Dr Sheree Trotter
Antisemitism and the Hijacking of Indigeneity: the roots of the so-called “Māori View on Israel-Palestine”
Sheree Trotter is Maori (Te Arawa). She earned a PhD in history from the University of Auckland (Thesis: Zionism in New Zealand to 1948). In 2012 she co-founded the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation for whom she has interviewed seventy Holocaust survivors. Sheree completed an Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy scholars-in-residence course at University of Oxford in 2023. She is co-director of Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem.
Antisemitism and the Hijacking of Indigeneity: the Roots of the Co-called “Māori View on Israel-Palestine”
Abstract:
Certain Māori activists and politicians have claimed ownership of “the Māori view” on Israel-Palestine. In reality, their radical anti-Zionist position is derived from western academic streams and modern international movements, rather than Matauranga Māori or indigenous perspectives. Indigeneity is merely co-opted for their political purposes.
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On 7 December 2023, a heated debate took place in New Zealand’s Parliament entitled, ‘Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territories — Ongoing Violence’. Māori politicians from the Labour Party, Green Party and Māori Party lined up on the side of the Palestinians, variously accusing Israel of genocide, apartheid, collective punishment, ethnic cleansing and colonisation.
Labour Party member Willie Jackson’s comments were particularly revealing as they clearly set out the genealogy of his position on Israel-Palestine. Triggered by a pro-Israel rally on the steps of Parliament led by Brian Tamaki, a Christian Māori leader, Jackson stated:
The Māori activist movement was inspired by the Palestinian situation. They were inspired by Arafat, and they were inspired by Castro and Mandela, who all supported the Palestinians…
So I'm glad today to tell the House that Māori are very much in support of the Palestinian people—always have been, always will be—and the two-State solution is the only way to go in terms of getting justice and fairness for the Palestinian people… It is one of the biggest tragedies in terms of indigenous people, in terms of oppressed people, in the world today.
Putting aside the question of how one determines what a definitive Maori view on any matter is, and who has the authority to determine such a view, the reality is that historically there has been a range of “Māori views” on Israel and the Jewish people. Ironically the genealogy of the view Jackson espouses does not descend from Matauranga Māori, Māori thinking, nor an Indigenous worldview. Jackson places the so-called “Māori view” squarely within the Soviet-Arab Alliance of the Cold War era, which Izabella Tabarovsky has described so well.
Tabarosky writes of the Soviet propaganda and disinformation campaign, “It built and weaponized narratives based on made-up or twisted facts. It distorted history. It employed classic propaganda tools such as deception, guilt by association, and repetition to inculcate the key messages. It shamelessly played on people’s sentiments...” (Hazan 2017: 230-93).
The accusations of the Māori politicians in the aforementioned debate bear little resemblance to reality. They exemplify the way in which Jews and Israel often function as a symbol, a motif employed to serve a largely unrelated situation or ideology. The actual, living Jew or Israeli becomes entirely irrelevant. The Jew is dehumanised resulting in a depiction of Israel and or the Jewish people that is false, one that is antithetical to lived reality. Antisemitism is usually the outcome of this thinking and sometimes the precursor.
The roots of the current pro-Palestinian perspective amongst some Māori can be traced to the activism of the 1970s, where young urbanised and university educated Māori found inspiration in the international black activist and indigenous movements such as the Black Panther Party and the American Indian movement.
The Māori equivalent was a group called Ngā Tamatoa, meaning Young Warriors, which formed after a conference at the University of Auckland organized by academic and historian Ranginui Walker. These passionate young Māori leaders sought to fight racism and confront injustice. They spearheaded the Māori Language Petition of 1972, which gained 30,000-signatures and prepared the way for the development of full immersion Māori language schools and the Māori Language Act 1987, granting Te Reo Māori official status in Aotearoa New Zealand. Nga Tamatoa also organized the 1975 Māori land march.
The group was the public face of a movement of rising political consciousness that connected with global decolonisation movements such as the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. As indicated by Willie Jackson, the heroes of these young students were Nelson Mandela, Yassir Arafat and Fidel Castro. This marked the birth of the alliance with Palestinian causes. Nga Tamatoa did not last long as a group, disbanding in 1975 over disagreements. However the leaders of the movement continued to agitate for the causes they believed in.
Donna Awatere was one of the founding members of Nga Tamatoa, who also led the protests against the South African SpringBok tour of New Zealand in 1981. In 1984 Awatere penned a manifesto entitled ‘Māori Sovereignty’. Awatere was influenced by global trends of decolonisation and ‘black nationalism’ such as the Independence of India in 1947 and the Black American civil rights movements during the 1960’s. P.73. She also modeled her thinking on the ideas of the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF).
In the Mana Wahine Seminar Series 2010 Awatere spoke of being invited to Cuba to the 20th anniversary of the storming of the Moncado Bastion, led by Fidel Castro and his group of revolutionaries. She and her colleagues went prepared with precious taonga (gifts) to present to Castro, not knowing that they were invited along with “24,000 others”. She explains that some of Castro’s people had been killed, fighting alongside the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and they were brought back to Castro’s palace. When the hearses came through, Awatere’s friend performed a haka, stopping the traffic, and Awatere and her other companion did a Karanga (traditional Māori call). The group ended up in Fidel’s castle and met one of the women hijackers, the last one remaining from her division of 40.
Awatere stated, ‘we had no idea and it just made us feel that our struggle in New Zealand was quite minor in the big scheme of things and that we were very fortunate’.
According to Laura Kamau’s 2010 thesis, Awatere made the connection with the PLO in Cuba and modeled her manifesto on the 1968 pamphlet, ‘Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine’. Kamau argues that while Awatere did not advocate the Palestinian Liberation Front model of guerrilla warfare and plane hijackings, she employed the militant language of the PLF to articulate Maori aspirations for the re-establishment of sovereignty over New Zealand and the return of ancestral lands.
The Palestinian Liberation Front’s strategy was to clearly define the enemy to the masses, so that they may know the weaknesses and the strengths of their opponent.
This founding document for the PLF articulated that, ‘Our enemy in the battle is Israel, Zionism, world imperialism and Arab reaction’. Awatere embraced this framework, replacing Israel with Pākehā (or European) New Zealand, Zionism with Christianity, world imperialism with Britain, and Arab reaction with colonial Maori.
These were the forces Awatere saw as obstructions to the possibility of establishing New Zealand as a Māori Nation State.
In addition to this stream of Soviet-Arab influence, universities since the 1980s have become engulfed in post-colonial narratives that interpret the world in a simplistic Foucauldian framework of oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized. This totalising and homogenizing approach, abuses and politicizes history and denies Indigenous agency.
Many Māori scholars and politicians have embraced these ideas, such as the current Māori Party leader, Debbie Ngarewa Packer, who has become a foremost proponent of Hamas talking points, even appearing on a video produced by Al Jazeera, a Qatar funded media outlet known for its extreme anti-Israel bias.
These anti-Israel streams within the Māori world have been birthed within Western academic frameworks and global political movements. They have not arisen organically within a Matauranga Māori or indigenous worldview. It is beyond the scope of this short paper to explore these questions in depth, but we hope that this symposium will kick-start a movement to do just that.
The reality is that Māori have a long relationship with Israel and the Jewish people dating back to the 1830s when the first traders came to Aotearoa New Zealand. Some Jews became embedded in the Māori world, forged close relationships and even intermarried. Today there are many Māori with a Jewish ancestor.
In the nineteenth century the concept that Māori were one of the lost tribes of Israel gained traction. This view originated with missionaries, like Samuel Marsden, who drew up a list of similarities between the cultural practices of Māori and Jew and from this deduced that there was a connection. Other missionaries and academics, such as Thomas Kendall, Professor Samuel Lee of Cambridge (England) and Robert Maunsell, advanced the view that there was a similarity between the Māori and Hebrew languages. This was but one of a number of European views about the origins of Māori and other Polynesian groups. The historian, Kerry Howe, argued that the theories that circulated in the western discourse of the nineteenth century, were a ‘transference of various versions of the European prehistoric past’. Thus, some traced Polynesians to classical Greek culture and others to Aryan or Caucasian origin. However, the idea of Hebraic descent found resonance amongst Māori, in a way that other theories did not. Indeed, some Māori today still consider themselves descendants of the “lost tribes of Israel”.
Many Māori identified with the marginalization and suffering of the ancient Hebrews and came to see themselves as Israelites. Bronwyn Elsemore argued that as early as 1840, Māori saw parallels between the experience and position of the two peoples. Like the Israelites of old, they had become captives in their own land, which had been plundered, while their people had been subjected to foreign powers. Elsemore cites the examples of Hone Heke comparing his people to the ‘persecuted children of Israel’ in 1845, and chief Te Aroha saying, in a speech in 1869, ’We are like wandering Israelites without a home’.
New Māori prophetic movements like Pai Marire and later Ringatū drew on Old Testament imagery and motifs. Their leaders, Te Ua Haumene and Te Kooti saw themselves as prophets, like Moses, destined to lead their people out of slavery. While these leaders identified themselves as Jews (Tiu), or Israelites and gave biblical names to their places, their movements did not seek to adopt Judaism, as such. As Elsemore argued, the Māori prophetic movements were a form of protest against the colonization that had accompanied the Christianity of the missionaries, whether inadvertently or not. The Jew held great symbolic value for Māori. The symbolism did, on occasion, have a practical outworking with regard to the few Jewish people in their midst. One such example was on the occasion of the 1865 murder of the missionary Rev. D.S. Volkner in Opotoki wherein the Pai Marire leader, Patara, chose to spare the lives of the Levy brothers. According to Levy’s written account of the incident, Parata expressed his fondness for Jews for the reason that, ‘the Jews were once a very grand people, but were now reduced to a very small one through the persecutions they had gone through, the Māoris believing themselves to be undergoing the same’.
Māori identification with the Israelites of the Bible provides an example of the symbolic role of the Jew, and in this instance led to a positive perspective on the Jewish people. The Rīngatū religion is still practised today. One adherent, Koro Rangi Paora stated recently that when he had the opportunity to go to Israel in 2017, “he was going to honor Israel on behalf of his elders and his teachers, paying homage and making contact with the God of Israel”.
Many Māori who embraced Christianity, have held a high view of Israel as the birthplace of their faith. The influential Kingitanga movement which began in 1858 acknowledged the Bible and the Queen. The first Māori King, Pōtatau, was anointed with a Bible over his head, a practice that has continued with his successors to this day. His descendant Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu had a love for Israel and welcomed Israeli ambassadors onto the marae (meeting house).
Another recent example is that of the late Kaumatua Patrick Ruka, a Ngapuhi leader who organized several hui (meetings) for Israeli ambassadors. Matua Pat was trained in the traditional Māori worldview as a child, and later in life embraced Christianity. He tells of the stories that were handed down to him from his ancestors. At the end of the nineteenth century his ancestors were disappointed with the missionaries because of colonization and promises broken. However, they concluded that “although the fruit was bad, the seed was good”. They believed the seed to be the people of Israel. The result of that thinking was philo-semitism with a deeply practical expression. At the end of World War Two, some of his tribe’s elders went to Parliament in Wellington to put on record their desire to give 1200 acres of their land to provide a home for Jewish refugees suffering in Europe. They were told to ‘go home to their hovels’. The government later took that land and gave it to Returned Servicemen. These are the oral histories that Matua Pat retained and passed on.
Many Māori have a positive view of Israel and have found inspiration in the re-establishment of the Jews in their ancestral homeland and the restoration of their indigenous language. Indeed, the Israeli example of language reclamation provided a model for the revitalisation of Te Reo Māori. Raoul Ketko who, in the mid 1980s was the head of policy in the Department of Social Welfare, recalls the story of his Māori colleague, the late John Rangihau, who, inspired by a visit to Israel, established full immersion language schools based on the Israeli Ulpan (intensive Hebrew language school). Rangihau was impressed with the way in which ‘disparate peoples from around the world and with a bewildering array of native tongues could, in a relatively short time, be absorbed into Israeli life and culture’. The Kohanga Reo movement which began in the 1980s has raised a new generation of Indigenous youth fluent and confident in their Māori language and culture.
The reality is that there is not a monolithic Māori view on Israel. Some Māori want to claim a dogma for an acceptable Māori worldview, replete with accompanying qualifications, tests for inclusion, and punishment for transgressions to the accepted tenets of the vogue belief system. However, Māori views have always been diverse. Māori culture and ways of thinking are not set in concrete. Our ancestors embraced new ideas and incorporated them into new perspectives as it suited. The current anti-Israel dogma is held by those who’ve embraced either a Marxist infected worldview, a settler-colonial prism that discards any fact that does not align with the ideology, or an Islamist fundamentalist perspective that sees no room in the Middle East for a sovereign Jewish nation. Sadly, the last year has demonstrated that these false narratives and the hatred they produce, have directly fueled antisemitism across the Western world.
We must continue to work to understand these trends and movements, and their very significant role in antisemitism in academia, media and Western culture more generally. And that is a task to which the Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem's Academic Symposium is dedicated.