1/17 Brian Tamaki has led haka in support of Israel. 6 of the 14 nations that backed Israel in a UN vote were in the Pacific Islands. What is the reason for the significant, tho not overwhelming, support for Israel from indigenous Pacific peoples? The answer lies in the 19th C.
2/17 Grant Wyeth has attributed Pacific support for Israel to the strength of pentecostal, End Times Christianity in the region. Wyeth has a point, but he ignores the fact that a significant number of Pacific people see themselves as descendants of Jews.
3/17 The identification with Judaism began in the 19thC & had 2 sources. The first was the teachings of missionaries. Struggling with how to relate to the peoples of the South Pacific, missionaries like NZ's Richard Taylor decided they were descendants of a lost tribe of Israel.
4/17 The notion of a Jewish origin was useful to missionaries for two reasons. In the first place, it allowed them to insist that, contrary to what extreme racists said, Pacific peoples were part of the human family, & capable of receiving the gospel.
5/17 But the notion of a forgotten Jewish history was also useful for putting Pacific peoples in their place. For Taylor & his co-thinkers groups like Maori had degenerated over centuries, losing their old Jewish culture. They needed to be 'educated' & 'civilised' by missionaries
6/17 But there was another reason Pacific peoples began to identify with the Jews. As they absorbed the missionaries' teaching & read the Bible, they began to see parallels between the sufferings of the Jews of the Old Testament & their own rapidly worsening situations.
7/17 Sitting in a cold prison on Chatham Island, where he had been exiled without a trial, Te Kooti thought of the story of Moses. In Aotearoa & many other parts of the Pacific, contact with Europeans brought land loss & displacement. The Old Testament resembled the present.
8/17 When he stole a boat & led his followers back to Te Ika a Maui, Te Kooti believed he was reenacting the journey of the ancient Israelites. The cold & turbulent waters between Chatham & the East Coast were his Red Sea. Like the Israelites, he travelled by the grace of god.
9/17 The arrival of Mormon missionaries in the Pacific reinforced the idea of a Jewish connection. The Mormons taught that the Polynesians had come from the Americas, which they had reached after being exiled from the Holy Land. They were a lost tribe.
10/17 The Mormons quickly won converts. In Aotearoa, they seemed less paternalistic than their competitors, & their emphasis on genealogy & baptism of the dead resonated with beliefs about whakapapa. In Tonga the Mormons were an alternative to the king's corrupt Wesleyans.
11/17 The belief in a Jewish connection was institutionalised in a series of indigenous churches, from Te Kooti's Ringatu church to the Deep Sea Canoe Movement of Malaita to Vanuatu's Church of Elohim, whose members dressed like ancient Hebrews.
12/17 Identification has been particularly intense on Malaita, where the flag of Israel is a banner of local identity, & where the mountainous interior of the island is believed to contain the ruins of the temple of Solomon. & Jewish identity has turned to support for Israel
13/17 The magazine of NZ Christians for Israel, an apocalyptic Christian Zionist group that has counted National MPs like Graeme Lee as members, regularly reports visits by groups of Pacific Islanders to Israel. Often the visitors are influential figures on their islands.
14/17 It is very difficult to believe that many of the hundreds of Pacific visitors to Israel have funded their own journeys. They appear to be hosted in Israel by Messianic Jews - that is, Jews who also worship Jesus. Visitors see sacred sites & hear speeches.
15/17 Recently Papua New Guinea, an outspoken supporter of Israel on the global stage, established an embassy in that country. It stands not in Tel Aviv but in Jerusalem. Israel has agreed to pay all the embassy's costs for at least three years.
16/17 MASHAV, Israel's foreign aid agency, has begun to fund projects on islands populated by 'Jews'. On Malaita, for example, MASHAV had funded solar energy & has begun identifying sites where 'mini industrial parks' can be established.
17/17 The irony here is so obvious it hardly needs mention. An identification with Jews that began as part of resistance to colonisation has now been coopted by a colonial state. If Te Kooti were alive, he'd surely parallels between the situation of Palestinians & his people
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