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On the afternoon of October 5, 2023, a dozen pilgrims from the Pacific nation of Fiji gathered in Israel’s Negev Desert, near the border with Gaza, to plant oak saplings in the Holy Land. At the group’s center stood Mikaele Mudreilagi, a stocky fifty-nine-year-old science teacher turned evangelical preacher with a shaved head and ghostly white goatee. He placed a seedling in the parched yellow dirt, took out a bottle of Fiji Water, and sprinkled its contents over the soil. Although he was ten thousand miles from the island where he lived, this was a moment of homecoming for Mudreilagi. He believed—no, he knew—that this was the land of his ancestors, the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Mudreilagi was taught as a child that long ago, his forefathers fled Israel down the Nile to Tanzania, then crossed vast oceans in canoes before arriving at the islands of the Pacific. He knew the story was true, he later told me, because when Western missionaries first arrived in Fiji, they found locals already circumcising themselves with shards of bamboo. Plus, Mudreilagi said, mysterious runes that resembled Hebrew lettering had been discovered carved into caves and onto rocks across the Fijian archipelago. Other adherents of the myth had deciphered a secret message hidden in their country’s very name: the letters, they claimed, stood for First Israeli Jewish Island. To Mudreilagi, the evidence was clear: these signs proved Fiji’s Hebrew origins. When he began preaching four years ago, he integrated Jewish symbology into his teachings. Mudreilagi quickly established himself as a regular presence in Fijian churches, then as a high-profile adviser to senior Fijian chiefs and leading politicians. Now his beliefs had returned him to where it all began.

That day in the desert, Mudreilagi heard a leaden thud. He turned and was confronted by a vision: a hunk of bone and flesh, oozing with blood and surrounded by splatters of gore. Above him, a company of birds circled in the sky. They were vultures, he determined, and this was an omen. Uneasy, Mudreilagi bade farewell to a few settlers from the nearby kibbutz of Be’eri who had overseen the plantings and led his followers back to Jerusalem. Two days later, in the predawn of October 7, he and his wife were awakened by the distant drone of an air-raid siren. “Is that an ambulance?” his wife asked. “No,” he told her. His mind turned to his vision. “It’s the sound of war.”

At that moment, Hamas militants were surging through Be’eri, where they slaughtered at least one of the settlers who had met with Mudreilagi’s pilgrims, along with one hundred of the kibbutz’s other residents. In his Jerusalem hotel, while Fiji’s government organized an evacuation flight, Mudreilagi set his pilgrims to work marshaling relatives “from our nation at the ends of the earth” to pray for Israel. Mudreilagi saw these calls for divine intervention as weapons, dubbing them “missile prayers” that would protect Israel as it fought back against its invaders. Later, as he and his followers soared over Canaan, Mudreilagi considered the faded plains from which they were once more being expelled. He decided he had to do more than pray. After returning to Fiji, he set about pressuring the country’s leaders into defending Israel on the world stage. “Our nation had started into a war, and our hearts were going out as if to our older brother,” he told me. “We are obliged,” he explained, “to support Israel.”

Several weeks after Hamas’s attack, as Israel hammered Gaza with air strikes, diplomats filed into the United Nations Headquarters in New York to debate the question of a ceasefire. Aside from Israel itself, the United States, and several other member states such as Hungary, the only nations to oppose the proposal were Fiji, Nauru, Tonga, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Papua New Guinea. “We have no regret in standing up for Israel. They were attacked. We have to support them,” said James Marape, the prime minister of Papua New Guinea.

In each subsequent U.N. vote concerning the conflict, many of Israel’s most loyal allies have been found in the far Pacific. The same has been true in the International Court of Justice, where Fiji has likewise defended Israel’s conduct. In February of last year, two pro-Israel activists who hailed from the Pacific went so far as to establish a so-called Indigenous Embassy in Jerusalem, an advocacy group that they hoped would provide moral backing to Israel’s claims that it represents the land’s original occupants. Around 90 percent of people in the Pacific islands are Christian, the product of centuries of often violent campaigns to convert their native populations. But the roots of the region’s affection for Israel go deeper. Many in the Pacific not only sympathize with Israel; like Mudreilagi, they believe they are literally descended from Jews. Now a handful of nations there—along with the United States—are some of the few countries on earth separating Israel from near-total diplomatic isolation.

Last fall, I decided to go island-hopping around the Pacific to seek out the legend’s advocates and consider how it had taken root. The myth seemed a striking example of the geopolitical power of storytelling: the tale’s boosters have helped motivate a quiet region into controversial global advocacy—and inoculated it against the antiwar repulsion sweeping the rest of the world. Even so, I still expected to find only a ragtag collection of hucksters and eccentrics of the kind that so often find a foothold in the remote South Seas. Instead, to my surprise, I found a fable championed by lawmakers and prime ministers, with the potential—if I could only bring myself to believe—to take me from the reputed resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, through supposedly ancient Jewish temples, and finally, into Paradise itself.

Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira, born into a family of minor Spanish noblemen, grew up in the sixteenth century dreaming of exploration. In his early twenties, Mendaña set off for Peru, where he joined his uncle, a colonial administrator. When he arrived in Lima, Mendaña—described in a government dispatch as a “well-disposed young man who is just beginning to grow a beard”—found the city gripped by rumors of a mysterious southern continent filled with gold and crowded with heathens: the land of Ophir, from which the Bible says that King Solomon sourced his legendary riches. Eventually, Mendaña’s uncle agreed to grant him captaincy of an expedition venturing west. Accompanied by missionaries and prospectors, he sailed for nearly three months before sighting a chain of jungled islands. But Mendaña would be disappointed: there was no gold, and some of the locals he’d hoped to convert reacted to his arrival with rage, especially after his men began burning villages and indiscriminately killing their residents. Some historians have concluded that the locals saw Mendaña’s men as a group of malevolent ghosts. One sailor wrote that as their ships traveled along the coast, they saw islanders throwing stones from the shore, chanting “Mate! Mate!” (“The dead! The dead!”)

Eventually, Mendaña retreated to Peru. Despite his failure to find the fabled southern continent, new rumors spread about the archipelago he had stumbled across, which was henceforth known as the Solomon Islands. When the Catholic and Anglican churches began sending waves of missionaries to the legendary islands in the nineteenth century, their interactions with native populations produced more stories of biblical heritage, which local preachers passed down from generation to generation. Meanwhile, the archipelago was largely forgotten by outsiders until the Second World War, when its proximity to Australia made it strategically indispensable, prompting the Japanese occupation and American invasion of Guadalcanal, the largest of the Solomons. When the war ended, the world again moved on. But Solomon Islanders were left with a keen sense of their own significance, which neatly echoed the tales of their Ophirian descent: if the myths were to be believed, they were not an overlooked people at the margins of the world, but rather major players in a millennia-old religious saga. For many, that sense of centrality proved irresistible.

For decades, these legends were confined to bedtime stories and church sermons. But in 1986, an evangelical preacher in the Solomon Islands named Michael Maeliau announced that he had received a divine vision. Born in a remote region of Malaita, the country’s most populous province, Maeliau proclaimed that God had shown him a great flood originating near his native island, rushing across the Pacific, and surging in three distinct currents over the North Pole, the East Coast of the United States, and the South Pole. He described it to his followers as “the effect of a speedboat on water without the boat.” The currents then united into a mighty tsunami, Maeliau said, that inundated all the world except Jerusalem, around which the waters came to form a perfect circle.

According to Maeliau, Malaita would become the epicenter of a religious transformation that would sweep the globe. A “celestial war” would be waged, in which non-believers like the nearby Muslims of Indonesia would be defeated, leading to the second coming of Christ. Maeliau called for Malaitans to form a theocracy to prepare for the world’s end, when they would return to Jerusalem in triumph. Maeliau’s preaching came amid wider rumors about Malaita’s relationship to ancient Israel: a mountain pockmarked with old mine shafts supposedly carved by Ophir’s workers; ruins that resembled the remnants of King Solomon’s temple; suggestive similarities between Malaitan and Hebrew words. Against that backdrop, Maeliau’s preachings spread rapidly among poor Malaitans desperate for confirmation of their own importance.

Many of them had recently moved to the capital city of Honiara, a shabby port on Guadalcanal, in search of jobs. Resentful locals began attacking the newcomers, and around 1998, the violence spiraled into the Tensions, a brutal conflict between rival militias. One of them, a Malaitan insurgent group called the Eagle Force, seized on Maeliau’s teachings and characterized their struggle as a holy war. A local described seeing Eagle Force insurgents careening through Malaitan villages in grimy Hiluxes adorned with the Star of David, or bulldozers armed with machine guns and draped in blue-and-white banners. The conflict was devastating. More than two hundred people died and more than thirty thousand were displaced. In 2003, the Eagle Force marched out of the jungle to attend a peace ceremony under an Israeli flag, but even today, the country remains so splintered that the central government’s authority effectively stops at Honiara’s boundaries.

The prophet Maeliau was now dead, but when I traveled to the Solomon Islands last September, I was determined to find another of the myth’s most public proponents: Jimmy Lusibaea, the former leader of the Eagle Force. He had become a government minister after the fighting ended, then was expelled from parliament after he was convicted in a much-delayed trial for shooting an unconscious man in both knees and pistol-whipping a police officer. He now runs a construction firm that, only a few months before my visit, had been raided by the police on suspicion of drug trafficking.

I found Lusibaea outside Honiara, at a construction site dotted with mounds of gravel and a bonfire belching clouds of greenish smoke. Beneath several sickly banana trees sat a man in tired corduroy pants and worn blue Skechers. Another man, who seemed to be a bodyguard, loomed nearby in a white linen shirt and wraparound sunglasses, the only indication that the seated man was a retired warlord. I picked my way over and asked tentatively about the Lost Tribes. “That’s what people in Malaita believe, ever since Jimmy,” said Lusibaea, referring to himself. “We know that Israelis are the chosen people.” He studied me for a moment. “Before the Tensions, we met some of those guys,” he said. “I will not elaborate.” Visions of Israeli commandos training Malaitan farmers swarmed my imagination. Did he believe the myth? “People in Malaita, they’re talking about that. I’m not sure.” Then why did he let his soldiers believe it, if he didn’t? “We used that flag—it’s like God is with us.” Eventually, his phone rang and he shooed me away. As I scurried off, I marveled at the man. His purported belief in the story had powered him to prominence, won him an army, and animated years of armed conflict. Yet now that the fighting was over, he was happy to throw it away.

Lusibaea may have moved on, but the Solomons had not: the country remains fractured along ethnic and political lines. A few days after my conversation with Lusibaea, I reached out to Robert Kaua, a senior leader of the Ministry of Provincial Government and Institutional Strengthening, an agency charged with unifying the nation and reducing corruption in its government—in short, with healing the divisions Lusibaea had helped create. One evening, Kaua invited me to his ministry’s headquarters. Honiara’s dusty streets were coming to life; cries of “hallelujah!” rose into the sky from its innumerable churches. At the ministry, in a warren of darkened offices, Kaua was still working, illuminated by a single fluorescent light above his chipped desk, his shoes kicked off in the heat.

Kaua spent much of his childhood in northern Malaita, where his grandfather taught him their clan’s ancient beliefs, among them that one of the Lost Tribes had fled from Israel to Asia, ventured down to the South Pacific, and ended up in Malaita. Later, after Kaua joined the government working alongside Australian peacekeepers after the Tensions, he teased the brash foreigners by saying that his heroes were Jesus Christ and Osama bin Laden: like him, he said, both were from the Middle East and evangelized on behalf of a muscular faith. “They go berserk,” he recalled, laughing.

To an outsider, Kaua acknowledged, the Lost Tribe myth could sound ridiculous. Even in the Solomon Islands, he joked, “there are those who don’t believe this Malaita lunacy.” Yet he remained convinced. For two hours, he spoke of perceived similarities between his village’s shrine and the layout of Hebrew temples, rumors of an “unknown God beyond the sea” who Kaua believed matched descriptions of Judaism’s Yahweh, and purported likenesses between Jewish prayers and those of his clan. One day, he said, he hoped to find proof of the connection to Israel by having Malaitans genetically tested. That being said, he saw no need for scientific evidence: in his bones, he could feel that the story was true.

When Kaua saw images of Hamas fighters invading Israel, he knew it was “judgment time.” “Evil now has progressed in the nation of Israel,” he told me. But despite Kaua’s “lifetime commitment to standing in the gap for Israel,” even he was tired of conflict. “We are praying for the day that the two flags unite,” he said of Israel and Palestine. That’s why he worked so hard to bring constitutional harmony to his own country. Given Malaita’s biblical origins, he said, “only we can go back and solve the problem” of Middle Eastern peace; if only he could calm his feuding nation, he might inspire Israel to do the same. Then, at last, the Lost Tribes could return home. He smiled mournfully as the light above him flickered. “One of these Lost Tribes still hanging around the Pacific needs to stand up and tell the big guys: it’s time now that we stop fighting and we reconcile,” he said. If they don’t, he added, God would visit his wrath on the world. “The more it continues, the more punishment will continue.”

Several weeks after my trip to the Solomon Islands, Mudreilagi, the preacher who had planted seedlings in the Israeli desert, invited me to visit him in Fiji, where he often leads prayer marches and heads the nation’s chapter of a pro-Israel group called the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem. Mudreilagi had impressed his foreign bosses with his campaigning. “The ICEJ branch in Fiji is having an amazing impact,” the organization’s president, Juergen Buehler, a German, told a Jewish news outlet in 2023. “They are setting an example for pro-Israel Christians worldwide.”

Fiji’s capital, Suva, is bordered on one side by jagged mountains and on the other by a harbor speckled with the hulking wrecks of fishing vessels and cargo ships abandoned by bankrupt companies and neglectful owners. The city’s jungled backstreets are lined with burned-out colonial manors and ramshackle homes made of cheap concrete and corrugated iron. Rickety buses careen across town; their destination signs often simply read jesus. When I called Mudreilagi from my hostel, he welcomed me to “the ends of the earth.”

Soon after I arrived, Mudreilagi suggested I join him at what he described as a “Jesus March”: a parade to celebrate the beginning of a prayer conference he had organized. Later that day, I found him wandering down Suva’s main avenue surrounded by hundreds of acolytes. Six men carried a golden ark, followed by a dozen women dressed in vibrant red, singing, “We’re marching to Zion—beautiful, beautiful Zion; we’re marching upward to Zion, the beautiful city of God.”

As we waded through the crowd, Mudreilagi told me he had organized the march to demonstrate Fiji’s deep love for and connection to Christianity and Israel. But even he seemed surprised by the extent of the message’s appeal. A crowd of observers—many cheering, some amused, others mystified—lined the street. A platoon of soldiers waved at the marchers as they wound past Fiji’s presidential palace.

Amid the throng, I met a glamorous middle-aged woman named Shekinah Blessing, who was carrying an enormous Israeli flag and wearing a white shirt emblazoned with the message we love israel. She worked as a flight attendant, she told me; whenever she meets Israelis on planes, she jokes to them that she is a deep-cover Mossad agent: “I just love Israel so much.” I raised the myth of the Lost Tribes, which prompted her to bounce in excitement. The legends were true, she told me. “It’s the only way to explain the love for Israel in Fiji.”

A grizzled man named Ro Mocelutu was marching nearby. He explained that he was a traveling evangelist and miracle worker. Not long before, he told me, he had revived his third dead person. It was remarkably easy. “Praying for a headache and praying for the dead is the very same principle,” he said with a shrug. All he had to do to summon his patients back into the world of the living was to walk into the rooms that held their bodies and call their names. “It doesn’t shock me,” he told me. “That’s the power of God.” Mocelutu’s evangelism had been inspired in part by the stories of Fijians’ descent from Israel, which he had heard since “before I could put two words together, before I knew my name, before I knew my purpose.” The Lost Tribes, he said, brought the Ark of the Covenant with them to Fiji. But as they approached the archipelago, a storm hit, and the Ark toppled overboard near a sandy islet they named Mana Island. Mocelutu stepped close, as if to share a secret: “The world is telling us that we are the Lost Tribe,” he said. “The bloodline from the Jews flows through the Fijians.”

Eventually, the march reached the Vodafone Arena, a space normally reserved for concerts, conventions, and sporting events. Several boys blew shofars—a Jewish instrument made from a ram’s horn—and a hush fell over the crowd. Two girls draped in Jewish prayer shawls danced wildly as the men carrying the ark stepped toward a stage, where a dozen women waved three more Israeli flags. Alejandro Arias, an American evangelist with a reedy voice, addressed the crowd. “Although the enemy wants to erase Israel off the map, it never will because it is under the covenant, and so are all the nations that bless Israel,” he declared. “We pray for the survival of the Jewish people.” Then Mudreilagi took the stage. By now, the faithful were whooping in their seats. He raised his hands. “Tonight, we stand with Israel from the ends of the earth, where the new day begins!”

The evening continued in an hours-long flurry of shofar blasts and urgent sermonizing until the crowd finally drifted away. The next day, Mudreilagi ignored my efforts to arrange a proper interview. He had seemed nervous when I saw him at the march; I started to suspect he hadn’t actually expected me to come all the way to Fiji. I organized a meeting with Viliame Gavoka, one of Fiji’s deputy prime ministers, instead.

A few years earlier, a coalition of opposition parties had swept Fiji’s longtime authoritarian leader from power. The new government was led by Sitiveni Rabuka, a former army officer who himself led a coup in 1987 against a government substantially drawn from Fiji’s large Indian community; he justified his decision to do so in part by appealing to the Lost Tribes myth to claim that indigenous Fijians, not Indians, were God’s chosen people. In 2022, to achieve a majority in parliament for his new government, Rabuka relied on the support of a Fijian nationalist led by Gavoka, the genial-seeming former CEO of Fiji’s tourism agency, whose signature campaign promise was that he would open a Fijian embassy in Jerusalem. Rabuka accepted this demand and appointed Gavoka deputy prime minister. (The Foreign Ministry announced its official plans to open a Jerusalem embassy in February.) Gavoka, a strong ally of the ICEJ, is a regular at Mudreilagi’s events. In 2023, Gavoka joined the preacher at an evangelical conference in Gold Coast, Australia, that was attended by Israel’s ambassador to that country. “A new dawn is happening for Israel in the Pacific,” Gavoka told the assembled audience.

I walked over to a decrepit office building near the waterfront and took a shuddering elevator up to the fourth floor, where Gavoka has his office. As I entered, I saw that an entire wall was covered by the flag of the city of Jerusalem: blue and white stripes superimposed by the Lion of Judah. After greeting me, Gavoka collapsed onto a plush black couch, seemingly exhausted. But as I began to ask about Israel, he bristled with excitement. His grandparents had been itinerant preachers who wandered barefoot through Fiji’s villages, he explained. For “us Christians,” he said, “Israel is the center of gravity.” He nodded to the flag on the wall. “It’s not just something that comes out of our mouths. It is something that is deep in our hearts.” He was disgusted by Hamas, he said, “but what is most tragic is the way the whole world has turned against Israel.” Under his watch, Israel would always have an ally.

Gavoka claimed that his advocacy had already had an impact. In February of last year, Fiji’s U.N. ambassador urged the International Court of Justice to dismiss accusations that Israel’s occupation of Palestine was a violation of international law, calling criticism of Israel’s tactics “one-sided,” and arguing that under the laws of war, “the presence of Israel is legitimate.” This represented a dramatic change in foreign policy. Fiji had long stayed neutral on Middle Eastern issues, wary of jeopardizing the work of the hundreds of Fijian soldiers who serve as U.N. peacekeepers. Many Fijians were outraged by the stance. The country’s ousted prime minister expressed concern about Fiji’s international reputation, while some lawmakers warned that it could put the country’s troops at risk of retaliation. Yet Rabuka, the prime minister, was reliant on Gavoka’s party to remain in power, and Gavoka refused to change course.

After discussing these controversies for a time, I asked Gavoka directly whether he’d heard of the Lost Tribes legend. He squirmed in his seat. “You know, ah, we talk about it,” he stammered. A traditional Fijian song referred obliquely to Israeli origins, he said. And one of his closest political allies had told him of remote Fijian sea caves filled with Hebrew petroglyphs. “I believe there’s a connection there,” he said. “It’ll be really interesting to have some scholars look deeply into it.” He didn’t sound convinced. I was reminded of Lusibaea and others who had championed the legend only to privately profess disbelief. I pressed further: If he wasn’t sure, why the focus on the myth? Gavoka paused, then leaned forward conspiratorially. “When you are in politics, when you want people to buy into what you believe in . . . ” He shrugged. “What is there and alive and part of the dialogue at the level of the community is quite phenomenal.” With a wink and a nod to the Fijians who believed in the legends, the former tourism CEO clearly believed he could channel some of their magic.

Before traveling to Fiji, I had called the offices of the country’s Fijian-language newspaper in search of its editor, who I knew had covered the Israeli-origin myths. A gruff voice told me that the editor wasn’t in. I explained my interest, and the voice softened. “Oh, well, I could help with that.”

A few days later, I met the man behind the voice: Viliame Ravai, one of the newspaper’s handful of reporters. Stout and middle-aged, with the confident demeanor of someone accustomed to asking questions rather than answering them, he was clearly delighted to have a new audience with whom to share stories about the islanders’ Hebrew origins. Over coffee at a local café, Ravai explained that Fiji is full of Jewish temples atop distant mountains. He could take me to see them. We considered two or three pilgrimage sites before he paused, peered at me cautiously, and suggested we travel to one particular village in the country’s highlands, where the local elders could show us one such temple. He batted away my questions about the village’s identity and precise whereabouts; I’d have to trust him. Ravai struck me as part boyish enthusiast, part sharp-eyed swindler. But I had a few spare days, Mudreilagi was dodging my calls, and I was intrigued.

We sped north along the coast in a pickup truck driven by Ravai’s cousin and accompanied by Ravai’s nephew, a quiet man whose leg was heavily bandaged from a large wound that he never explained and which I decided it would be better not to ask about. Ravai had nursed an interest in the Lost Tribes since childhood, he told me. A decade ago, he’d visited a sea cave full of petroglyphs that he said resembled Hebrew, presumably the same ones I had heard about from Mudreilagi and Gavoka. Later, when I looked at photos of alleged Hebrew inscriptions across Fiji, I could barely make out the carvings in the rock; to a skeptic’s eye, it was hardly conclusive proof. But Ravai was convinced: “I was sure there must be some kind of people that visited this place before.” He seemed increasingly excited for me to see a rarely glimpsed truth. “Fijians, most of them keep this secret.” We hurtled over jungle-clad hills, then across farmland that seemed borrowed from the English countryside. A dark mountain range crept over the horizon. After several hours, we reached a smattering of pastel-colored homes connected by neat dirt paths lined with painted rocks. Two elders ushered us into the local church, a tiny structure with a corrugated-iron roof. I had arrived, the men explained, in Israel.

God had scattered the Holy Land’s features through this remote part of the Pacific, the elders told me. One of them pointed east, toward an isolated peak. That, he explained, was Mount Sinai. Similar Biblical landmarks, he said, were all around us. The burning bush. The rocky pillar that was once Lot’s wife. The neighboring village, he said, was Egypt. While growing up amid these divine gifts, the men said, they were taught a prophecy by their families: one day, a messenger would bring them a flag to signify that their village and Fiji were blessed by God. On May 15, 2015, that messenger arrived. A man appeared in the village, declaring that he had been sent by a man from Perth named Ben Yahusa. After a church service, the messenger raised an enormous Israeli flag outside. In the elders’ telling, a single ray of heavenly light shone down while the villagers cried with joy.

One of the elders rose from the church’s woven mats, walked to a small cabinet of lacquered wood, lifted its lid, and produced a large Israeli flag: this was the messenger’s gift. As the man unfurled it, the other man stepped over and pulled out a tasseled golden cushion, on which sat a brown leather-bound Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, with a dated inscription from Yahusa that emphasized his love for the local tribe, whom he dubbed the Kings of Stone. “All the landmarks in Israel are here: so Israel just copied everything from here,” one of the elders told me as I flipped through the Tanakh’s fragile pages. “A time will come when Israel will know Fiji.”

I struggled to understand all this. Were they speaking metaphorically, or did they mean that God had blessed their land with reproductions of biblical settings? While I tried to wrap my head around this mix of prophecy and fantasy, Ravai nudged me. We still hadn’t reached the temple he had spoken of. We left the elders, hopped back in the pickup, and sped toward the shadowy mountains. After climbing to the top of a low ridge, we looked over a valley ringed by blunt peaks and crammed with verdant bush. At its heart was a collection of homes encircling a small building painted white and blue. As the sky darkened, we drove down into the hamlet, where we found a portly man in his sixties outside the nearest house. He greeted me, looking unsurprised. His name was Mosese Ritova, and he had been expecting me.

Ritova led us toward the blue-and-white building and unlocked a rotting wooden door to reveal an interior featuring still more Israeli flags. On a small altar sat another Tanakh. This was his temple, Ritova explained. “I always pray here for so many miracles.” Ravai, his cousin, his nephew, and I sat in a semicircle while Ritova launched into a series of convoluted stories about Moses and a prophecy that the world would end in the twenty-first century, prompting Ritova’s father, among others, to flee into the mountains where they could wait out the decades until God granted them salvation. The valley seemed like an appropriate site, given its purported religious significance. He flicked a hand toward the same mountain the village elders had indicated. “That’s the place where the Ten Commandments were given.” This valley was the center of creation, where humanity was born.

My head spun. This mountain range was no mirror image of Israel, as I had thought the village elders had meant. This was the actual Holy Land, Ritova said, from which all people originated. But what about Fijians’ legendary Hebrew ancestry? Ritova smiled serenely and shook his head. Clearly I had misunderstood. Fijians were not the Lost Tribe of Israel; Israelis were the Lost Tribe of Fiji. And when the apocalyptic prediction eventuated, he said, the people of Israel would return to the island nation to find salvation.

Evening had fallen, and bats chittered in the sky outside. Ritova invited us to stay the night in Paradise. He rarely had guests, he said; his only visitors were ghosts—pale and translucent spirits. “White guys like you!” he joked. As a gift, Ravai and I had brought some kava, a psychoactive root whose consumption is fundamental to Pacific culture. We pounded the root into a powder, mixed it into water, sat in Ritova’s living room, and passed a few cups around. For hours, I listened as Ravai and Ritova shifted between gossip and detailed theological debates. Finally, in the early morning, I slipped away to Ritova’s spare bedroom, where I dreamt of tropical islands and the end of the world.

On my last day in Fiji, I finally persuaded Mudreilagi to talk. We met on the outskirts of Suva, on the balcony of a food court. On one side of our table, locals slurped noodles; on the other, teenagers filed into a cinema to see the latest Bollywood flick. I asked first about his pilgrimage to Israel. How did it feel to plant trees in the Holy Land, given his ancestral link to Israel? He flashed a wan smile. “If there is indeed a connection, then the planting of a tree in the soil with Fiji Water is cementing our connection to the people of the land.”

“If”? Mudreilagi had spent the past week immersed in the symbology of Israel, surrounded by hundreds of followers in thrall to the myth of the Lost Tribes. Self-declared prophets like Ritova had set out their versions of the legend with fervent belief. “If” offered a striking ambivalence. Did he doubt the story? I asked. Mudreilagi grimaced and looked away. “I wouldn’t say doubt, but I’ve gone through . . . ” He paused. “To the extent that . . . ” He paused again. “I . . . I . . . must say that I feel there’s a possibility.”

This was a much weaker endorsement than he had made in the past. Mudreilagi winced again, seeming to realize just how shaky his commitment to the story that had brought him so many blessings had become. He rushed to control the damage. “Well, it has to take DNA things, all of those tests, to prove it,” he said. “I believe there is a connection. But I leave it to the Lord.” And, he added, “our leaders, the current government, know that deep connection.”

Lusibaea, then Gavoka, now Mudreilagi: the legend’s most prominent advocates’ own attachment to the Lost Tribes myth ranged from highly suspect to nonexistent. Their political calculus was clear, but I still wondered how their followers, the true believers, could remain convinced when their leaders were such cynics. I was reminded of something one of the myth’s advocates in the Solomon Islands had told me: “It’s good to know where we come from. It’s important to know where our history begins.” Everyone I spoke with emphasized their remoteness, here at “the ends of the earth.” For someone who believes himself to be at the world’s margins, it must be reassuring to know that your ancestry connected you to the world’s center. Even for those who knew how far-fetched it all was, when faced with that possibility, why wouldn’t you believe—or at least pretend to? While other nations rushed to distance themselves from Israel, Pacific nations rushed to align themselves with it. In the unlikeliest of ways, the myth had tied the Pacific to the heart of global affairs.

Mudreilagi offered to drive me to the city center, where I was due to catch a bus to the airport. He confided that he was about to return to Israel for the first time since the October 7 attacks. He had been invited to support Jerusalem’s newly opened Indigenous Embassy. The goal was to use indigenous advocates—many drawn from the Pacific Islands—to “confront” the “blatant falsehood that Jews are foreign colonizers who have aggressively displaced the Palestinians.” As criticism of the carnage caused by Israel mounted, the embassy would be a way to “garner support from the outside world for Israel as an indigenous people of the land.”

“The indigenous peoples of our nation are going back to stand with our elder brothers,” Mudreilagi told me with a grin. His doubts wouldn’t stop him from returning. A few weeks later, I texted Mudreilagi to ask about the trip. How did it feel to be back in Israel? He sent me a photo of himself presenting a Fijian carving to Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, against a backdrop of blue and white, along with a brief note: “As usual, the warmth of meeting family.”