Photo showing the only Catholic church in Gaza after being struck by an Israeli tank

By Theodore Shoebat

“Therefore thus says the Lord God: ‘Like the wood of the vine among the trees of the forest, which I have given to the fire for fuel, so I will give up the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and I will set My face against them. They will go out from one fire [the Holocaust], but another fire shall devour them. Then you shall know that I am the Lord, when I set My face against them. Thus I will make the land desolate, because they have persisted in unfaithfulness,’ says the Lord God.” — Ezekiel 15:6-8 

History is a force that cannot be defeated. You can make the biggest bombs in the world, the most powerful guns, you will never stop the force of history. And what do we see?

The world is descending into madness — the madness of tribalism, the madness of militarism. It is a genocidal madness that knows no bounds. The Iranians and the Turks want to destroy Israel, and as the Iranians bomb Israel, this desire is made manifest in the cheers of the Muslim world. Iran is relentlessly bombarding Israel, and with every bomb that strikes the Jewish state, Iran receives the adulations of the Islamic world. Now the Muslims have a hero to look up to, esteeming Iran as a country that is fighting to save the Palestinians from the tyrannical Zionists. History does not exactly repeat but it rhymes. And the history of the Jews is stained with blood. Why is the future exempt from the lessons of the past? 

What has been is what will be,

    and what has been done is what will be done,

    and there is nothing new under the sun. — Ecclesiastes 1:9

Just as there was a Shoah in the past, so shall there be one in the future, and are witnessing the presaging signs of this inevitable deluge of gore. Israel shall become one giant Auschwitz. A cry against the Jews has been resounding the world, and even in the Western world there are millions of people who embraced a song by Kanye West that has for its chorus, “Hiel, Hitler.” This is not coincidental, its not coming out of nowhere. There is a spiritual reality that is transpiring underneath all of this. Remember what Christ said to the Jews: 

“Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar.” (Matthew 23:34-35)

Christ identifies the Jews with Cain, and what was the curse that was given to Cain? “You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” (Genesis 4:12)  The Jews have been driven out of countries for millennia, and have been hated throughout their history. Thus a rhyming of history is inevitable. Even while in their own country, the Jews are hated by their neighbors. But why has the hatred intensified? Because of Gaza. Why was Cain hated? Because he was a murderer.  Israel has made Gaza into a giant war crime zone. Look at what Israel snipers were doing in the Netzarim corridor. I will let the report by Haaretz, which quotes the soldiers who witnessed these crimes, speak for itself:

“The forces in the field call it ‘the line of dead bodies'” a commander in Division 252 tells Haaretz. “After shootings, bodies are not collected, attracting packs of dogs who come to eat them. In Gaza, people know that wherever you see these dogs, that’s where you must not go.”

The Netzarim corridor, a seven-kilometer-wide strip of land, stretches from near Kibbutz Be’eri to the Mediterranean coast. The IDF has emptied this area of Palestinian residents and demolished their homes to construct military roads and military positions.

While Palestinians are officially prohibited from entering, the reality is more severe than a simple exclusion zone. “It’s military whitewashing,” explains a senior officer in Division 252, who has served three reserve rotations in Gaza. “The division commander designated this area as a ‘kill zone.’ Anyone who enters is shot.”

A recently discharged Division 252 officer describes the arbitrary nature of this boundary: “For the division, the kill zone extends as far as a sniper can see.” But the issue goes beyond geography. “We’re killing civilians there who are then counted as terrorists,” he says. “The IDF spokesperson’s announcements about casualty numbers have turned this into a competition between units. If Division 99 kills 150 [people], the next unit aims for 200.”

…

“Calling ourselves the world’s most moral army absolves soldiers who know exactly what we’re doing,” says a senior reserve commander who has recently returned from the Netzarim corridor. “It means ignoring that for over a year, we’ve operated in a lawless space where human life holds no value. Yes, we commanders and combatants are participating in the atrocity unfolding in Gaza. Now everyone must face this reality.”

“Division commanders now have almost unlimited firepower authority in combat zones,” explains a veteran officer in Division 252. “A battalion commander can order drone strikes, and a division commander can launch conquest operations.” Some sources describe IDF units operating like independent militias, unrestricted by standard military protocols.

…

“One time, guards spotted someone approaching from the south. We responded as if it was a large militant raid. We took positions and just opened fire. I’m talking about dozens of bullets, maybe more. For about a minute or two, we just kept shooting at the body. People around me were shooting and laughing.”

But the incident didn’t end there. “We approached the blood-covered body, photographed it, and took the phone. He was just a boy, maybe 16.” An intelligence officer collected the items, and hours later, the fighters learned the boy wasn’t a Hamas operative – but just a civilian. 

“That evening, our battalion commander congratulated us for killing a terrorist, saying he hoped we’d kill ten more tomorrow,” the fighter adds. “When someone pointed out he was unarmed and looked like a civilian, everyone shouted him down. The commander said: ‘Anyone crossing the line is a terrorist, no exceptions, no civilians. Everyone’s a terrorist.’ This deeply troubled me – did I leave my home to sleep in a mouse-infested building for this? To shoot unarmed people?”

…

An officer in Division 252’s command recalls when the IDF spokesperson announced their forces had killed over 200 militants. “Standard procedure requires photographing bodies and collecting details when possible, then sending evidence to intelligence to verify militant status or at least confirm they were killed by the IDF,” he explains. “Of those 200 casualties, only ten were confirmed as known Hamas operatives. Yet no one questioned the public announcement about killing hundreds of militants.”

Another fighter describes witnessing four unarmed people walking normally, spotted by a surveillance drone. Despite clearly not appearing as militants, a tank advanced and opened fire with its machine gun. “Hundreds of bullets,” he recalls. Three died immediately (“the sight haunts me,” he says), while the fourth survived and raised his hands in surrender.

“We put him in a cage set up near our position, stripped off his clothes, and left him there,” the soldier recounts. “Soldiers passing by spat on him. It was disgusting. Finally, a military interrogator came, questioned him briefly while holding a gun to his head, then ordered his release.” The man had simply been trying to reach his uncles in northern Gaza. “Later, officers praised us for killing ‘terrorists.’ I couldn’t understand what they meant,” the fighter says.

In another incident, observation posts spotted two people walking toward Wadi Gaza, an area designated as restricted. A drone revealed they were carrying a white flag and walking with raised hands. The deputy battalion commander ordered troops to shoot to kill. When one commander protested, pointing out the white flag and suggesting they might be hostages, he was overruled. “I don’t know what a white flag is, shoot to kill,” the deputy commander, a reservist from Brigade 5, insisted. The two people eventually turned back south, but the protesting commander was berated as a coward.

…

This approach isn’t limited to Division 252. A Division 99 reservist describes watching a drone feed showing “an adult with two children crossing the forbidden line.” They were walking unarmed, seemingly searching for something. “We had them under complete surveillance with the drone and weapons aimed at them – they couldn’t do anything,” he says. “Suddenly we heard a massive explosion. A combat helicopter had fired a missile at them. Who thinks it’s legitimate to fire a missile at children? And with a helicopter? This is pure evil.”

Why such indiscriminate slaughter? Because in their ideology, all Palestinians are terrorists. According to one Israeli soldier, Yehuda Vach, the brigadier general of the IDF’s Division 252, declared to his troops: ”there are no innocents in Gaza”. The same soldier recounted, that with Vach “it wasn’t just opinion – it became operational doctrine: everyone’s a terrorist.”

Under Vach, the demarcation of the “kill zone” shifted from day to day, and anyone who walked in said “kill zone” had to be killed, regardless if any of the civilian population was oblivious to his arbitrary changing of the lines. As the Haaretz article documents:

“Under Vach, the Wild West atmosphere intensified. The “kill zone” boundary shifted constantly – “500 meters here today, 500 meters there tomorrow,” says one fighter. While other units also broke rules, officers say Vach went further. One of the concepts he introduced was declaring anyone entering the kill zone a terrorist conducting reconnaissance. “Every woman is a scout, or a man in disguise,” an officer explains. “Vach even decided anyone on a bicycle could be killed, claiming cyclists were terrorists’ collaborators.”

This aimless slaughter didn’t stop at kill zones. There was another method of torment that is done by Israel, and that is the “Mosquito protocol,” in which Israeli soldiers force a Palestinian civilian to enter houses and, if there is a bomb inside, to be blown to pieces, forcing them to be human shields. Why do they call it the “Mosquito protocol”? For the same reason that Japanese scientists called their Chinese test subjects (who they infected with disease) “logs,” and for the same reason Nazi scientists referred to their Jewish and Polish test subjects as farm animals. The Palestinian is the mosquito, sent to get swatted. For the same dehumanizing effect, IDF soldiers called their Palestinian victims “wasps.” As a Haaretz report from August 1th of 2024 documented:

“The senior ranks know about it,” the source said. The army has played innocent despite footage shown on Al Jazeera about two months ago. Israeli soldiers can be seen dressing Palestinian detainees in uniforms and flak jackets, putting cameras on them and sending them into badly damaged houses and tunnel entrances with their hands bound by plastic ties.

…

There is also evidence that in some cases, minors or the elderly are used. “There were times when really old people were made to go into houses,” one combat soldier said. If the Palestinian knows Hebrew, that’s an advantage for the IDF; when Gazans are used in buildings and tunnels, they need to report to the forces outside.

As one soldier put it, Palestinians are told: “Do one mission of … a [tunnel] shaft and you’re free.”

Still, even though some Palestinians are required to remain with a unit “only” for 24 hours, others wind up staying for two days or even a week. “When you’re inside this thing, you don’t know how to say what’s okay,” the soldier said. “What’s certain is that it’s a horrible feeling.”

…

A soldier in a conscript army brigade added: “About five months ago, two Palestinians were brought to us. One was 20 and the other was 16. We were told: ‘Use them, they’re Gazans, use them as human shields.’”

According to this soldier, that day, soldiers in the unit began to ask questions about this use of civilians as human shields; they also wanted to know who gave the order.

According to the soldier, “They tried to say something about October 7, not something concrete. One person said: ‘Don’t beat them too much because we need them to open the locations'” where troops need to enter, such as buildings and tunnels.

…

Many soldiers felt uncomfortable about this, demanded answers and even shouted, said a person who was near one of the Gazans. “Most of them realized there was a problematic incident here, and it was hard for them to process,” he said.

He added: “One of the commanders turned to one of the combat soldiers who tried to receive answers and told him: ‘You don’t agree that the lives of your friends are much more important than their lives? And isn’t it better that our friends will live and not be blown up by an explosive device, and that they get blown up by an explosive device?”

This soldier said that the commander’s comment was made with such aggressiveness that it was clear that there was little room for the troops to express doubts.”

Nadav Weiman, executive director of Breaking the Silence – a whistleblower group consisting of former Israeli soldiers who expose IDF atrocities, said in regards to the Mosquito Protocol: “These are not isolated accounts; they point to a systemic failure and a horrifying moral collapse…  Israel rightly condemns Hamas for using civilians as human shields, but our own soldiers describe doing the very same.” One soldier recounted to AP News about a 2024 IDF meeting in which a brigade commander presented to the division commander a slide reading “Get a mosquito” and suggested they might “just catch one off the streets.” The same soldier told a horrific story in which a Palestinian was forced into a tunnel as a human shield, he passed out and died. 

Another Haaretz report, published in February of 2025, documented a horrific incident of the Mosquito Protocol:

An IDF officer used an 80-year-old Palestinian man as a human shield to inspect houses in Gaza for booby traps, while threatening to blow off his head by tying an IED command-wire to his neck, according to a report Saturday by Israeli independent media outlet “the Hottest Place in Hell.”

The man and his wife were later forced to evacuate south, where a different IDF battalion spotted them and shot them both to death.

The incident took place in Gaza City, in the neighborhood of Zaytoun, in May. According to soldiers who interviewed for the report, the elderly man was forced to inspect neighborhood houses for booby traps, even though he needed a cane to walk.

The soldiers, from the Nahal infantry brigade, spotted the man and his elderly wife in a house in Zaytoun.

“They said that they did not have anywhere to go, and that they were not able to evacuate to Khan Yunis” in the southern Gaza Strip, one of the soldiers said. “The man walked with a cane, and they said that they just could not walk all the way there,” he added.

“He entered each house before us, so that if there was a booby trap or a terrorist – then the device would be activated by him, not by us,” said a soldier who witnessed the incident.

“The officer tied the [IED] command-wire to the elderly man’s neck, so that he would not run away,” another soldier said.

After the man was commanded to inspect houses with the squad for eight whole hours, the couple was ordered to evacuate south, to an area dubbed as a humanitarian zone. However, the soldiers said that they didn’t update other IDF forces in the vicinity that the couple was about to head south.

“After 100 meters, the other battalion saw them and shot them on the spot. They died like that, on the street,” one of the soldiers said.

The IDF said in response that it has yet to hear of the incident. “If more details surface, then another inspection will be undertaken,” they said.

And then we have the massacres of starving Gazans as they rushed to food distribution centers, which was clearly exposed in an in-depth article by Haaretz. One Israeli soldier told Haaretz:

“It’s a killing field … Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire. … We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces … I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”

One reservist told Haaretz of the dystopian nightmare:

“Gaza doesn’t interest anyone anymore … ”It’s become a place with its own set of rules. The loss of human life means nothing. It’s not even an ‘unfortunate incident,’ like they used to say.”

Another officer said:

“Working with a civilian population when your only means of interaction is opening fire – that’s highly problematic, to say the least … It’s neither ethically nor morally acceptable for people to have to reach, or fail to reach, a [humanitarian zone] under tank fire, snipers and mortar shells.”

The Haaretz report also spoke of how private contractors getting paid by Israel to demolish houses for roughly $1,500 per house, and these contractors getting close to the Palestinians coming for food, prompting the IDF to open fire on the crowds:

“Today, any private contractor working in Gaza with engineering equipment receives 5,000 [roughly $1,500] shekels for every house they demolish … They’re making a fortune. From their perspective, any moment where they don’t demolish houses is a loss of money, and the forces have to secure their work. The contractors, who act like a kind of sheriff, demolish wherever they want along the entire front. … In order [for the contractors] to protect themselves, a shooting incident breaks out, and people are killed … These are areas where Palestinians are allowed to be – we’re the ones who moved closer and decided [they] endangered us. So, for a contractor to make another 5,000 shekels and take down a house, it’s deemed acceptable to kill people who are only looking for food.”

We can continue to present such horrific events, but this will suffice to shed light upon the horrors of Gaza.  The silence of the evangelical zionists of America about the crimes of Israel is an indication of their true religion: fixating on the Jewish race and justifying the crimes of Israel in the name of their genetic gospel. 

It is of no surprise that the atrocity of Gaza has enraged the world against Israel. There is very little sympathy for Israel, and when the Jewish state gets bombed, people simply say, ‘This is what you get for Gaza.’ As Israel has used the October 7th massacre to justify its massacre of the Gazans, the haters of the Jews will point to the slaughter of Gaza to justify the destruction of the Jews. All genocides are done under pretexts. The same will be done to justify the next Holocaust: they will say, ‘The Jews are mass murderers and thus deserve to be murdered.’ This will be reminiscent to what the Nazis did when they annihilated the Jews: they argued that because many of the Bolsheviks were Jews, and the Bolsheviks were mass murderers, thus the Jews deserved to be murdered. Just as the Israeli hardliners make ‘Palestinian’ synonymous with ‘terrorist,’ the Nazis made ‘Jew’ synonymous with ‘Bolshevik.’ The praisers of Israel like to say, ‘Israel is fighting mass murderers.’ But, the Nazis were also fighting mass murderers, the Bolsheviks. A government can be murderous while also fighting another murderous state, it still does not justify the former. But this is what sinister people do all the time; they point to the evils of others to justify their own evils. 

Absalom was enraged at his father for not punishing Amnon for raping his sister, and he used this fault of David to revolt against him. What Amnon did was evil, and David did wrong not to punish his son, but Absalom used this to justify an evil war against his father which was really done, not for justice, but for his own power. It was evil for the prince of Shechem to rape Dima, but after his people agreed to convert to the religion of Israel, it was evil for Levi and Simeon to, in the name of justice for Dima, break the covenant they had agreed upon and butcher the inhabitants of Shechem. They murdered in the name of justice for their sister, but they plunged themselves in injustice; they slaughtered with a facade of indignation, but spilt innocent blood for the purpose of thievery, for after they butchered those people, “They took their flocks and their herds, their donkeys, and whatever was in the city and in the field. All their wealth, all their little ones and their wives, all that was in the houses, they captured and plundered.” (Genesis 34:28-29)

They murdered those people who had nothing to do with the crime the prince had done, and this was after they had agreed to allow Jacob and his tribe to “dwell in the land and trade in it, for behold, the land is large enough for them.” (Genesis 34:21)

They murdered those people even after they agreed to be circumcised so that the Hebrews could “dwell with us to become one people” (Genesis 34:22) This was the beginning attempt at grafting the gentile world into the rootstock of Israel; here lied the beginning endeavor to unite humanity. But it was thwarted by Levi — the patriarch of the priestly class of Israel — committing to an action that harkens us to what Christ said to the scribes and Pharisees: “you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.” (Matthew 23:13-14) They unsheathed their swords to fight a monster, only that they had become monsters. They were suppose to lead the people of Shechem as a shepherd leads his flock, but instead they butchered the sheep. And these same sons of Jacob, were suppose to be watching their flock in Shechem, but instead were conspiring to murder Joseph. Jacob asks Joseph,  “Are not your brothers pasturing the flock at Shechem? Come, I will send you to them.” (Genesis 37:13)

And then Jacob tells him:  “Go now, see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock, and bring me word.” (Genesis 37:14) But when Joseph arrived at Shechem, his brothers were not there. A man noticed Joseph was searching for something with no avail and asked,  “What are you seeking?” “I am seeking my brothers,” he said. “Tell me, please, where they are pasturing the flock.” (Genesis 37:15-16) They were not pasturing their flock at Shechem, but instead were conspiring a murder yet again, just as they were suppose to guide the people of Shechem as a shepherd guides his flock, but instead conspired and committed the murder of those people. The man told Joseph that his brothers were in Dothan, and when he arrived to this area, his brothers “saw him from afar, and before he came near to them they conspired against him to kill him.” (Genesis 37:18) And they said: “Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits. Then we will say that a fierce animal has devoured him, and we will see what will become of his dreams.” (Genesis 37:19-20) And what was this dream that drove them to such mad violence? 

“Hear this dream that I have dreamed: Behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright. And behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf.” (Genesis 37:6-7) 

Their bundles of wheat — their bread — bowed before his bundle of wheat, his bread. With this are we reminded of that story in the Gospel when Christ and His disciples were harvesting wheat on the Sabbath and the Pharisees protested:

 “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” And Christ replied: “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions became hungry; how he entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for anyone to eat except the priests, and he also gave it to those who were with him?” (Mark 2:25)

If no one else was allowed to eat the consecrated bread except for the priests, then why was it allowed for David to consume such sacred bread? Because it was foreshadowing the rising of a new priesthood. Hence why in the same conversation Christ declared: “But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here.” (Matthew 12:6) And the Disciples were harvesting wheat on the Sabbath, and that is because the bundles of wheat of Christ was above the sacrifice of the Temple, just as the bundles of wheat of Joseph’s brothers bowed down before the sheaf of Joseph. Christ told the descendants of Jacob that something greater than the Temple was on earth, and that was because He was (and is) the fulfillment of the Temple, and He is the fulfillment of the consecrated bread. “Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.” (Matthew 26:26)

The sheaf in Joseph’s dream, to which his brothers’ sheaves bowed, was Christ. King David ate the consecrated bread, because he was presaging the dawn of a new order. What did David write in his Psalms? “You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” (Psalm 110:4) Melchizedek was the king of the Canaanite city, Salem (before it became Jerusalem under the Israelites), and he was also a priest who offered the sacrifice of bread and wine after Abraham crushed the kings who kidnapped his nephew, Lot. Abraham tithed to Melchizedek a tenth of the spoils he won on the battlefield, and about this event St. Paul writes: 

“And those descendants of Levi who receive the priestly office have a commandment in the law to take tithes from the people, that is, from their brothers, though these also are descended from Abraham. But this man [Melchizedek] who does not have his descent from them received tithes from Abraham and blessed him who had the promises. It is beyond dispute that the inferior is blessed by the superior.” (Hebrews 7:5-7) 

Levi was a son of Abraham, and his priesthood received the tithes of the Israelites, but Abraham gave tithes to a Canaanite priest and received his blessing. The order of Melchizedek — a Canaanite king — is thus higher than the order of Levi, a mass murderer of the Canaanites of Shechem. The order of Levi — with its shedding of animal blood — bows down before the order of Melchizedek, with its offering of bread, and that bread is Christ. Levi’s bundle of wheat bows down to the sheaf of Joseph, for that wheat was Christ. Abraham was promised a great nation from his seed, but his nation went beyond his tribe and transcended blood relations. Hence why God told Abraham: “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:3)

And the promise of Abraham was not limited to one tribe, but to all of humanity. Hence why St. Paul says: “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.” (Galatians 3:16) Those who follow, not Levi — the murderer of Canaanites — but Christ — a priest of the Canaanite king Melchizedek — are thus of the seed of Abraham. The promise of Abraham are not limited to race and tribe, but is universal. Levi did not wish to be universal, but rather butchered foreigners who had agreed to be grafted into God’s tabernacle, just as the priests in Christ’s day — the sons of Levi — violated the Temple when they sold merchandize in the Court of the Gentiles, and thus Christ exclaimed to them:  “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” (Mark 11:17) Christ was quoting Isaiah 56 where it also reads:

 “Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say,

“The Lord will certainly separate me from His people.”” (Isaiah 56:3) 

And surely this is what Levi did to the Canaanites of Shechem, severing their lives away after they had agreed to follow God. What God warned against in Isaiah was done by both Levi and his descendants in the time of Christ, for they placed the letter of the Law above the spirit of the law. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.” (Matthew 23:23) 

Levi was a mass murderer, and Melchizedek was the King of Salem — that is, the King of Peace. Levi bows before Melchizedek — the Israelite bows before the Canaanite —  just as Levi’s sacrifice bows to Joseph’s sheave. When Christ and His Disciples were harvesting wheat on the Sabbath, and the Pharisees objected, Christ harkened back to David consuming the consecrated bread which was only to be eaten by the Levitical priests, as if to tell them: A new priesthood has arisen, a priesthood not of Levi, who was a murderer, but a priesthood of compassion, of Melchizedek, the Prince of Peace. Hence, Christ declared to them in that same conversation: “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.” (Matthew 12:6-7) Mercy above sacrifice, this is what was rejected by Levi when he butchered those Canaanites of Shechem. And when Christ says, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,” He is specifically quoting Hosea 6, and it is not coincidental that this verse is declared as a condemnation of the Levitical priests — sons of Levi — committing murder on their way to Shechem:

“For I desire mercy and not sacrifice,
And the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.

“But like men they transgressed the covenant;
There they dealt treacherously with Me.

Gilead is a city of evildoers
And defiled with blood.

As bands of robbers lie in wait for a man,
So the company of priests murder on the way to Shechem;
Surely they commit lewdness.” (Hosea 6:6-9)

Levi — the father of the Levitical priests — murdered in Shechem; these priests — sons of Levi — were murdering on their way to Shechem. And God condemns these sons of Levi when He says: “I desire mercy and not sacrifice”. These words were declared by Christ to the Pharisees, as if to say, ‘Your priesthood — founded by Levi the murderer — and the members of which, committed murder on their way to Shechem, is coming to an end.” 

And it was because of Levi’s crime that he received a curse from Jacob: 

“Simeon and Levi are brothers;

    weapons of violence are their swords.

Let my soul come not into their council;

    O my glory, be not joined to their company.

For in their anger they killed men,

    and in their willfulness they hamstrung oxen.

Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce,

    and their wrath, for it is cruel!

I will divide them in Jacob

    and scatter them in Israel.” (Genesis 49:5-7)

In the Jerusalem Targum it renders the curse as being done specifically for the slaughter of the people in Shechem:

“Shimeon and Levi are brothers of the womb; their thoughts are of sharp weapons for rapine. In their counsel my soul hath not had pleasure, and in their gathering against Shekem. to destroy it mine honour was not united; for in their anger they slew the prince and his ruler, and in their ill will they demolished the wall of their adversary.” 

The Targum goes on to say that not only was it Simeon and Levi who butchered the people of Shechem, but that it was these two who wanted to murder Joseph, and that the curse of being scattered was specifically laid upon Levi: 

“And Jakob said, Accursed was the town of Shekem, when they entered within it to destroy it in their violent wrath; and their hatred against Joseph, for it was relentless. If, said Jakob, they dwell together, no king nor ruler may stand before them. Therefore will I divide the inheritance of the sons of Shimeon into two portions; one part shall come to them out of the inheritance of the sons of Jehuda, and one part from among the rest of the tribes of Jakob; and the tribe of Levi I will disperse among all the tribes of Israel.” 

From this we can see that the curse of being dispersed was given to Levi. That curse was finally fulfilled when the priesthood of Levi was destroyed by Rome’s destruction of the Temple. With the destruction of the Temple came the dismantling of the priesthood. “Verily I say unto you, there shall not be left here one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down.” (Matthew 24:2) The Levitical priesthood’s demise was foretold, and as the beloved Temple of the sons of Levi lied engulfed in flames, with the smoke billowing to the sky, high priests (sons of Levi) begged for their lives before the Roman military commander Titus who declared to them that since their Temple was crushed, their priesthood had been toppled. As Josephus documented: 

“On the fifth day afterward the priests that were pined with the famine came down; and when they were brought to Titus by the guards, they begged for their lives. But he replied, that “The time of pardon was over, as to them: and that this very holy house, on whose account only they could justly hope to be preserved, was destroyed: and that it was agreeable to their office that priests should perish with the house it self to which they belonged.” So he ordered them to be put to death.” (Wars, 6.1.1)

The priesthood of Levi died, but the priesthood of Melchizedek lives forever. Abraham belonged not to the priesthood of Levi — a butcher of Canaanites — but to the order of Melchizedek, for “because when Melchizedek met Abraham, Levi was still in the body of his ancestor.” (Hebrews 7:10) And of whose seed is the Church? Is it not of Abraham’s?  “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”  (Galatians 3:29) If the seed of Abraham is Christ, then why are we indulging in a genetic gospel that is fixated on bloodlines? People will claim to be of the bloodline of Abraham, but Christ did not see fleshy sons of Abraham as necessarily true sons of Abraham. In one conversation that Christ had with a crowd of Jews, He says: “I know that you are offspring of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you.” (John 8:37) In just a moment later, Christ tells them that they are not sons of Abraham: 

“They answered him, “Abraham is our father.” Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did, but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did.” (John 8:39-40) 

So Christ recognizes them as sons of Abraham, but then says they are not sons of Abraham because of their evil. So Christ is making a distinction between fleshy sons of Abraham and true sons of Abraham. “Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham.” (Galatians 3:7)  We must say with St. Paul: “not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring” (Romans 9:7) We are not sons of Levi — the murderer — but of Abraham, a member of the order of Melchizedek which transcends all bloodlines. But the hardliners of Israel make themselves into sons of Levi, into the sons of a dead and cursed priesthood. Today, the murderous act of Simeon and Levi is praised by fanatical rabbis. The Orthodox rabbi Hanan Porat, wrote of the Gaza war and applied it to it the Simeon and Levi massacre:

“Our people have an unhealthy and dishonorable tendency to think that “restraint is strength.” Therefore, it is necessary that the fighting spirit of Shimon and Levi be spread throughout the nation.” 

Even though the people of Shechem agreed to convert to the faith of Israel, and even went so far as to get circumcised, there is still a major rabbinic interpretation that says it was justified to butcher them. Their justification is that the slaughter of the Shechemites was “a war.” This way of thinking is influenced by the major Jewish authority, the sixteenth century rabbi, Judah Loeb (better known the Maharal): 

“Shechem may have sinned, but the whole town, how had they sinned such that they deserved to die? But it seems that this is not at all problematic, for they were two separate peoples, Israelites and Canaanites… and it is permissible to engage in battle when one nations sets out to make war against another.” 

Therefore, according to this rabbi’s way of thinking, covenant breaking and mass murder are permissible, even when your enemy has agreed to convert to your religion, as long as the crimes are done under the pretext of “war.” Even Abraham asked God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if there were ten righteous people in those cities, and God replied: “I will not destroy it for ten’s sake.” (Genesis 18:32) The people who praise Levi’s slaughter do not follow Abraham; for they do not follow Abraham’s seed — Christ — but rather they follow Levi against whom Jacob exclaimed: 

“Let my soul come not into their council;

O my glory, be not joined to their company.

For in their anger they killed men” (Genesis 49:6) 

They follow Levi and not Abraham, and with this we are reminded of the conversation that Christ had with a group of Jews. They told Christ “Abraham is our father”, and Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did” (John 8:9). Abraham desired to spare those who were not involved in the evil of Sodom, and Levi sought out to butcher even those who had agreed to convert to his faith. Is the latter the way of Abraham? Obviously not. But those who use the works of Levi to justify murder in Gaza, follow Levi and not Abraham. Not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring (Romans 9:7) 

When the war in Gaza began, the Israeli poet, Yehudah Weisen, wrote a poem calling for the destruction of Gaza, harkening back to Levi and Simeon, and going so far as to say that Jacob was wrong to condemn them:

“Simon and Levi

Dear, dear,

Simon and Levi, the beloved –

Their father was wrong and they were right,

Simon and Levi are the beloved.

This is a Jewish law that was born with Dinah,

This is the good Hebrew hand.

Once with a sword, today with D9 –

And just as it is, so too will your strength be lost.”

An Israeli soldier named Eli Shraga, wrote a poem and placed it onto an APC. It reads:

“Here in this APC

I am Shimon and Levi my brother.

And our sister Dina

If you see our cousin

This mother’s son

Tell him we are

Coming” 

Rabbi Moshe Hager, a famous teacher who was head of the pre-military preparatory school in Beitar and a colonel in the reserves, explained in 2012 that it was Simeon and Levi who were the correct ones while Jacob was preoccupied with international criticism:

“Our father Yaakov is afraid of international pressure on him and his family. Maimonides, as quoted by Rabbi Aviner, actually rules that Shimon and Levi made the right move.”

Yair Ben David, a commander in the 2908th Battalion, declared in a military speech in December of 2023:

“Battalion 2908 entered Beit Hanoun and did in Beit Hanoun what Levi and Shimon did in the city of Shechem. But the task is not finished; the mission is not over… We must do in Gaza what we did in Beit Hanoun … With God’s help, every Shechem and every city that dares to raise its head against the people of Israel will look like Beit Hanoun.”

The spirt of Levi possesses Israel. There is a sinister drive — influenced by the abysmal spirits — to lead mankind away from Melchizedek and into the fold of Levi. The return to Levi is a return to his murderousness. To walk the path of Melchizedek, is to join an eternal priesthood that continues forever (Hebrews 7:24). To concern oneself with Levi, is to concern oneself with genealogy, to fixate on the bloodline of Abraham. But, to be in the priesthood of Melchizedek is to do away with the fixation on race or genes. The Levitical priesthood had to descend from Levi, but Melchizedek was the king of Salem which, at the time of Abraham, was a Canaanite city. What does Noah say of Canaan? 

“Cursed be Canaan;
    a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.” (Genesis 9:25) 

The priesthood of our Salvation comes from Canaan, and its patriarch — Melchizedek — was (as we read in Josephus) a Canaanite chief. Canaan was deemed to be a servant, but Christ was a servant. If the priesthood of humanity’s Redemption came from “a servant of servants,” and not from the prestigious tribe of Levi, then in the Ark of Salvation, tribal hierarchy is rendered to nothing. Abraham was of the line of Shem to whom Canaan was to be a “servant of servants”, and yet Abraham gives tithes to a Canaanite, and he receives the sacrifice of bread and wine from the same Canaanite. Shem bows in respect to Canaan; the master gives his spoils to the servant; the offering of the lowly is embraced by the lofty.     

“And those descendants of Levi who receive the priestly office have a commandment in the law to take tithes from the people, that is, from their brothers, though these also are descended from Abraham. But this man who does not have his descent from them received tithes from Abraham and blessed him who had the promises.” (Hebrews 7:5-6) 

In the priesthood of Melchizedek, racial hierarchy is dismantled. Jerusalem is declared a holy city by Christian zionists because of its Jewish inhabitants, but Melchizedek was a priest of God and a king of Jerusalem (Salem) before the Jews even existed. Then Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was the priest of God Most High. (Genesis 14:18) If Jerusalem was a holy city before the Jews and while it was inhabited by Canaanites — servants of servants — then there is a universality in the sacredness of Jerusalem, beyond bloodlines and earthiness. In Salem also is His tabernacle, And His dwelling place in Zion. (Psalm 76:2) When Jerusalem was lived in by Canaanites and under the holy king Melchizedek, it was still holy. But when Joshua entered Canaan, Jerusalem was under an evil Canaanite king named Adonizedek and Joshua went to war against Jerusalem. Was Jerusalem holy then? Obviously not. Absalom desired to murder his father David and rule over Jerusalem, and when a messenger told David: “The hearts of the men of Israel are with Absalom”, David told all his servants who were with him at Jerusalem, “Arise, and let us flee, or we shall not escape from Absalom.” (2 Samuel 15:13-14) He flees Jerusalem, knowing that the hearts of the men of Israel are with Absalom. And Absalom came into Jerusalem (2 Samuel 15:37).  It also says: “Meanwhile Absalom and all the people, the men of Israel, came to Jerusalem.” (2 Samuel 16:15)  

Was Jerusalem holy then? It was under Israelites, but wicked Israelites. Jerusalem was holy when it was under Melchizedek, a Canaanite king, but wicked when it was under Adonizedek, a Canaanite. Jerusalem was holy when it was under David, but not under Absalom. So why should we fixate on a physical city that — like all cities — wavers between good and evil? The holiness of Jerusalem is not about race, but a physical sign of the universality of heavenly Jerusalem. Israel declared war on David, and which of these was of heavenly Jerusalem? Obviously the latter. And while Israel was with Absalom, who was with David? A remnant of Israel and a large body of Philistines, one of the great enemies of Israel. David fled Jerusalem, and who came with him? “All his men marched past him, along with all the Kerethites and Pelethites; and all the six hundred Gittites who had accompanied him from Gath marched before the king.” (2 Samuel 15:18) All of these peoples were Philistines. And how does the Bible describe the battle between David, his Gentile army and Absalom and his Israelite army? “So the people went out into the field of battle against Israel.” (2 Samuel 18:6) David warred against Israel. And who was spiritual Israel? And which one of these truly mattered? God did not care for earthly Israel, for He sided with a diverse army of both Jew and Gentile against the whole of Israel and Jerusalem.  

The holiness of Jerusalem transcends the earth and tribe; it transcends hierarchy and race. Our focus on Jerusalem is thus not confined to an earthly city, but to a universal one — a city of God. “But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (Hebrews 12:22). It is in this Jerusalem where we find Melchizedek’s priesthood, outside of the bloodlines of the Jews, outside of the fixation on genetics and tribes. 

“For it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah, and in connection with that tribe Moses said nothing about priests. This becomes even more evident when another priest arises in the likeness of Melchizedek, who has become a priest, not on the basis of a legal requirement concerning bodily descent, but by the power of an indestructible life.” (Hebrews 7:14-16) 

To go back to the fixation on race, is to return to Levi who refused to accept Canaan into his tribe and chose rather to murder him than to embrace him. Abraham embraces Canaan and accepts the sacrifice of bread and wine from the uncircumcised Melchizedek; Levi rejects the circumcision of Canaan, kills him and robs him. The crime was so great that Jacob (Israel) never forgot it, and in his dying last breaths, exclaimed of Simeon and Levi: “Let my soul come not into their council; O my glory, be not joined to their company.” (Genesis 49:6) There is a mentality that too many people have when it comes to the Bible: they read a verse and think, ‘this is it, everything has been explained,’ and they go on to have an unstable view of Christianity. ‘The Bible says that Canaan will be a servant of servants, thus Canaan is endlessly condemned.’ But the Canaanites of Gibeon sought out Joshua to make a covenant with him.

Yes, they lied to Joshua and said that they were from a far away land, to make it seem as if they were not of Canaan; and yes, Joshua did make a covenant with them while he was deceived. This is all true. But, when Joshua found out that he was lied to, he could have said, ‘You made a covenant with us under false pretenses, and for this you should be destroyed.’ But instead, Joshua honored the covenant. Unlike Levi who butchered the Canaanites of Shechem after they had agreed to be circumcised as a covenant to Jacob’s God, Joshua honored the covenant. Even after the people of Israel complained against the rulers of Israel (Joshua 9:18), wanting bloodshed as Levi wanted blood, the rulers said to them, “We have sworn to them by the Lord God of Israel; now therefore, we may not touch them.” (Joshua 9:19) The Canaanites of Gibeon lied to Joshua, but they lied for the sake of attaining mercy, and mercy was given to them. “For I desire mercy and not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6). The people of Israel did not want mercy, but death.

They had a viciously black and white view of things: ‘God told us to exterminate the Canaanites, these people of Gibeon are Canaanites and they lied to us. Therefore they must die.’ But mercy was given. The letter of the law was not extremely abided to, rather the spirit of the law was upheld. “For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.” (Matthew 23:23) Even in the midst of this war of extermination, mercy prevailed. Joshua was still upset that the Canaanites of Gibeon had lied to him, and so he said to them: 

“Why have you deceived us, saying, ‘We are very far from you,’ when you dwell near us?Now therefore, you are cursed, and none of you shall be freed from being slaves—woodcutters and water carriers for the house of my God.” (Joshua 9:22-23) 

The Canaanite king of Jerusalem, Adonizedek, and his fellow Canaanite allies, did not wish to have peace with Joshua, but rather they “gathered together and went up, they and all their armies, and camped before Gibeon and made war against it.” (Joshua 10:5) The Canaanites of Gibeon begged Joshua to fight for them against these Canaanites, crying out: “Do not forsake your servants” (Joshua 10:6). Joshua did not hesitate, and war was done in the defense of Canaanite servants. Yes, Noah said, “Cursed be Canaan”; yes, Noah said that Canaan will be a servant of servants to Shem. But here, Shem serves Canaan. Shem risks his life in the battlefield for Canaan. Levi made a covenant with the Canaanites of Shechem; broke the covenant and spilled innocent blood. Joshua made a covenant with the Canaanites of Gibeon, but served them. Abraham — a son of Shem — bows in respect to Melchizedek.

And what of the battle for the people of Gibeon? The sun and moon stood still, and “there has been no day like that, before it or after it, that the Lord heeded the voice of a man; for the Lord fought for Israel.” (Joshua 10:14) The battle that has no rival, no comparison, was one in which Shem fought for Canaan. The Israelites grumbled against Joshua for not killing the Canaanites of Gibeon, but Joshua became their salvation, and “delivered them out of the hand of the people of Israel, and they did not kill them.” (Joshua 9:26) The people of Israel demanded the blood of these Canaanites after Joshua had made a covenant of peace with them, just as Levi desired butchery after making a covenant with the Canaanites of Shechem. Levi believed that he was imposing justice — telling his father, “Should he have treated our sister like a prostitute?” (Genesis 34:31) The Israelites wanted to enact their own form of justice when they murmured against the leaders (Joshua 9:18) for preventing them from slaughtering the Canaanites of Gibeon. And then what happened next? The king of Jerusalem, Adonizedek, encamped against Gibeon and made war against it. (Joshua 10:5)

What does Adonizedek mean? God of justice. Adonizedek believed he was imposing justice by waring against the Canaanites of Gibeon, just as the Israelites believed they were just when they demanded the blood of these same Canaanites, and just as Levi esteemed himself as just when he butchered the Canaanites of Shechem. But in this case, mercy prevailed over the justice of tyrants. Without mercy, there is no justice, only tyranny. The tyrant will always find a pretext to commit genocide to make the slaughter appear justified. Absalom pointed to David not bringing Amnon to justice for the rape of Tamar as a justification to overthrow David; Levi pointed to the rape of Dina to justify the butchering of the people in Shechem; and all the Israeli soldiers who commit atrocities will point to the crimes of October 7th to justify their inhumanities. The Israelites pointed to the command of God Himself to destroy the Canaanites as justification to exterminate the Canaanites of Gibeon, but mercy prevailed. “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6).

And so the king of Jerusalem, whose name was “god of justice,” saw himself as just when pursuing the Canaanites of Gibeon for slaughter. But it was the justice of tyrants, the one that demands bloodshed even of the innocent. Even though God did command the destruction of all Canaanites, mercy was to be observed with the Canaanites of Gibeon for the covenant they had made with Joshua. The Israelites demanded blood, but mercy was held aloft above everything. They could have said, ‘This covenant was done under false pretenses, and God ordered that we destroy these people.’ This is exactly what was done by the tyrant King Saul when in his zeal for the people of Israel and Judah he sought to strike down the Canaanites of Gibeon (2 Samuel 21:2) Saul had zeal for his tribe and forsook mercy. And here lies the demarcation between earthly Israel and spiritual Israel: one is committed to blood and the other to mercy. Surly, Saul thought that he was justified to kill these people of Gibeon — just like Adonizedek (the god of justice) wanted to destroy them — and surely he pointed to the commandment of God to destroy these people in the Torah. But mercy prevailed. Israel wanted nationalist justice, but God cursed them with a famine for three years. And when David asked God why this famine was occurring, God told him: “There is bloodguilt on Saul and on his house, because he put the Gibeonites to death.” (2 Samuel 21:1)

David went to the Gibeonites and asked: “What shall I do for you? And how shall I make atonement, that you may bless the heritage of the Lord?” (2 Samuel 21:3) Here Shem serves Canaan. Here, Shem seeks a blessing from Canaan, just as Abraham sought the blessing of Melchizedek, a priest of Canaan. And what does St. Paul say of this? It is beyond dispute that the inferior is blessed by the superior. (Hebrews 7:7) The Gibeonites told David: “It is not a matter of silver or gold between us and Saul or his house; neither is it for us to put any man to death in Israel.” But David persisted: “What do you say that I shall do for you?” (2 Samuel 21:4) Here, Shem persists on serving Canaan to receive his blessing. The Canaanites of Gibeon told David: “The man who consumed us and planned to destroy us, so that we should have no place in all the territory of Israel, let seven of his sons be given to us, so that we may hang them before the Lord at Gibeah of Saul, the chosen of the Lord.” And the king said, “I will give them.” (2 Samuel 21:5-6) Here, Shem turns over seven of his own countrymen to Canaan for justice to be imposed. Here, Shem serves Canaan to receive his blessing. Yes, Joshua did tell the Gibeonites that they were to be servants to Israel, laboring as “cutters of wood and drawers of water for the congregation and for the altar of the Lord” (Joshua 9:27)

But what did Christ say? whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:26-28) It is true that Noah exclaimed:  “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.” (Genesis 9:25) But David seeks a blessing from the Gibeonites, Abraham seeks a blessing from Melchizedek, the Canaanite priest, and Christ the Messiah is of the Order of Melchizedek. The Canaanites of Shechem made a covenant with Jacob and God and got circumcised, and “on the third day, when they were sore, two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and came against the city while it felt secure and killed all the males.” (Genesis 34:25)

Joshua made a covenant with the Canaanites of Gibeon, and at “the end of three days after they had made a covenant with them” the Israelites found out that they were their neighbors and had lied about being from a faraway land (Joshua 9:16), but Joshua “delivered them out of the hand of the people of Israel” (Joshua 9:26). Christ, a priest of the Canaanite Order of Melchizedek, was murdered by earthly Israel, and on the third day, humanity was delivered from perdition. The reverse of what Levi did, was done by Joshua, and what Joshua did foreshadowed what Christ would do. A return to earthly Israel is a return to Levi and a rejection of Abraham, a disciple of Melchizedek. Thus, when king Saul butchered the Gibeonites, he was following his predecessor, Levi. This spirit of Levi breaks covenants and commits mass murder. 

The world saw this spirit manifest itself in the year 1982, in the slaughter of the Sabra and Shatilla neighborhoods. The killings lasted for four days. Women were ravished, babies were murdered, and mounds of bodies were made. The killers were Maronites, or members of the Lebanese branch of the Catholic Church, and they were backed by the Israeli government.  After an agreement was brokered by the US government, the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) agreed to leave the Sabra and Shatila camps. The remainder of the population in these camps were almost entirely unarmed civilians, leaving many women, children and elderly at the mercy of bloodthirsty nationalists who were trained and armed by the Israeli government. The Maronite nationalists, with the green light of Israel, rushed into the camps, and almost immediately began slaughtering and raping. Just as the men of Shechem were left defenseless after they had made a covenant with Israel, the civilians of Sabra and Shatila were left defenseless after the Palestinian fighters agreed to leave the camps.

The Sabra and Shatila massacres began on September 16th and continued on into the 19th, in the year 1982. It was after Israel’s second operation in Lebanon, called Operation Peace in Galilee, which was launched on June 6th. Its stated objective was to establish an Israeli military presence within twenty-five miles of the Israeli border. But it quickly escalated in its aim. By June 13th, Israeli forces led by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had advanced all the way to Baabda, the seat of the Lebanese presidency. This was also the headquarters for the PLO, and so Israel had trapped thousands of PLO combatants. Moreover, the Israeli army was completely surrounding West Beirut at this point. Israel was succeeding in its goal of, in the words of Sharon, “ridding the world of the center of international terrorism.” This meant the elimination of the PLO headquarters and infrastructure in West Beirut. The PLO was putting up a tenacious fight; the Israelis lost 368 men during the fight for West Beirut. However, the Israelis were winning by a landslide. In the first three months of Israel’s invasion, 17,825 Arabs were killed in all the areas occupied by Israeli forces. In West Beirut, 2,461 were killed from air strikes. By midsummer the PLO was in negotiations led by US envoy Philip Habib to end the siege.  

Israel wanted the PLO to leave Lebanon. But the PLO was concerned about the fate of the civilian population in the camps. An agreement was finally made in mid-August. Part of the agreement was that the PLO would withdraw its more than 11,000 fighters out of Lebanon. This evacuation would be superintended by a multinational force that would leave within thirty days of its arrival. The agreement also entailed written guarantees for the security of the Palestinian civilians in the camps, personally signed by America’s representative in the negotiation, Philip Habib. The evacuation of the PLO fighters began on August 21st and ended on September 1st. By September 10th, the American, Italian and French troops who had overseen the withdrawal had left Lebanon.

Besides having the PLO removed, the Israelis also wanted to establish a government friendly towards Israel and saw Maronite Catholic militants as the ideal people to take hold of the state. Shortly after civil war broke out in Lebanon in March of 1975, Israel began collaborating with Maronite paramilitaries who were fighting the PLO, especially the Phalangists, far-right nationalists led by Bashir Gemayel.  Ever since 1976, the Israelis had trained, armed and supplied the cadres and top lieutenants of these nationalist fighters. On top of this, Israel helped create a Lebanese border militia called Army of Free Lebanon, under the command of renegade Lebanese army major Saad Haddad.

The candidate that Israel wanted to lead Lebanon was Bashir Gemayel, a ruthless thug who had no qualms in butchering not only fellow Maronite rivals, but their family members as well (his gunmen forced his political enemy, Tony Frangieh, and his wife Vera, to watch the shooting of their infant daughter Jihane, then made him watch the murder of his wife, before killing him). Gemayel was very popular amongst the Maronite population and garnered a cult of personality for himself. On August 23rd, as the PLO was moving out, Bashir Gemayel was elected president of Lebanon. Israel immediately pressed him to sign a peace treaty with the Israeli government. But Gemayel resisted this. On September 14th, a week before he was suppose to assume office, Gemayel was killed by a bomb at the Phalange party headquarters in East Beirut. The perpetrator turned out to be Habib Shartouni, a Maronite Catholic who was also a member of a Syrian nationalist organization called the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.

Israel’s Minister of Defense at the time, Ariel Sharon, did not hesitate to blame the PLO on the killing of Gemayel, even though the PLO at that point had fully evacuated Lebanon. On the evening of the assassination, Sharon declared that Gemayel’s killing “symbolizes the terrorist murderousness threatening all people of peace from the hands of PLO terrorist organizations and their supporters.” Even though the killer was a fellow Maronite, the Maronite nationalists wanted to believe that it was the Palestinians who killed their beloved leader. According to Washington Post correspondent Jonathan Randal, Gemayel’s men were “only too willing to listen to the Israelis’ insistent argument that the Palestinians in the camps had killed Bashir and should pay.” The entire narrative of the PLO killing Gemayel was based on a lie, a lie that would instigate a lake of blood. As the saying goes, a lie can travel around the world before the truth can even get its shoes on. The lie had traveled like a demon, and possessed the souls of those who believed the lie and who thirsted for blood.

Within hours of the announcement of Gemayel’s death, Sharon and Prime Minister Menachem Begin decided to enter West Beirut. They did not consult the Israeli cabinet, and only told Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir of their deployment of troops. They did this despite an agreement with the US not to do such a move. According to Israeli journalist Amnon Kapelouk, this particular operation of entering Lebanon was meticulously planed long in advance. Thus, the death of Bashir Gemayel was merely used (albeit dishonestly) as a justification to enter Lebanon and use the Phalangists as proxies. 

That evening, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff General Rafael Eitan arrived in Beirut. Some hours later, at 3:00 in the morning, September 15th, Eitan, Major General Amir Drori, head of Israel’s northern command, and other Israeli officers met with Phalangist military leaders, including Fadi Frem, the militia’s new commander in chief, and Elie Hobeika, chief of intelligence. It was during this meeting that using the Phalangists in the Palestinian camps was discussed. Sharon’s instructions (presented as testimony to the Kahan Commission of Inquiry which was set up after the massacre) stressed that “Only one element, and that is the IDF, shall command the forces in the area. For the operation in the camps, the Phalangists should be sent in.”

Chief of Staff Eitan explained that while the IDF would not go into the camps, the Phalangists would be sent in “with their own methods.” The reason why the Israelis chose to work with the Phalangists, according to Eitan, was because “we could give them orders whereas it was impossible to give orders to the Lebanese Army.” Israel’s military entry into Lebanon commenced just about twelve hours after Gemayel’s death. Israeli Phantom jets flew over Beirut, Israeli gunboats took positions to shell the city, and tanks and troops advanced. The PLO was absent, which meant that resistance came only from the Lebanese Nationalist Movement (a coalition of Islamist and left-wing forces), and it was occasional and not very strong (this is indicated in the fact that Israel lost only seven soldiers during this operation). Sharon arrived in Beirut at around 9 AM to supervise the operation. By noon time, Israeli forces completely surrounded the camps of Sabra and Shatila. Now it was time for the “nests of terrorists” to be dealt with in “combing operations.”

This meant unleashing the rage of the Maronite nationalists. There were meetings that were held throughout the day between Phalangist commanders like Frem and Hobeika, and top Israeli military officials such as Chief of Staff Eitan, Major General Drori, head of military intelligence General Yehoshua Saguy and Brigadier General Amos Yaron. Yaron used photos to coordinate details for the Phalangist entry into the camps. There was also a warning “not to harm civilians.” At around 4 PM, 1,500 Maronite nationalists (Phalangists accompanied with militiamen from Saad Haddad’s Free Lebanon Forces) travelled from the Beirut International Airport on IDF-supplied jeeps towards the camps. If this operation was not intended to be a massacre, then what was the point of sending in militants into civilian populated districts?

On Thursday, September 16th, they entered the camps armed with knives, hatchets and firearms. The slaughter commenced almost immediately. They broke inside homes, slit throats, hacked people to death with axes, shot and raped people. For those who think these Maronites were fighting for a Christian cause, then explain what this has to do with Christianity? Almost nobody fought back because the camp was now full of unarmed civilians, many of them being women, children and elderly. The only people who fought back were those who owned some personal firearms.

When the sun went down, the Israelis made sure to fire nonstop flares into the night sky, so that the Maronites could see. The Israeli soldiers who were outside the camps were told that their mission was to fight terrorists. Did they know that they were firing flares so that the Phalangists could prolong the slaughter into the night? By 8 PM that night (just three hours after the Maronites bursted through the camps) a Phalangist representative reported to the Israeli officers at the forward command post, including General Yaron, that three hundred people — including civilians — had been killed so far. Forty minutes later, a briefing was held by Yaron. In the taped transcript of the briefing (which was included in the Kahan Report) the IDF divisional intelligence officer said that the Phalangists within the camp “are pondering what to do with the population they are finding inside. On the one hand, it seems, there are no terrorists there. . . . On the other hand, they have amassed women, children, and apparently also old people, with whom they don’t exactly know what to do.” When he began to cite a conversation with a Phalangist making clear that these people were going to be slaughtered, he was cut off by General Yaron.

When Friday morning — September 17th — arrived, rumors of nightmarish massacres had begun to spread from the mouths of medical personal, film crews, and refugees who managed to escape to the Gaza and Akka hospitals. IDF soldiers were ordered to seal off the exits, and there were even soldiers who pushed civilians, trying to flee, back inside. But because there were some soldiers who were so heartbroken by what was happening inside, they let people escape. Soldiers who were in an armored unit 100 meters from the camp witnessed groups of civilians being mass executed. IDF soldiers who were questioned later also spoke of how there was this absence of the “sounds of combat.”

At 11:30 AM, General Yaron (under orders from General Drori) ordered the Phalangist comanders to advance no further. Chief of Staff Eitan, being informed that the Phalangists had maybe “gone too far”, returned to Beirut from Tel Aviv. Drori, Eitan, Yaron and a Mossad representative, met together at the Phalangist headquarters in East Beirut. According to the minutes of the meeting (recorded by the Mossad representative), Chief of Staff Eitan “expressed his positive impression received from the statement by the Phalangist forces and their behavior in the field” and decided that they could continue their “mopping up” action until 5:00 A .M .

Regardless of the orders to advance no further, the slaughter did not slow down and the butchers were now told that they could continue on in satisfying their bloodlust. On went the executions — people shot at point blank range —, on went the gutting, on went the raping and the carnage. And as this horror transpired, bulldozers were seen scooping up corpses, their limbs and entrails hanging from the edges of their blades. It was like something out of the Holocaust, when mounds of bodies were pushed by tractors into pits. Only this was not the 1940s. This was 1982, and the murderers were being backed by the world’s only Jewish government. A batch of humans would be lined up, executed, and then the bulldozer would destroy a house and the debris was used to bury the corpses. The process was then repeated.

At midnight the killing stopped, only to be resumed at 5 AM (the time the Israelis and Phalange had agreed to cease the killing).  At around 7:00 A .M ., Maronite militiamen had gone to the Gaza hospital north of Sabra, and murdered the Arab personnel on the spot. The Maronite nationalists attacked another hospital, the Akka hospital. According to the New York Times, who spoke with an Asian doctor who was at the hospital during the massacre:

“Most people were either in hiding or had fled. Early Friday, at Akka Hospital, according to the Asian doctor, a young boy came rushing in, saying that his mother had been knifed and his sister taken away by militiamen.

At about this time, the people in the hospital shelter were unable to control their fear any longer and almost all of them fled the hospital in a panic, scattering in all directions. What happened to some of them is not known.

The Asian doctor said that in addition to himself, the only medical personnel left behind at Akka Hospital were five Palestinian staff members and six foreign nurses. He said there were also some patients in their rooms. None of them could walk.

At about 10:20 A.M., witnesses said, militiamen came to the hospital. Speaking Arabic in a southern Lebanese dialect, the witnesses said, they ordered everyone to come out with their hands up.

Three foreign nurses left the hospital under a white flag, according to the Asian doctor. He said they were accompanied by a Palestinian physician who worked at the hospital, Mohammed Ali Osman.

As they were leaving, a shot rang out, and the Palestinian doctor fell to the ground, dead. At 2 P.M. Friday, a different group of militiamen came, wearing different uniforms, according to the Asian doctor. He said they started to molest one of the Lebanese nurses, whose name was Friyal. They stopped after she started screaming.

“Shortly after that we went down to the shelter,” the doctor said, ”and found that one of the Palestinian nurses down there had been raped repeatedly and then shot.” He identified her as Intisar Ismail, 19 years old.

At approximately 3:45 P.M., witnesses say, yet another group of militiamen arrived at the Akka Hospital. Their arrival suggested to the Asian doctor that there was very little coordination between these men, especially since they all tended to ask the same question. The militiamen said they wanted to see the nurses. He told the men that the nurses had all fled.

At this point, according to the doctor, the militiamen asked to search the hospital. During the course of their work, they found a photograph of Yasir Arafat in the Asian doctor’s room.

“You are a terrorist,” one of the militiamen said to him.

At that point, the doctor said, he began to beg for his life. He was told to bring the nurses back to the hospital by 7 P.M., or else, the militiamen said, they would blow his head off.

Fortunately for the physician, by about 5 P.M. Friday, an International Red Cross convoy made it to the hospital and evacuated everyone left there. The doctor said that at about 5:30 P.M., as he was leaving the facility for safety, he saw at the southern end of Shatila what he estimated to be 80 to 90 bodies. They had been mixed together with sand and were being pushed by bulldozers.”

Thousands were butchered in this nightmare. Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk gives a rough estimate of 3,000 to 3,500 dead.”

The French journalist, Pierre Pean, did an in depth inquiry into the Sabra and Shatila massacre and was so traumatized by what he found that he later wrote:

“Throughout my investigation, I was paralyzed by these stories that carry, tangled, children with their throats cut or impaled, women’s bellies cut open with their fetuses, heads and limbs cut off with axes, piles of corpses… To the point of nausea.”

Pean spoke with a survivor of the massacre, Oum Chawki, who described how her husband was taken away from her, how the Maronite militiamen ripped the earrings from her daughter’s earlobes and how she witnessed a pile of corpses:

There was a knock at the door of the house. Someone said, “We’re Lebanese, we’ve come to search for weapons…” “My husband opened the door, not particularly worried, because he didn’t belong to any militant organization. He worked at the golf club near the airport.” Chawki then talks about the three Israeli soldiers and a soldier from the Lebanese Forces, the right-wing Christian militias, who entered the house, took her daughter’s bracelets and ripped off her earrings—she shows the torn lobe of one of her ears—and beat them.

“We were put into a van, which drove to the entrance of the Shatila camp. The soldiers separated the men from the women and children. The Lebanese man took the papers of three of our cousins before shooting them dead in front of us. My husband, my son, and other cousins were taken away by the Israelis. The women and children set off on foot towards the Sports City. On the side of the road, women screamed and cried, claiming that all the men had been killed.”

A sobbing woman, who had lost her entire family, showed her where the bodies were being dumped. The two women then walked towards the Orsal neighborhood and stepped over dead Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinians. Mrs. Chawki said she saw hundreds of them. It was indeed the Orsal district which had the most victims.

“—They were unrecognizable. Their faces were deformed, swollen… I saw twenty-eight bodies from the same Lebanese family, including two disemboweled women… I was trying to spot the clothes of my son and my husband. I searched all day. I came back again the next day… I didn’t recognize any of the bodies of people from Bir Hassan.” 

Mrs. Chawki saw Lebanese soldiers digging pits to push the bodies into… She never found the bodies of her husband and son. She finds it more difficult to deal with the case of her daughter, who was raped.

Siham Balkis, another survivor of the massacre, recounted what she saw in the aftermath of the first wave of butchery:

“There were many corpses in the streets. Young girls with their hands tied. Destroyed houses. Tanks, probably Israeli. The remains of a baby embedded in the tracks of one of them. Before arriving at the Sports City, the men were separated. Soldiers asked the young men to crawl. Those who crawled well were considered fighters and shot by soldiers from the Lebanese Forces.”

Palestinians were not the only victims of the killing spree. Kemla Mhanna, who survived the massacre, recounted with nightmarish detail how there were many Lebanese who were butchered alongside the Palestinians:

“All the people from our neighborhood who remained were murdered. Mostly Lebanese. When I came back, a pile of bodies was piled up. Next to my house, a Palestinian was hanging from a butcher’s hook, cut in two like a sheep. I saw how, in the large pit, they placed a first layer of corpses on which they spread sand, then another layer of corpses, and so on… I also saw another Lebanese from the Orsal neighborhood, Hamad Chamas, one of the few survivors of the massacre in that neighborhood. He was in a shelter when two Israelis arrived in a Jeep and seven or eight soldiers. I’m sure these soldiers were Israeli because they wore Israeli uniforms and didn’t speak proper Arabic. The soldiers asked us to leave the shelter while insulting us. They ordered me to put down the child I was holding and line up with the others. One of them, who spoke good Arabic, searched everyone and took one of the men’s money, then they all shot at us. I was only wounded in the head and thigh, under a pile of corpses. There were twenty-three dead… I hid in a shelter all night. In the early morning, there was a strong smell of corpses everywhere.”

One can go on and on with these horrid testimonies, but these will suffice to show the sadism and carnage of what happened in those camps under the hands of covenant breakers. The story of the Sabra and Shatila massacre is a microcosm of what happens when humanity turns away from Abraham: the Jew turns to Levi and the Christian violently fixates on nationalism. This is what happens when the Jews turn away from Abraham and tread upon the path of Levi. Covenants are broken, and a path of carnage and blood is paved. The world witnesses the horror of Levi and says, ‘Let us do away with this nation.’

And who in history arose to exterminate the Jews? It was the Germans and their acolytes who pursued the utter annihilation of the Jews and, like Adonizedek (the god of justice) and the Israelites who wanted to wipe out the Canaanites of Shechem, these Europeans believed that they were doing a righteous, necessary and just act by murdering the Jews, because they had made “the Jews” synonymous with Communism. The Jews were under the covenant of Abraham, but leaving that covenant, joined themselves to the atrocious ways of Levi. The Europeans are under a covenant with the tabernacle of Abraham and, forsaking it, return to savagery, paving a path of cruelty and carnage in the name of justice. Where is this covenant with the Europeans? It was declared and prophesied by Noah after the waters of the flood had calmed: 

“May God enlarge Japheth,

 and let him dwell in the tents of Shem” (Genesis 9:27) 

The tents of Shem are the tabernacles of Shem. From whose line did Christ come? From Shem. From whose line did Abraham come? From Shem. The Hebrew line springs from Abraham, “and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever.” (Romans 9:5) St. Paul preached with much exertion to the Jews that Christ is the Messiah, but they rejected his message. One day, Paul went to the Temple to pray and Christ appeared to him and told him: “Make haste and get out of Jerusalem quickly, because they will not accept your testimony about me.” When Paul brought up his persecution of the Church, Christ insisted: “Go, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.” (Acts 22:17-21) If Christ commanded to leave Jerusalem, then why is there is obsession with Jerusalem amongst Christian zionists? Christ directed Paul to leave the Temple so that he could preach to the gentiles. This was part of the beginning of Christ being taught to the Europeans, the posterity of Japheth. In Paul’s final attempt to tell the Jews about Christ, some of the Jews believed and the rest did not, and Paul declared to them:

“For the heart of this people is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.

Be it known therefore unto you, that the salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles, and that they will hear it.” (Acts 28:27-28)

Japheth was thus entering the tents of Shem, joining Shem’s descendant Abraham. Christ commanded Paul to leave the Jewish Temple, to bring the gentiles into the tent of Shem; and in turn, Christ commanded the gentile to leave the pagan temple. 

But what happens when Japheth leaves the tent and returns to the pagan temple? The same thing that happens when the Jew returns to Levi and his Jewish temple. He focuses on race and tribe. Butchery is the rotten fruit. Japheth wars on Shem, and will form a new religion around his desire to wipe Shem out. The Israelites thought they were following God when they demanded the destruction of the Canaanites of Shechem; the Jews thought they were doing God a service when they murdered Christ; and so Japheth will think that he is doing something just and necessary when he commits to the annihilation of Shem. 

“Because we have exterminated a bacterium we do not want,” declared Heinrich Himmler in a speech to the SS, “in the end, to be infected by the bacterium and die of it.” What was Himmler referring to? As he said in the same speech: “I mean the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race.” He does not speak of sadism nor cruelty, but moral duty: “we had a moral duty towards our people, the duty to exterminate this people.” In his zeal for Israel, King Saul butchered the Canaanites of Gibeon. In their zeal for Germany, the Nazis butchered the Jews. As Himmler declared: “That is why we are doing our duty more fanatically than ever, more devoutly than ever, more bravely, more obediently and more thoroughly than ever. We want to be worthy of being permitted to be the first SS-men of the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, in the long history of the Germanic people, which stretches before the US.” Nazism was a religion, and Hitler was held aloft as a prophet, bringing judgement upon the Jews. On January 30th, 1939, Hitler declared in a Reichstag speech a prognostication, which he deemed as a prophecy, about the extermination of the Jews by Germany:

“I want today once again to make a prophecy: In case the international Jewish financiers within and outside Europe succeed once more in hurling the peoples into a world war, the result will be, not the Bolshevization of the world and with it a victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

Hitler saw the Jews as synonymous with Bolshevism, so his war against the Communist Soviet Union was esteemed by the Nazis as a war to protect Germania from Jewish Bolshevism. Thus, the annihilation of the Jews was seen as a judgement on the Jews for the spread of Communism, the atrocities of the Bolsheviks and for the fomenting of war on Germany. When the extermination of the Jews was ongoing in 1942, Goebbels wrote in his diary that it was the fulfilling of Hitler’s prophecy:

“The prophesy which the Fuehrer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in these matters. If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It’s a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other government and no other regime would have the strength for such a global solution of this question. Here, too, the Fuehrer is the undismayed champion of a radical solution necessitated by conditions and therefore inexorable.” 

In the same year, Goebbels again wrote in his diary of Hitler as a prophet against the Jews:

“The Jewish race has prepared this war; it is the spiritual originator of the whole misfortune that has overtaken humanity. Jewry must pay for its crime just as our Fuehrer prophesied in his speech in the Reichstag; namely, by the wiping out of the Jewish race in Europe and possibly in the entire world.”

Nazism — tribalism and fixation on race — becomes the new religion of Japheth after he leaves the tent of Shem. In the Nazi SS, before one received his SS dagger he had to swear an oath written in a catechism in which belief in God was inseparable from belief in Hitler and race:

“Q: Why do we believe in Germany and the Fuhrer?

A: Because we believe in God, we believe in Germany which he created in His world and in the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, whom He has sent us.

Q: Whom must we primarily serve?

A: Our people and our Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler.

Q: Why do we obey?

A: From inner conviction, from belief in Germany, in the Fuhrer, in the Movement, and in the SS, and from loyalty.”

As the Jews will always turn to fixation on tribe and temple once they sever themselves from Abraham, so the European will always turn to racism once he exits the tents of Shem. What happened in the past, is a reflection of what will happen in the future.

What has been is what will be,

and what has been done is what will be done,

and there is nothing new under the sun. — Ecclesiastes 1:9

Israel is not residing in the tens of Shem, and thus it murders Gaza, and follows Levi. Japheth, leaving the tens of Shem, will turn to the worship of race. The evils of the Holocaust will repeat, and the world will look at Israel’s destruction and rejoice.  Even in the darling prophecy Christian-Zionists love to quote, Ezekiel 38-39, which according to them explains how God rescues the Jewish remnants from the impending danger by Gog and Magog, the prophecy adds: “The nations will know that the house of Israel went into exile for their wrongdoing, because they were disloyal to Me, and I hid My face from them; so I handed them over to their adversaries, and all of them fell by the sword.” (Ezekiel 39:23)

How many were killed by the sword? 

Answer: “All of them”.

Who makes it? Daniel clarifies: 

“… and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book.”

Only the remnant who recognize Christ are rescued (see Daniel 12:1)

What happens to the rest who are not in the “Book?”

I rest my case.