New Zealand’s Yoni-come-latelies
On the unusual and enduring relationship between Māori and Jew
David Cohen
When it comes to the excruciating war Hamas declared on Israel on 7 October, protesters in New Zealand have largely been globally recognisable types. Give or take, as it surprisingly happens, one indigenous exception.
Here in the South Seas, as elsewhere, we’ve had the geographically challenged who possibly couldn’t find Gaza on a line-map – along with those who would probably prefer not to find Israel on any map at all. The usual faculty lounge lizards have reliably been out in force, too, as have a retinue of their foreign fee-paying students. Ditto the pen-happy media types calling for ‘proportionality’ on the part of the Israelis, even if nobody seems quite able to define what this term means in the context of the responding to the medieval-style attacks their country suffered.
But another group making its voice heard is New Zealand’s indigenous population, or at any rate a number of those who claim to speak on their behalf. The indigenous Māori party is calling for Israel to offer an ‘unconditional and immediate’ ceasefire – or else. Or else what? The order of the boot for the local Israeli ambassador, Ran Yaakoby, for starters.
The Māori party is a minor political force in the Kiwi scheme of things, but its overall support here seems to be on an upward trend, having just tripled its numbers in the country’s recent general election from two to six seats in the 120-member parliament. To the extent it accurately reflects the wider Māori sentiment – and this point really needs to be hovered over – such an unapologetic abandonment of the Jewish state represents something of a historical swerve.
Even before the establishment of New Zealand in 1840, relations between local Māori, who now account for around 17 per cent of the population, and the country’s Jewish community, which has never numbered more than 10,000 souls, have been notably good.
It was the English missionary Samuel Marsden, fresh to the brawling land from New South Wales, who first brought the two together, in 1819.
Influenced by the era’s stereotypes of Jewish identity, his widely published study of the two groups famously produced several intersecting points, among them trading skills, a similarity of roles between Māori elders and rabbis, and a common conception of God.
In the 1830s, the warrior-cum-priest Te Atua Wera founded a movement on the notion that Māori were one of Israel’s heaven-sent lost tribes. His followers, mostly already converted to Christianity, promptly unconverted themselves and became ‘Jews’, believing that the settlers’ religion had rendered them strangers in their own land. The Old Testament link that missionaries had served to the Māori as an entree into Christianity became an end in itself for the country’s ten known Māori religions.
Actual Jews didn’t do too badly out of this mythical perception. Take the story of the Jewish doctor, Joseph Burstein, who practised in the country’s far north in the 1970s. There was a large tree by his gate where Māori patients often attached his prescriptions – unfilled. Such was his mana, it was said, that his meds were not required as long as he touched the patient.
During the Yom Kippur war of 1973, Burstein was even asked to approach Israeli authorities in order to promote a heat-seeking missile one of his patients claimed to have invented and now wished to gift to the beleaguered Israeli forces. (Although ‘theoretically sound’, the invention was deemed impractical.) Elsewhere, Jewish-Māori marriages have long been far from unknown. One of the country’s most prominent tribal leaders, the impressive Mark Solomon, is the descendent of a Jewish whaler who blew into the South Seas aboard an American fishing boat. The last government’s Māori development minister, Willie Jackson, discovered he had more Jewish ancestry than Polynesian heritage after taking a routine DNA test for a television show.
In recent decades, many political Māori have renewed ties with the Jewish world by identifying with Israel’s establishment as a modern state. Often their argument for national self-determination – taken to mean a greater say in the running of the country, if not its eventual handover to complete Māori control – leans into the Zionist experience.
Or at least it did until the Māori party took a new leaf from the more recent narrative in which Palestinian Arabs figure as the original inhabitants of their land and the Jews as mere Yoni-come-latelies.
On the other hand, it could be that the party is overplaying its hand. It wouldn’t be the first time. A few weeks before it began issuing these recent denunciations of the Israelis, for example, its ‘co-leader’, Rawiri Waititi, was arguing for $100 million in public money to be set aside for the hitherto unknown category of ‘Māori sport’, while making bizarre-sounding arguments about the Māori genetic makeup being innately ‘stronger than others’.
In the past, the party has also received mixed reviews for its over-the-top efforts to abolish the English language from aspects of public life, not least in respect of Anglophone place names. A couple of years ago, predicting a tsunami of public support for the proposal, it launched a petition to ditch the name New Zealand altogether in favour of Aotearoa, the undeniably more poetic-sounding Polynesian name already often used interchangeably with the official one. In the event, around 70,000 unverified signatures, representing scarcely one per cent of the population, were gathered.
That way too could go its latest proclamation. After all, in addition to expelling the Israeli ambassador, the party has said his American counterpart should also get turfed out of the country; an exceedingly unlikely possibility.
‘There have been notable indigenous supporters of Israel but in the prevailing culture they have largely gone unheard,’ warns a new Māori group calling itself the Indigenous Coalition for Israel. ‘This has meant that a false narrative concerning the Israel-Palestinian conflict has easily taken hold amongst indigenous peoples – and this has often bled into antisemitism.’
Another Māori minister in the new government, Shane Jones from the New Zealand First party, has dismissed the Māori party’s position as ‘anti-Semitic’ grandstanding.
Perhaps that last bit is a little extreme. It could be that these other Māori parliamentarians are just rehearsing arguments heard endlessly abroad over the past couple of months. In which case they’re not so unusual after all. And certainly not helpful.