Several small Pacific countries regularly vote in support of Israel at the United Nations in spite of overwhelming opposition for the Zionist state in the Middle East over its genocide in Gaza.

Why?

In this AJ+ video short, senior presenter/producer Dena Takruri sets out to explain the Pacific backing for Tel Aviv, including from Fiji which is understood to be supplying peacekeepers for US President Donald Trump’s International Stabilisation Force (ISF) for Gaza due to be announced this week.

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Israel has been building religious and diplomatic connections with the Pacific Islands, as six nations voted with it on the Gaza ceasefire issue.

“Israel is left standing alone with the backing of the US . . . and the South Pacific,” says Takruri.

“As Israeli’s biggest financial and military backer, the US makes sense.

“But why is a region in the Global South, on nearly the complete opposite side of the globe, co-signing genocide and apartheid?

Evangelical identity
“To understand the Pacific Islands countries, you have to understand the region’s identity. And that’s mostly Christian, like 90 percent Christian.

“And that’s because European missionaries in the 19th century focused on proselytising tribal leaders. Once their chiefs were swayed, their tribes would go with them.”

Christians in the Pacific took a very literal reading of the Bible, a feature of evangelicism.

For example, in Fiji, which has just opened an embassy in Jerusalem, one in four people identify as evangelicals – Christian Zionists.

To take advantage of this, Israel has deployed a special identity-based diplomatic “mythmaking” task force presenting Jews in Israel as being “indigenous” people returning to their “homeland”.

This notion clashes with the reality that Zionists settled in Palestine and expelled 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba –  “the catastrophe” – at the founding of the state of Israel.

“It’s the latest example of the Global North using the Global South for its own gain,” concludes Takruri.

The US tested 67 nuclear weapons on the Marshall Islands, tricking the people who lived on Bikini Atoll to leave their homeland “for the good of all mankind.”

But the Bikini Islanders didn’t know the US would contaminate their island and make it uninhabitable.

Now nearly 70 years later, many Marshall Islanders have moved to Springdale, Arkansas, nearly 600 miles (965 km) from the nearest ocean.

But as many Marshall Islanders build new lives there, they know Arkansas is not their permanent home, and their nuclear legacy is something both Americans and the next generation of Marshall Islanders need to remember.

The US forced the 167 islanders living on Bikini Atoll to leave in 1946 to enable American testing of nuclear weapons.

Over the next decade, the US tested 67 nuclear devices — 23 of them on Bikini.

Tabish Talib traveled to the Ozarks to learn how the Marshall Islanders are staying connected to their roots so far from their home.

“I feel like a nomad,” says a sixth generation representative of the Bikini Islanders in Arkansas, Sosylina Jibas-Maddison. “And it’s heartbreaking knowing there that we don’t have a home to go to.”

This is known to Marshall islanders as Bikini Day on July 5, the day that is also marked for the inaugural design of the swimsuit named by its French designer after the nuclear “bombshell”.

• AJ+ Reports: Why a royal princess from the Pacific is in Arkansas (13m30s)

The AJ+ Reports documentary on the Marshall Islands in the US.