Greg Bouwer
IINZ
Fiji’s deputy prime minister has explained why the Pacific embraces Israel. His answer exposes the arrogance behind Labour’s objection – and the selective respect for Pacific sovereignty that passes for principle in Wellington.
On Friday, we examined Labour’s extraordinary objection to Israel’s admission as a forum partner of the Pacific Islands Forum. Eighteen governments, including New Zealand, had agreed to practical cooperation with Israel. Labour would have blocked it. Israel offered the Pacific water. Labour offered a veto.
Now Fiji’s Deputy Prime Minister, Viliame Gavoka, has explained something Labour appears unwilling to understand: the Pacific’s relationship with Israel is neither an accident nor a concession to geopolitical fashion. It is a relationship rooted in history, identity and belief.
“The entire Pacific Islands identify with Israel in ways many would not understand,” Gavoka wrote in response to news of Israel’s admission.
“It’s biblical and ageless and real.”
Then came the sentence that should be compulsory reading for every New Zealand politician who imagines that the Pacific requires Wellington’s approval to choose its international partners:
“We know that the relationship with Israel is timeless, whereas with others, it’s largely geopolitics and subject to what is fashionable for the moment.”
There is the difference. For Gavoka, the relationship with Israel is not a fashionable political cause, a diplomatic bargaining chip or an opportunity to signal ideological virtue. It is rooted in something older and deeper than the latest resolution, protest slogan or parliamentary press release.
For years, New Zealand politicians have lectured the world about respecting Pacific voices, Pacific identity and Pacific sovereignty. We have been told, correctly, that Pacific nations are not pawns in someone else’s geopolitical contest. Their cultures must be respected. Their priorities must be heard. Their choices must be their own.
Apparently, there is an exception. When those nations choose Israel.
Suddenly, the collective judgment of 18 governments becomes something that Labour believes New Zealand should have blocked. Suddenly, Pacific independence is less important than demonstrating opposition to the Jewish state.
Consider what has actually happened. Israel has not been admitted as a member of the Pacific Islands Forum. It has been accepted as a forum partner, enabling cooperation in agreed sectors. It has not been given a vote over Pacific affairs, nor has the forum endorsed every policy of the Israeli government. Pacific leaders have simply decided that a relationship with Israel serves their interests.
Labour would have said no. Not because Israel lacks expertise in the areas the Pacific needs. Not because Pacific governments have demonstrated that they do not want Israeli cooperation. Quite the opposite: they have collectively agreed to it.
Labour would have opposed the partnership despite that decision.
Fiji is not some distant observer of the relationship. It opened an embassy in Jerusalem in September 2025. Israel established its permanent diplomatic presence in Suva in June 2026. Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka and Deputy Prime Minister Gavoka have openly championed closer ties.
These are not accidental diplomatic encounters. They are deliberate expressions of sovereign policy.
Gavoka has now explained the thinking behind them. The Pacific’s relationship with Israel, he argues, is not merely transactional. It is also biblical, historical and cultural.
This should surprise nobody familiar with the Pacific. Christianity remains deeply woven into the social and political fabric of many island societies. Biblical history is not an obscure academic subject there. It informs identity, moral understanding and perceptions of the modern world.
Yet when that cultural and religious inheritance produces an affinity with Israel, it suddenly becomes something that outsiders feel entitled to dismiss, reinterpret or explain away.
We are constantly instructed to respect indigenous knowledge and cultural perspectives. We are told that communities understand their own histories and identities better than distant political elites.
Does that principle apply only when the resulting beliefs are politically fashionable?
Are Pacific Christians entitled to their understanding of Israel only when it produces conclusions acceptable to the New Zealand Labour Party?
Gavoka is not claiming to speak for every Pacific Islander, and no serious observer would suggest that all Pacific societies share identical attitudes towards Israel. But he is a senior elected leader explaining a perspective that plainly carries weight in his region. His explanation deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms.
Instead, the instinct in some quarters is to treat Pacific support for Israel as something requiring explanation, while hostility towards Israel is treated as the natural, morally enlightened position.
That is not respect for Pacific perspectives. It is ideological condescension.
And there is an even more revealing double standard.
The Pacific Islands Forum maintains formal relationships with China, Turkey and Cuba. These are countries whose governments have faced serious allegations and criticism concerning human rights, political repression or territorial conduct. Yet diplomatic engagement with them is generally understood to be just that: engagement. Nobody seriously believes that maintaining a partnership with China requires the Pacific to endorse Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs, or that engagement with Turkey constitutes approval of its policies towards the Kurds.
And then there is Indonesia. Its control of West Papua is regarded by Papuan independence advocates as an occupation, and its treatment of the indigenous Melanesian population has attracted decades of international criticism. Human Rights Watch has documented arbitrary detention, torture, unlawful killings, racial discrimination and mass displacement. These are not allegations arising from some distant conflict with no connection to the Pacific. They concern indigenous people within the Pacific’s own Melanesian neighbourhood. Yet Indonesia remains a recognised Strategic Partner of the Pacific Islands Forum.
Indeed, the forum has explicitly reaffirmed Indonesia’s sovereignty over West Papua while continuing to seek access for international observers. It has evidently concluded that engagement with Jakarta can coexist with concern for Papuan rights.
But Israel? Apparently, cooperation over irrigation, water recycling or agricultural resilience becomes politically intolerable.
What is the principle here?
If Labour believes that allegations of occupation, repression or serious human rights violations should disqualify a country from partnership with the Pacific, let it say so. Let it explain why Indonesia remains an acceptable partner despite the documented suffering of indigenous Papuans, while Israel’s admission should have been blocked.
If China qualifies, if Turkey qualifies, if Cuba qualifies, and if Indonesia qualifies, why not Israel?
These governments are not identical, nor are their relationships with the forum. But the principle should be consistent. If Labour believes that allegations of occupation, repression or serious human rights abuses disqualify a country from Pacific partnerships, it must explain why Indonesia, China, Turkey and Cuba remain acceptable while Israel does not. Without that explanation, the objection looks less like a principled defence of human rights and more like another political exception reserved for the Jewish state.
Meanwhile, there are Pacific communities facing actual problems.
Water scarcity does not disappear because a politician in Wellington objects to Israel. Agricultural vulnerability is not solved by condemning the Jewish state. Climate pressures do not wait for Labour to decide which countries are politically acceptable sources of technical expertise.
Israel has spent decades developing desalination, precision irrigation, water recycling and agricultural technologies suited to difficult environments. Not every technology will suit every Pacific island, and any project should be judged on its costs, sustainability and results. But those are reasons to examine cooperation, not to prevent it before it begins.
A government serious about Pacific development would ask what Israel can contribute, what Pacific communities actually need and how local capacity can be strengthened.
Labour’s instinct was to object to the relationship itself.
That is the difference between practical engagement and political theatre.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has described criticism of Israel’s inclusion as insulting to Pacific Island countries. Disagreement with a diplomatic decision is not automatically an insult. But Peters has identified the central problem: New Zealand politicians who profess respect for Pacific sovereignty appear remarkably comfortable second-guessing its exercise when Israel is involved.
And remember, New Zealand itself participated in the consensus.
Labour is therefore not merely criticising an Israeli diplomatic achievement. It is announcing that it would have opposed a collective Pacific decision, including the judgment of governments whose independence and regional leadership New Zealand claims to respect.
The same political culture that warns against imposing outside priorities on the Pacific now objects because Pacific leaders have refused to adopt its preferred position on Israel.
Gavoka’s words expose the underlying assumption: that Pacific support for Israel must be a misunderstanding, an embarrassment or a geopolitical manipulation, rather than an authentic expression of Pacific belief and political choice.
He has rejected that assumption in the clearest possible terms. “It’s biblical and ageless and real.”
One need not share Gavoka’s religious convictions to understand their significance. One need only accept that Pacific leaders have the right to make decisions informed by their own histories, values and interests.
Nor does one need to approve of every Israeli government policy to recognise that Israel is entitled to participate in ordinary international cooperation. The notion that Israel must first satisfy the political demands of its opponents before it may help a Pacific community improve its water supply is not a serious development policy. It is an ideological condition imposed on a practical relationship.
There is something particularly revealing about the contrast between Gavoka’s confidence and Labour’s objection.
Gavoka speaks of a relationship that he regards as enduring, rooted in belief and independent of political fashion.
Labour speaks as though the Pacific’s choice of partners should be filtered through the politics of Wellington.
One is an assertion of identity and independence. The other is an attempt to substitute New Zealand’s political preferences for a regional decision.
And perhaps that is why Gavoka’s intervention matters more than another diplomatic communiqué. He has made it impossible to pretend that Pacific support for Israel exists only because somebody else engineered it.
The Pacific has its own reasons. It has its own priorities. And it has made its own decision.
Labour is entitled to dislike that decision. It is entitled to criticise Israel. It is even entitled to explain why it would have voted differently.
But it should spare us the pretence that opposing a partnership freely accepted by Pacific governments is somehow an act of solidarity with those governments.
Israel offered the Pacific water, and Labour offered a veto. The Pacific has explained why it chose Israel. Perhaps Labour’s next contribution could be to listen.
This article was originally published by the Israel Institute of New Zealand.
