Nauru inaugurated its first embassy in Israel on Monday, and it did not open in Tel Aviv. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar hosted visiting Nauruan Vice President and Foreign Minister Lionel Aingimea in Jerusalem, where Sa’ar was photographed fixing a mezuzah, a small parchment scroll inscribed with the words of the Shema, to the embassy’s doorpost. Nauru becomes the ninth country to place its embassy in Jerusalem rather than Israel’s coastal commercial capital, joining the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Paraguay, Somaliland, and two of its own Pacific neighbors, Papua New Guinea and Fiji.
Aingimea called the move “a message to the world of where we stand.” He cited Nauru’s voting record backing Israel at the United Nations 71 percent of the time, a figure he said “will increase very quickly.” Sa’ar, in turn, described the nation of roughly 12,000 people as “one of Israel’s greatest friends.” The two agreed to the embassy opening at a meeting in Fiji in June of last year. In exchange, Israel’s foreign aid arm, MASHAV, will send emergency-care doctors to Nauru and supply cardiac ultrasound equipment and water-purification systems capable of producing tens of thousands of liters of clean water daily.
According to Salote Tagivakatini, a former Fijian diplomat, the political move has nothing to do with strategy. “Christianity is the biggest underlying factor,” she told AFP. Roughly 90 percent of indigenous Pacific islanders identify as Christian, she said, and their reading of the Bible’s description of Jews as “God’s chosen people” creates an obligation to support Israel that transcends ordinary diplomacy.
That obligation traces to waves of 19th-century European missionaries who brought evangelical Christianity to the South Pacific, teachings that took root with a force still visible in the region’s politics today. Some communities in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Fiji identify as descendants of one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Anthropologists have documented the Gogodala people of western Papua New Guinea singing Hebrew songs and flying the Israeli flag at tribal ceremonies, a practice with no connection to tourism or diplomacy, only to a belief about their own ancestry.
The region’s political leadership reflects the same conviction at the highest levels. Fiji’s prime minister, Sitiveni Rabuka, is a former lay preacher in the Methodist church. Papua New Guinea’s prime minister, James Marape, is the son of a Seventh-day Adventist pastor. Samoa’s prime minister, La’auli Leuatea Schmidt, wore a Jewish prayer shawl at his swearing-in last year and entered the ceremony to the sound of a shofar, the ram’s horn blown during the Jewish High Holidays. “I stand for Israel, the land of God,” he said at the time, according to local media. Samoa has announced it will open its own embassy in Jerusalem later this year, and Sa’ar said Monday that Colombia is expected to follow in October.
Not every Pacific voice shares this alignment. A small group of demonstrators carrying Palestinian flags met Sa’ar during a visit to Fiji earlier this year. And the financial case for the relationship is thin by ordinary standards: Lowy Institute data shows Israel has provided only about two million dollars in Pacific aid and development funding since 2015, a fraction of what Australia and China have each spent in the region. International affairs expert Shannon Brincat noted that Israel gains real diplomatic value from these ties even so. “By moving their embassies to Jerusalem, it normalizes Israel’s claim that it’s the undivided capital,” he told AFP.
Pacific security researcher Maima Koro, of Adelaide University, argued that measuring the relationship in aid dollars misses what is actually driving it. “Israel is the people of God to them. And there’s this promise that God made to Israel,” she said. “It’s not transactional. The connection is spiritual.”
The status of Jerusalem remains one of the most contested questions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in 1967 and later annexed it, a move most of the international community does not recognize, which is why most nations still keep their embassies in Tel Aviv. President Trump broke with that consensus in 2018 by relocating the American embassy to Jerusalem. Nauru had already recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2019; Monday’s embassy opening turned that recognition into a physical presence on the ground.
For a scattering of small nations half a world away from Jerusalem, sharing no language, food, or culture with Israel, the pull is not one they describe as political at all. It is a belief, held since the missionaries first arrived, that Jewish return to the land of Israel is not merely current events. It is the fulfillment of a promise their own scripture told them was coming.
