Star of David and Solomon Islands

Ancient Biblical link and not Middle Eastern politics

Shortly before the Solomon Island’s capital Honiara was plunged into a new disaster of rioting and looting, a group of men stepped ashore at the Ironbottom Sound waterfront.

From the island of Malaita, they were carrying Israel’s flag, the Star of David.

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To a Pacific Island audience, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Samoa predominantly, this is an unremarkable event. For a heavily Christian population, whose theology derives from roughly translated versions of the King James Version, the Star of David is not a political statement. It's a statement of faith. 

Malaita has around a quarter of the 711,000 people of the Solomons, a nation still struggling to define itself after a colonial era in which it was at various historical pivot points, or, more bluntly, subject of other empire wars. Depending on what is called the Solomon Islands, it has been settled by people for 4000 to 5000 years. In 1568 a Spanish navigator, Álvaro de Mendaña, arrived in Ironbottom Sound and on Guadalcanal’s beaches he saw evidence of alluvial gold. Like most explorers of his period, he only had a vague notion of where he actually was. He thought he had found the source of mythical gold mined by the Old Testiment’s King Solomon of Israel. Thus Mendaña called it the Solomon Isles. All he got right was the fact that there is gold in Guadalcanal’s hills.