Do Kamo and the Holy Land: What the pacific churches can teach the world about belonging

He preached across the city — in Anglican, Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelical churches of every kind — always speaking about the same things: the power of truth, the pursuit of justice, and Jerusalem. He told Americans about the Israeli occupation. About what life was like for Palestinian Christians and Muslims living under Israeli military rule. Many of them had never heard any of it before.

“The Americans are surprised every time to find out that Jesus was not American,” my grandfather would say. My uncle Ibrahim — sick, but still sharp, still full of laughter — would add: “In New York, they debate me about the promised land — as though Jesus did not come for everyone. They call themselves Christians..” And the two men would cackle together, sharing the tragedy and absurdity of it.

That Christmas Eve, my grandfather was invited to the home of James Baker — Secretary of State under President George H.W. Bush. At midnight, Mr Baker asked him to lead Christmas prayers in the chapel in the back garden. A retired Palestinian bishop, born in Tulkarem, who had watched his people pushed from their land for decades — leading Christmas prayers for the family of the American Secretary of State. He was not bitter about the irony. He had come to bear witness. 

That is what I carry with me today.

Do Kamo: the Pacific gift to the world

I want to begin with two words: Do Kamo. It comes from the Kanak people — your neighbours in this ocean, and brothers and sisters in their own struggle against colonialism.

Here is the heart of the idea: a person is never just an individual. You become who you are through your relationships — with your family, your community, your ancestors, your land, and your God. Sever those relationships, and you do not just lose something important. You lose yourself.

The Pacific church already knows this. It is woven into your language, your culture, your songs, your theology, and your way of gathering. And it is exactly what is being destroyed in Palestine, on the same streets where Jesus walked and preached, in the cradle of Christianity.

What Is happening in Palestine

When a church in Gaza is bombed and its congregation scattered across the earth, something is broken that goes much deeper than bricks and walls.  Christian presence in Gaza is so ancient, it started shortly after the Pentecost. The Palestinian people are being cut off from everything that makes them who they are — from their land, from the graves of their loved ones, from the places and stories that formed them. Do Kamo gives us the words to name this: the destruction of personhood itself. It is not just displacing people. It is unmaking them and denying even their humanity and that they exist as a people.

My grandfather described Christian Zionism as the greatest threat to the region. He was speaking as a pastor who watched, year by year, the community he loved being torn apart, people uprooted from their homes and land, and villages destroyed. So the question I want to answer is: why is this happening? And why are significant parts of the Christian church providing cover for it?

Demographic reversal theology

If you remember nothing else from today, remember this term: Demographic Reversal Theology.

At the start of the twentieth century, the land we now call Israel and Palestine was more than 89% Palestinian.  They owned orchards, a vibrant in industry and economic sector, and the first commercial airport in the region.  Demographic Reversal Theology is the belief that God requires that population to be reversed — that salvation requires the land to be made overwhelmingly Jewish, and so the people already living there must be removed, replaced, or subjugated.

It is not a neutral reading of the Bible. It picks and chooses texts about land and prophecy while ignoring everything the Bible says about justice for the stranger and the oppressed, and that in Christ we are all chosen; the children of God and created on His image. It reads the Hebrew prophets like a real estate document rather than a call to righteousness. And it has no coherent account of Jesus — a Palestinian Jew, born under occupation, executed by empire. Any theology that uses his name to justify the removal of an entire people must invent a Jesus who bears no resemblance to the one in the Gospels.  The Gospel is about spreading love; not war, hatred, and exclusion.  

This theology is not ancient. It is not found in Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, or Calvin. The ancient churches of the Middle East — including the Palestinian church present at Pentecost — reject it unanimously. Demographic Reversal Theology was invented in the 1830s by an Anglo-Irish clergyman, and spread globally through American evangelical publishing and broadcasting in the twentieth century. And yet it now drives the foreign policy of the most powerful nation on earth. Here in the Pacific, it has driven Fiji to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — a decision that forecloses the possibility of East Jerusalem ever serving as the capital of a Palestinian state. It does not just take a side. It removes the table.

Why this is your fight too

Demographic Reversal Theology belongs to a longer tradition of using Christian language to justify colonialism and denial of the rights of indigenous people— the same tradition that shaped the Pacific just as it shaped Palestine. The same moves that underpin this theology were used across the Pacific from the eighteenth century onward: colonisers declared indigenous land empty and unclaimed, not because indigenous people were absent, but because their presence was rendered invisible and their humanity denied. Indigenous spiritual relationships with land were called paganism. The land itself was recast as a promised inheritance for those who would restructure it supposedly in God’s name.

This is the same logic. The same story. Different land, different people — same violence, same “theology”.

The Pacific church, of all the churches in the world, is equipped to see this clearly. You understand that a person is relational, that land is sacred, and that dispossession is a violence that goes to the root of being. You have carried that knowledge through nuclear testing, through seas rising over ancestral islands, through colonial powers making decisions about Pacific peoples without Pacific voices. Palestinian Christians know the same wound — in our olive trees, our church bells, and the keys to houses we cannot enter.

Your moment

The Pacific church has a prophetic tradition — of speaking truth to nuclear powers, of standing for the dignity of creation, of insisting that the voice of the small and the vulnerable must be heard in the halls of power. This is your moment to extend that tradition to Palestine.

Jesus of Nazareth is not the property of Demographic Reversal Theology. He cannot be conscripted into a system that erases his own people and calls it prophecy. The body of Christ cannot amputate its oldest limb.

In the household of God, there are no disposable members. There are no rooms that can be demolished for someone else’s convenience. Do Kamo — the true person, the living human being in authentic existence — applies to every Palestinian child, every Gaza family, every ancient congregation. We belong to the same household of God.