Israel Should Lead the Pacific AI Agenda

Israel already successfully exports its sophisticated water systems, cyber weapons, and anti-missile infrastructure to global markets. However, Jerusalem has somehow failed to establish an artificial intelligence footprint among the critical Pacific island states that routinely defend the Jewish state in confrontational international forums. The current bureaucratic apathy within Israel’s Foreign Ministry risks wasting this irreplaceable strategic asset.

United Nations arithmetic illustrates why Israel cannot afford to ignore the Pacific. In 2025, the General Assembly passed fifteen resolutions targeting the Jewish state; eleven singled out Jerusalem exclusively, ignoring the world’s actual human rights abusers. Amid this transparently biased theater, Pacific microstates provide a critical diplomatic shield against Western abandonment and Arab League pressure. Their voting records expose the reality: six Pacific nations stood firm against the October 2023 ceasefire resolution, a blocking bloc that held steady through subsequent unilateral texts in June and September 2025. Micronesia boasts a decade-long streak of never voting against Israel, routinely outranking Canada on the State Department’s voting coincidence index. This alignment translates directly to sovereign legitimacy: Papua New Guinea opened its Jerusalem embassy in 2023, followed by Fiji in 2025, and Nauru in September 2026. Their collective populations may be smaller than the Israeli city of Ashdod. Still, under the UN’s “one nation, one vote” reality, these island states wield the same sovereign weight as the powers trying to isolate Israel.

History shows that such unconventional diplomacy yields generational strategic rewards. During the First Intifada, President Chaim Herzog flew to Fiji and Tonga to cultivate isolated allies, defying professional diplomats who scoffed at the itinerary. That groundwork paid off in 1994, when Israel became the first non-Pacific state to recognize Palau. Stuart Beck, the Jewish-American lawyer who negotiated Palau’s compact, subsequently served as its UN ambassador, permanently anchoring the island within Israel’s voting bloc.

Geography, maritime infrastructure, and deep-sea cables ultimately dictate the strategic value of these votes. Micronesia’s exclusive economic zone rivals India’s landmass and straddles critical communication routes for American, Australian, and Japanese maritime traffic. Under Compact of Free Association rules, the United States guarantees the defense of Palau, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands. Yet Beijing actively subverts this defensive umbrella, buying regional leverage through lavish infrastructure projects and Huawei 5G networks. This aggressive digital encroachment locks local ministries into a dual-use telecommunications stack, allowing Chinese intelligence to map allied infrastructure and actively compromise Western naval movements.

Consequently, dominating the Pacific AI agenda anchors these governments securely within the Western orbit. By providing artificial intelligence models for fishing, desalination, cyclone tracking, and cable security, Israel can systematically crowd out predatory Chinese cloud infrastructure. Jerusalem already successfully solves identical maritime challenges across the Eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea. Scaling these inference tools to Pacific atolls transforms transient political affinity into durable physical infrastructure.

To prevent Beijing from completely severing these historic ties, Jerusalem must counter Chinese expansion by launching a comprehensive, three-pronged Pacific AI initiative immediately.

First, Israel must establish a joint hydrology lab in the vast Negev Desert to develop digital models of lagoon mixing. This specialized, cutting-edge facility should train island technicians using bilingual data and deploy solar racks on patrol craft. Certainly, this will let local Pacific governments control model weights, ensuring operational capacity during cyclone blackouts without Beijing’s uplinks.

Second, Israel’s Foreign Ministry should immediately open a fully staffed, dedicated Israel-Pacific cell in New York. This vital hub must integrate elite Unit 8200 and defense personnel rotating through Suva, Palikir, and Port Moresby to publish weekly maps of illegal fishing and cable anomalies.

Third, the Jewish state must pitch an AI security annex to the Compacts of Free Association. This formal agreement would deploy Israeli inference software across networks, keeping encryption keys stored safely in Palikir, Koror, and Majuro rather than on Chinese clouds. Enacting this would naturally require close, high-level diplomatic coordination with Washington. By positioning itself as a technical guarantor rather than a fickle political patron, Jerusalem can lead annual joint simulations from Israel’s Technion in Haifa.

President Herzog courageously engaged the Pacific when contemporary critics short-sightedly called it eccentric; today, the State of Israel must aggressively view Pacific computing through that same visionary and necessary strategic lens.