COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle
In colloquial language, “Jesus wept” is a cry of exasperation when we encounter something either appalling or appallingly stupid.
The leaders of the 18 states and territories comprising the Pacific Island Forum — including Australia and New Zealand — have done both by inviting Israel to be a second-tier sectoral partner to their regional organisation.
The origin of “Jesus wept” lies in the Bible and Christ’s despair at the human condition — which I discuss in a separate article, Lazarus has come back from the dead.
- READ MORE: Israel approved as second-tier partner in Pacific Islands Forum — Barbara Dreaver
- Shameful move by Pacific Islands Forum undermines decolonisation and justice — David Robie
- Other Israel in Pacific reports
First and foremost the Forum’s invitation to Israel is a political statement that these countries — at the political level — are in alignment with the values and programmes being advanced by Israel.
As decisions of this body are made by consensus, it means that all 18 member states — including Australia and New Zealand — have given their blessing. At the heart of this move is the theologically-twisted world of Christian Zionism which has a powerful hold on both political elites and many ordinary folk in Pacific communities.
Fables, such as certain Polynesians or Melanesians being among the Lost Tribes of Israel, swirl around the Pacific and are deliberately nourished by cynical actors. The myth of a Pacific connection to Israel was first peddled by Christian missionaries in the early 19th century to rustle up recruits and has held sway with gullible minds ever since.
Elise Barandon, a visiting fellow at Australian National University, says Israel’s growing influence in the region can be better understood through the lens of a shared Judeo-Christian framing.
“These engagements — alongside targeted development cooperation, security assistance, and increased political dialogue and visits — signal the activation of existing religious affinities, now translated into more explicit diplomatic positionings, including in multilateral arenas such as the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA),” Barandon wrote earlier this year in an ANU paper All In for the Holy Land: Pacific Islands and Christian Zionism.
Scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (2007) exposed the depth of collusion and modus operandi of Israeli and US homegrown Zionists — Christian and Jewish — in massively influencing US policy. Israel has applied the same techniques with great success to the smaller fish in the Pacific.
For Israel the support of these small Pacific nations (Palau has a population of just 18,000 but one vote at the UN) is gold. For the price of a few shekels they can help build a narrative of “legitimacy” at the United Nations, despite the world’s states in large measure repudiating the racist Zionist project to extinguish Palestinian identity in Palestine.
Israel runs a sophisticated global influence campaign; state agencies include MASHAV and the “humanitarian” NGO IsraAID. Similar to US agencies like USAID these are operated as extensions of foreign policy, often focusing on “aid for votes”. What goes on under the radar in terms of purchasable politicians is opaque.
IsraAid is tasked with providing water, sanitation, mental health and emergency medical care — all the things they have systematically destroyed for millions of Palestinians. But some Christian communities of the Pacific turn deaf ears and blind eyes to this and accept the largesse.
Many — but not all — the leaders of the heavily Christian Pacific — where churches are still full on Sundays — have chosen to side with a regime that has killed tens of thousands of children and is actively attacking the Christian community of Palestine. A strange element of Christian Zionism is the fact it also ignores this persecution of Christians in the Holy Land.
As Australian John Menadue pointed out in a recent article in Pearls & Irritations:
“The ethnic cleansing of both Christians and Muslims from Palestine continues. It is not only erasure of a people but of their culture and history.
“Australian leaders in church and state are complicit in the ethnic erasure of the Palestinian people, Muslim and Christian alike, from their homeland. They appeal for our help. But they are not being heard. They are being ignored.”
New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, like most “Christian” politicians, is probably not a true believer, otherwise he would know full well that by joining 17 other Pacific leaders last month in welcoming the state of Israel as a partner to the Pacific Islands Forum he has indelibly stained both his country’s and his own name.
To be clear: all 18 states have a great number of people who actively oppose the genocide and support the Palestinian people in this hour of need.
As David Robie, one of the veterans of Pacific journalism pointed out, the Forum has decolonisation as one of its founding principles. For good reason: our region has a long dark history of slavery, indentured labour, violent expropriation of land and European political and missionary imposed cultural erasure.
These wounds have not yet healed and now we have the ghastly sight of Israel representatives being embraced by Pacific leaders from New Zealand, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and other states.
Dr Robie, in a recent article in Asia Pacific Report, Shameful Israel move by Pacific Islands Forum undermines decolonisation and justice, says: “The Pacific Islands Forum has betrayed one of its founding principles in admitting Israel — already a global rogue pariah state — as a development partner in the middle of the genocide of an Indigenous people, the Palestinians.”
Their actions effectively express support for widely-held religiously-fuelled sentiments like these:
“We should take the land because God commanded us to take it. It’s our land. The Palestinians can go to any other Arab country, except Jordan, Lebanon and Syria — those are ours too. Or we will kill them,” said American settler Atara Serwatien, who recently moved to Israel from the US.
I spoke over the weekend with Rinad Tamimi, a Palestinian-New Zealand activist. She was understandably distracted by the fact that 35 members of her family had been evicted this week, along with thousands of other Palestinians, by Israeli Occupation Forces from their homes in Hebron, in the West Bank.
The United Nations has made clear the Israelis are an illegal occupation force and should not be in the West Bank at all, let alone imposing a collective punishment pogrom as part of its widening and accelerating genocide. New Zealand’s famously-racist Foreign Minister Winston Peters yawns and looks the other way when Palestinian rights are on the agenda but the rest of us should not.
Rinad Tamimi’s 95-year-old grandfather was among the family members manhandled out of his home by the Israeli stormtroopers.
“We’ve been pleading, rallying, marching for over three years now. We’re not asking for a miracle. All we’re asking for is for our government to sanction Israel, join the ICJ [International Court of Justice] case, and most importantly, speak out for what’s going on in Palestine. But we are seeing quite the opposite and I think it’s sickening,” Tamimi says.
I’ll give the last word to Dante Alighieri. I re-read Dante’s Divine Comedy recently and this line came to mind as I wrote about these Pacific Forum leaders:
“Oh, you proud Christians, wretched and small
“Who, by the dim lights of your twisted minds,
“Believe you prosper even as you fall.”
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He hosts solidarity.co.nz and contributes to Asia Pacific Report.
