was himself put out of action, he knocked out sixteen tanks. We heard many such stories. As the mammoth Syrian attack was checked, many of these stories must have been true. I remember meeting a boy who was one of only three survivors in a unit of fifty at El Qantarah on the Suez Canal in Northern Sinai. There was another boy who was the only survivor out of two hundred and fifty. In Ein Kerem, a suburb of Jerusalem and the birthplace of John the Baptist, there was scarcely one family that did not suffer bereavement. One of the reasons for this was that it is Israel’s policy to send boys from the same area into the same regiment for it is considered good for morale. This means that boys who have grown up together and have gone through school together, go into the same regiment together, which works very well when they do not get killed. However, when the fellow with whom you grew up dies alongside you, it is a terrible shock. This too is why in a place like Ein Kerem there was hardly a family unaffected. The whole unit from that area was wiped out. Israel is unique in that it does not keep its officers in the rear of the battle. They lead their men, following the Old Testament tradition, consequently some of the best young men lost their lives in each of these battles. There is often a tragic aftermath among the survivors too. When most of his unit were either killed or badly wounded, one soldier decided along with two others that the only thing to do was to surrender as they were completely surrounded. They laid out two rows of very badly wounded men, one of sixteen or seventeen and the other of eleven. They put out a white sheet to signal their surrender. It was accepted and the three men were told to stand to one side. When they did this however, the Egyptian tanks moved forward and crushed both lines to death. Twenty-four hours later the boy went out of his mind; his mother, asking for prayer for him, told us, ‘He will never be normal again, short of a miracle.’ A taxi cab driver was at a hospital, having taken some friends to visit their wounded son. While there this man saw one of his son’s friends, who told him, ‘I am very sorry, but your son is dead.’ The man decided to go straight home and tell his wife the news. When he got home he found a cable informing them that the elder boy had also been killed. The father then collapsed with a heart attack and died. An official in the Foreign Ministry told me about a friend of his, completely without religious beliefs who came in and said, ‘Have you got a prayer hat?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘why?’ The friend said, ‘I want it. Don’t ask me why. I will tell you later.’ The official eventually found out that this man’s only son had suffered severe brain damage because of shrapnel. The doctor had said that if the boy recovered, he would be a mere cabbage. The father had never prayed before, but he went to his son’s bedside and prayed for nine hours that God would take him. After those nine hours, the boy died. I remember the case of another lad. He had come close to suicide. He was on the Bar-Lev line and was badly shot up. He did not know how many hours he had been unconscious, but when he regained consciousness lying in a pool of his own blood, he realized that he had no legs and thought that he had no arms. So, making a great effort he tried to turn over so that he would roll down into the Suez Canal and drown. As he rolled over, he suddenly realized that he still had one arm attached to his body, although badly wounded. This stopped him, and he determined to go on living. That boy was being rehabilitated, along with many other severely wounded men. There are many such stories, but I do not just want to recount harrowing stories for their own sake. It is sufficient to say that there was very, very great sadness throughout Israel. There were other remarkable stories too. There was the Jewish Christian who was called up nineteen times by the military authorities at the wrong address. Finally, his whole unit of two hundred and fifty went to the front line without him and there was not a single survivor. Because of an official mix up, this Jewish Christian survived. The medical care was amazing. It took on an average only six hours to get a man from the front line to a regular hospital. The new policy of the Israeli Government is to send doctors with their orderlies right into the front lines. You may have seen this on television news reports. Men were shown being brought out with intravenous apparatus already in use. Many of the boys still able to walk, actually walked up to the helicopters holding the intravenous equipment because there was such a scarcity of manpower. I am afraid however, that although many thousands of men were saved by this policy, a number of Israel’s finest young doctors lost their lives. The Hadassah Hospital at Jerusalem performed five hundred and eighty-one major operations around the clock in the first twenty days. At their field hospital under canvas a hundred major operations were performed in this time and these included the most delicate brain surgery. These operations were on men who were too ill to be moved by helicopter into the regular hospitals. Those in the United States have learned something about burn injuries from the Vietnam War. The Yom Kippur War also had its share. New weapons pierced tank armour-plate and then burst into flames, roasting people alive inside. One must also remember that tanks carry their own ammunition, which explodes when the tank is hit. When I visited the Hadassah Hospital it had a whole top floor given over to men suffering from burns. I was deeply moved by what I saw and heard. The professor taking me around told me, ‘Many of these boys are unrecognizable as human beings. They have melted.’ Later the professor in charge of the Burns Unit told me that out of sixty or more cases with full-thickness burns (every level of skin tissue being affected), only one died, which is a remarkable tribute to the loving devotion of the doctors and nurses there, who worked day and night to save lives. But most of these men were only eighteen or nineteen years old, with the whole of their lives before them, and those with medical experience will know that such burns cases suffer terrible psychological after effects. On a recent visit to the hospital I saw one of these survivors. He had returned there for plastic surgery and further rehabilitation. He was nineteen years of age and must have been a good-looking young man. His face now looked as if it had completely melted−no eyebrows, no eyelashes, hardly any lips and two dark brown eyes looking out from what appeared to be a grotesque mask. Even his hands had melted into grotesque shapes. The professor in charge told me that they had even been able to tell at what time of day the boys had received their burns. At night they were only burnt on their faces and hands, but during the day, especially at midday, the burns were far more extensive because the boys had rolled up their sleeves and opened up their shirts. We need to pray for these boys, that they might find God. All this affected me so deeply that I told the hospital authorities that my friends and I would make ourselves responsible for the rehabilitation equipment. It has since been my joy to be able to channel over £15,000 of rehabilitation equipment to Hadassah for the use of these boys, some of whom will need care for virtually the rest of their lives. I have been amazed at the effect that our small gifts have had. On a return visit to Israel, I met all the professors of Hadassah and one after another said, ‘We have had some very big gifts, but it was these small gifts from groups of Christian students in Britain and Norway that deeply touched us.’ The thing which moved them most of all was that a group in the eastern section of Jerusalem also gave something, for some members of this group were Arab Christians. The Israeli medical authorities remembered that in the 1948 War of Independence, a medical convoy had been ambushed by the Arabs in that very part of the city. Seventy-eight people died in that ambush including the director general of Hadassah, top specialists and doctors, but now after all these years and in a time of need, Arab believers in that same area had joined with other Christians in giving this money. There were also many cases of paralysis resulting from the Yom Kippur War. There are men who will be lame, dumb or blind for the rest of their lives; there are many others who suffered terrible brain injuries and of course there was much severe shock, as a result of which many cannot speak or see. This was the first war in Israel’s twenty-five-year history that resulted in such severe cases of this kind. If there were no other evidence, this would be enough to show the kind of war the Yom Kippur War was. Several of the boys told me that what horrified them most was the fact that the Egyptian troops had been given a drug, something like LSD, which made them completely impervious to fear. Colonel Amnon Resheff, commander of Israel’s 14th Armoured Brigade, said, ‘Our task was made more difficult by the human waves coming at us. It did not seem to matter how many we killed, they kept on coming. The attacks they made were often suicidal. Their commanders did not care how many perished.’ It is a strange fact but during the whole course of the war I did not personally hear of one Jewish Christians killed or even wounded. I did, however, hear of many who had significant opportunities to serve their fellow Israelis on both fronts. One believer from Tel Aviv, named Chaim, was on the Sinai front and had his Bible with him. A big talking point throughout the Israeli army at that time was the question of biblical prophecy, and many were asking, ‘Have the Old Testament prophets said anything about the days in which we are living?’ Most of these boys knew nothing about the Bible and nothing about prophecy. Whenever they found someone who did, they wanted to hear from him. Chaim was in great demand everywhere. After the first two weeks of the war, when there was a little more free time the boys would gather around and discuss these things. They would say, ‘Now you read it to us. Where is it?’ Then Chaim would lead them in a discussion about the Scriptures. Once a jeep drove up at great speed, and two fellows jumped out of it and ran into the mess hall. ‘Where is Chaim? We want Chaim.’ ‘There are lots of people called Chaim. Which Chaim?’ the men in the mess hall answered. ‘We want the Bible Chaim.’ ‘You can’t have him, he stays here.’ ‘We want him down at our end of the Canal, because we have great discussions going on, but no one’s got a Bible, and no one knows anything about these things.’ At the very height of the war, Arab and Jewish believers were praying together in Jerusalem, but equally remarkable was the fact that those working among the Arabs and those working among the Jews got together. The great breakthrough came after a slight confrontation in one of our times of prayer. First someone prayed for Israel and the Israeli Cabinet. Then someone prayed equally seriously for the Arabs ‘for whom our Lord had also died’. I immediately stopped the prayer meeting and said that if we were going to pray horizontally like this and shoot one another down in prayer, we might as well stop altogether. I mentioned that I thought the breakthrough would come when one of those working solely among the Jews, prayed for the Arabs and vice versa. The change did indeed come when someone who was fanatically pro-Israel prayed that the Arab wounded would really find the Lord and for Arab believers in Damascus that they might be helped by God at that time. That brought us all together and from then on we trusted each other and were able to pray for Arab and Jew alike without recrimination. The war deeply affected some of the Israeli leaders. Golda Meir, then seventy-six years of age, went to the airport nearly every day on which there were prisoners returning from Egypt and waited hours to be able to greet them. There were only a few hundred of them in all. At times she wept so much that the television cameras had to be turned away from her. Other times, after a twenty-four- hour cabinet session or something similar, she would go to the hospitals of Hadassah or Tel Hashomer and visit the wounded boys instead of getting some sleep. The Israeli military authorities often showed humanitarian concern for the welfare of their enemies. I heard about the Syrian pilots who parachuted out of their planes into the sea. Surprisingly it was not the Lebanese government, or the Syrian, but the Israeli authorities who sent launches out to rescue them. I was told of an incident by an Israeli officer when he and his men found the body of a Syrian pilot who had been left unattended within shouting distance of his own units. He had bailed out of his plane and was wounded in his arm and thigh. They were relatively superficial wounds, but he was left to bleed to death when he could easily have been saved by his own troops. On his parachute he had scrawled in Arabic, in his own blood, ‘Allah help Syria, if this is the way she treats her sons.’ Most of the Israeli prisoners of war in Egypt were tortured. Some of them will never walk again because of the things which were forced into their bodies. I will not go into the details, but I will, however, tell you this. At the Hadassah Hospital one of the leading brain specialists in the world, an Israeli, performed a difficult and complex operation on an Egyptian major and by so doing saved his life. This surgeon’s own son will never walk again, because of the way he was tortured by the Egyptians. At the time of his capture he could walk perfectly. The idea that Israel is an imperialist, colonialist state with a kind of apartheid is absolute nonsense. At the Hadassah Hospital, whose standards compare favourably with leading hospitals in London or New York, an assistant surgeon and one of the chief nurses are both Arabs. They work alongside their Jewish colleagues quite happily, which is after all what ideally should happen since Jews and Arabs are cousins. One third of all the out-patients at this hospital are Arab, and about a quarter of the in-patients and there is no distinction made between the two. One cannot help but feel that forces outside the country are playing on this whole matter. If it were not for these outside forces, Arab and Jew would probably live in peace. I remember speaking with one of the world’s leading dermatologists at Hadassah, a specialist in leprosy, who told me: ‘Just before the war a woman came to us from Cyprus, an Arab woman, and she had the first signs of leprosy. She asked if I could treat her. I said, “Yes, have you any money?” She said, “None at all.” So we put her on government expense. During the following months, the fact emerged that her husband was an officer in the Jordanian army, which was facing the Israeli forces. She was totally cured, went back to Jordan and promptly sent a friend to us who also had leprosy, to be cured free of charge at Hadassah.’ There are many signs of a very deep work taking place within the Israeli nation. Golda Meir said in a speech which I found one of the most moving I have ever heard, ‘There is no Jew in Israel who can say that he is the same today as he was on the eve of Yom Kippur. I don’t believe I will ever be the same.’ Bibles and prayer books were in demand above all else by the soldiers and a controversy raged, in the Hebrew press, as to whether the field rabbis (service chaplains) had failed in their duty or not. The crux of the complaint was this− there had been a run on Bibles during the first few weeks of the war, and there were none available. It was somewhat unreasonable to blame the Jewish chaplaincy. For years no one except perhaps one lad here and there, had ever asked for a Bible. Now suddenly thousands of men wanted them. One Israeli entertainer took a whole truckload of vodka, Bibles and prayer books to the Golan to distribute to the soldiers. It was very cold there, and he took the vodka to try and keep the boys warm. Surprisingly enough, however, it was not the vodka they wanted, but the Bibles which were of course Old Testaments. Some people think that without the New Testament, it is impossible to find God as Saviour and are worried by this, forgetting that the early church had only the Old Testament. The New Testament is of course necessary for the full revelation of God’s plan of salvation, but the Old Testament is also the Word of God which lives and abides forever. A recent report of interviews with soldiers has revealed that a surprisingly high number of them went into the war as atheists and came out as ‘believers’. They are not believers as Christians understand the word, but believers in a Supreme Being. That is nevertheless a tremendous change of heart. One man told me, ‘I have never seen anything like it. The boys prayed before battle, during battle and after battle. They spent time reading the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and discussing it. I have never seen anything like it. Women normally pray, but not men.’ One great joy was the fact that the Israeli Cabinet officially sanctioned fifteen minutes of Bible reading on the Israeli radio. This had never happened before but now the Bible is read for fifteen minutes during peak listening time each evening. On November 5th, 1973, a few days before the cease-fire, the chief Rabbi called Israel to prayer. That was the first official day of prayer that the modern state of Israel had ever had and virtually everyone responded to it. The synagogues were packed with people; there were never less than three thousand at the Western Wall in prayer and it was real prayer from the heart. For those of us present on that occasion it was unforgettable. For days afterwards, the searing tones of the Rabbi leading us in prayer burnt through our soul. On few occasions can these ancient stones of the Western Wall, spanning as they do the whole age from Christ to the present time and crystallizing the history, sorrow, suffering and hopes of the Jewish people have ever witnessed such prayer. You’ve been listening to chapter 3 of the audiobook for Battle for Israel by Lance Lambert. For more information, or to purchase the full audiobook, please visit our website www.lancelambert.org. May you know the deep deep love of Jesus.