- – By Markson V LUIKHAM
Ukhrul | EKHON: Can a people claim two homelands across continents, one by ancestral descent from Manasseh, the other by indigenous birthright, without generating a contradiction that law, logic, and history cannot reconcile? The Bnei Menashe claim places this question squarely before the world. Truth does not bargain. History does not surrender.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗺 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗜𝘁𝘀 𝗣𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗕𝘂𝗿𝗱𝗲𝗻
A segment of the Kuki community in Northeast India declares itself to be Bnei Menashe, the children of Manasseh, a lost tribe of Israel whose millennial exile has finally found its end. They are also called Shinlung. Linguistically, they are Tibeto‑Burman, belonging to the Kuki‑Chin‑Mizo ethnic family, indigenous to Asia. Yet the same community, through other organizations, simultaneously asserts exclusive indigeneity in Manipur and demands a separate Kukiland. Both claims are held at once. Both are asserted with force. Both cannot be true in the way they are wielded. A political movement cannot simultaneously claim Israel as its ancestral homeland and Manipur as its indigenous soil without generating contradictions that evidence, logic, and the architecture of international law cannot sustain.
𝗔 𝗗𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗕𝗲𝗰𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝗮 𝗠𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁
The claim did not emerge from archaeology, epigraphy, or settled genealogical proof. It began with a vision. In 1951, Mela Chala, also called Chalianthanga, of Buallawn village, reported a dream that his people’s pre‑Christian religion was Judaism and their original homeland was Israel. A private revelation, once spoken, does not remain private. Through the 1970s, segments of the community adopted Jewish practices while retaining Christian faith, a theological hybrid born of yearning rather than doctrine. They adopted the name Bnei Menashe, meaning Children of Manasseh. A dream, once weaponized, hardens into identity, and identity, once organized, becomes political currency.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗸𝗲𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗪𝗵𝗼 𝗚𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗟𝗲𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗮𝗰𝘆
The dream needed legitimacy. It found a gatekeeper in Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, who in March 2005 formally recognized the Bnei Menashe as descendants of Israel. This was not spontaneous recognition. It was the product of sustained lobbying by Shavei Israel, founded in 2002 by the American‑born Israeli political activist Michael Freund, whose mission is to gather the scattered tribes and bring them home. Freund personally approached Rabbi Amar and pressed him to study the origins of the Kuki community. A rabbinical court, a Beit Din, was dispatched to India in September 2005 to begin conversions. But the recognition came with a decisive qualification: full Orthodox conversion was required upon arrival in Israel. The Bnei Menashe were not welcomed as Jews. They were accepted as candidates for conversion. The distinction is the keystone of the entire arch.
𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗦𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗺𝗲𝗱, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗜𝘁 𝗗𝗶𝗱 𝗡𝗼𝘁
The genetic evidence remains contested and inconclusive. In 2003, Professor Karl Skorecki of the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, examined 350 DNA samples and found no evidence of Middle Eastern paternal origin. Further testing in 2003 to 2004 on several hundred male community members did not yield conclusive evidence of continuous Israelite descent. A Kolkata based study in 2005 identified a trace of maternally descended Near Eastern ancestry in a small number of women, but that finding was immediately contested and attributed by critics to ancient intermarriage rather than continuous Israelite descent. The scientific consensus is that the Bnei Menashe are Tibeto‑Burman, indigenous to Asia, as supported by Y‑DNA paternal line results. A dream in 1951 and a rabbinical ruling in 2005 cannot override the genetic code. Faith may rest on mystery, but territorial claims cannot rest on faith alone.
The claim is also contested from within. The Thadou tribe, historically catalogued under the Kuki‑Zo rubric, has repeatedly rejected that label and does not identify with the Bnei Menashe narrative. They insist on a distinct Thadou identity and refuse to be absorbed into a broader political construct. The Thadou are not Kuki; they are a separate tribe that has refused to be merged under the artificial Kuki‑Zo label. When identity is disputed from within and unconfirmed by science, it cannot be treated as settled fact simply because it is politically useful.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗶𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗚𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗺 𝗣𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗪𝗲𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁
Despite the contested evidence, the migration proceeded. The first Bnei Menashe arrived in Israel in the late 1980s with the help of an Israeli rabbi. Through the 1990s and 2000s, approximately 1,700 to 1,800 arrived in small groups, often on tourist visas, converting to Judaism upon arrival. Immigration halted briefly between 2007 and 2012, then resumed with Israeli government approval for 275 members. Over the past two decades, roughly 4,000 community members have already made aliyah, Jewish immigration to Israel, with an estimated 5,000 already settled.
On 23 November 2025, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Aliyah Minister Ofir Sofer approved a historic five year plan to bring the remaining 5,800 Bnei Menashe to Israel by 2030, with 1,200 expected by the end of 2026. On 24 April 2026, the first 250 arrived under Operation Wings of Dawn. The Israeli government expects to complete the arrival of the entire community, reuniting families, by 2030. The cost, borne by the Israeli treasury, is projected at $27 to $30 million for flights, Hebrew training, housing, and integration.
In exchange, the migrants receive full Israeli citizenship after Orthodox conversion, free flights to Israel, housing in cities like Nof HaGalil in northern Israel, Hebrew language training, and access to military service and employment in sectors with labor shortages. As of October 2023, approximately 206 Kukis were serving in the Israeli Defense Forces, and some were recalled as reservists during the war against Hamas. Sections of the wider Kuki diaspora continue to identify symbolically with the Bnei Menashe narrative, even among those who remain Christian. The migration also intersects with broader demographic, settlement, and integration policies within Israel, particularly in northern regions experiencing labor and population pressures.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗲𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆
While thousands crossed the sea, other Kuki organizations worked to extract political advantage on the ground they simultaneously claimed as indigenous soil. The lost tribe narrative has increasingly been deployed in ways that intersect with claims of indigeneity, foreign advocacy, and territorial mobilization.
In June 2023, the World Kuki‑Zo Intellectual Council submitted a memorandum to Prime Minister Netanyahu. It did not request humanitarian aid. It requested his personal intervention to grant Kuki statehood under Article 3 of the Indian Constitution for self‑governance free from the control and discrimination in all aspects by the majority community. It further declared that if New Delhi hesitated, Netanyahu’s intervention would be required to declare a Kuki Country under the Grierson Linguistic Survey of 1904, integrating Kuki‑Chin territories of Chin State in Myanmar, Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, Mizoram in India, and Kuki Hills in Outer Manipur. A foreign head of government was asked to carve a sovereign entity from the territory of the Indian Republic. This was not mere lobbying. This was an appeal to foreign authority to validate a territorial project inside a sovereign state, a step that raises profound questions about sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the limits of transnational political lobbying. This development has generated concern among several observers and civil society organizations regarding the geopolitical implications of transnational lobbying for territorial restructuring.
Grierson himself was unambiguous. He stated that the denomination Kuki‑Chin is a purely conventional one, there being no proper name comprising all the tribes. A linguistic survey is not a land deed. An ethnographic sketch is not a political boundary. Cartographic manipulation by Kuki revisionists does not create historical legitimacy.
Simultaneously, Kuki organizations turned their attention to Washington. In May 2024, the North American Manipur Tribal Association staged a congressional briefing in the United States. At this briefing, US Commission on International Religious Freedom commissioner David Curry alleged that atrocities on the Kuki minority Christians were connected to a broader, widespread pattern of deteriorating religious freedom conditions throughout India. The State Department followed with a report alleging significant human rights abuses in Manipur, which the Indian Ministry of External Affairs dismissed as deeply biased and reflecting a very poor understanding of India.
Separately, the American preacher and Army veteran Daniel Stephen Courney was deported from India in 2017 after being found to have provided Kuki militants with military‑grade equipment such as drones and bulletproof vests. The Legal Rights Observatory has documented that the US Baptist Church is funding projects linked with banned militant outfits. Funds raised within the United States by Christian institutions have been channeled to Kuki armed groups. When Christian sympathy becomes a funding mechanism for armed groups, the line between humanitarian concern and political interference is erased.
𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗖𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗕𝗲 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗱
A political movement cannot simultaneously invoke Israelite descent for external legitimacy while asserting exclusive indigenous territorial entitlement in contested regions without generating deep legal and political contradictions. If the Bnei Menashe narrative is primarily spiritual and symbolic, it cannot be deployed as the basis for territorial separatism. If it carries political implications, those implications must be openly examined, not concealed behind diplomatic ambiguity. To petition the Israeli prime minister for a separate state on Indian soil, while claiming indigeneity in Manipur, is a contradiction that evidence, logic, and the architecture of international law cannot sustain.
The recognition and resettlement of Bnei Menashe communities inevitably carries geopolitical weight. When organizations associated with the same identity are involved in separatist demands in Northeast India, the issue ceases to be merely religious or cultural. It becomes a matter of political consequence that implicates the recognizing state. Israel cannot pretend that its symbolic recognition exists in a vacuum. Every recognition creates relation. Every relation creates responsibility. When certain Kuki armed groups, whose identity draws on the same Bnei Menashe narrative, are implicated in attacks on Christian villages, ambushes on church services, burning of forests, abduction of civilians, and killing of pastors in Northeast India, the nature of that relation becomes a legitimate subject of international inquiry.
The United States faces a parallel difficulty. American Baptist missionaries were the first to bring Christianity to the Naga Hills and Manipur. The first Naga church was organized on 22 December 1872 at Molungkimong by Rev. E.W. Clark among the Ao Nagas. The first converts in Manipur were twelve Tangkhul Nagas baptized by William Pettigrew on 29 September 1901. The Kukis and Thadou received Christianity later, after large‑scale colonial‑era settlement and militarized recruitment under British frontier policy. They were settled under British frontier policy as auxiliary and buffer communities. As the United Naga Council has documented, the British colonial administration planted the Kuki tribe in the Naga hills as a mercenary force, recognizing their total lack of attachment to any land and landscape. Colonial administrative records frequently categorized Kuki settlements in parts of the Naga Hills as later frontier settlements rather than indigenous formations.
The nation that sent those missionaries must now explain why its Christian institutions, its Congress, and its State Department amplify the voice of a movement whose associated armed factions are attacking the very people who first received the Gospel from American hands. A narrative of persecuted Kuki Christians cannot be permitted to bury the fact of Naga Christians being shelled, shot, and displaced by Kuki armed groups. Memory should clarify truth, not invert it.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗸𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴: 𝗗𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆
The Naga civil society organizations, the United Naga Council, the Naga Students Federation, the All Naga Students Association Manipur, the Naga Hoho, the Global Naga Forum, must now unite with the indigenous peoples of North East India and petition to the Israeli government and the US administration. Silence in the face of contradiction is complicity.
To the Government of Israel, the petition shall demand:
- Clarify the political implications, if any, of recognizing the Bnei Menashe identity in relation to territorial movements in Northeast India. If the recognition is purely spiritual, Israel should state so unequivocally. If it carries political weight, the consequences must be acknowledged and addressed.
- Issue an unequivocal public statement that Israel does not endorse the Kukiland project, and that the simultaneous assertion of Israelite descent and exclusive indigeneity in Manipur creates profound contradictions that cannot be diplomatically concealed.
To the Government of the United States, the petition shall demand:
- Investigate the funding streams from American Christian institutions to Kuki armed groups. Financial transparency is the minimum requirement of accountability.
- Hold accountable any American citizen who has provided military support, equipment, or training to Kuki militants. The arm that arms the violent bears the stain of the violence.
- Cease the uncritical amplification of unverified Kuki victimhood narratives in the US Congress, the State Department, and associated bodies. To broadcast an unverified claim is to become its accomplice.
- Reckon with the missionary legacy of the American Baptist Church in the Naga Hills and Manipur. The first church was Naga. The first converts were Naga. The nation that sent the Gospel must not turn away while the spiritual descendants of those first believers are attacked by armed factions associated with a movement that came later to the faith and now advances territorial claims on the same soil.
𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗹𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻
The contradiction now stands in plain view. What cannot endure is the simultaneous assertion of ancestral return to Israel and exclusive indigenous entitlement in Manipur without scrutiny, consequence, or question. Truth does not bend to political convenience. History does not dissolve under repetition. And the governments of Israel and the United States, bound by recognition and legacy, can no longer pretend the contradiction does not exist. Let the record show who named the contradiction, and who chose to look away.
The writer can be reached at Dependent.for.all@gmail.com.
(The views expressed in the article are solely those of the writer and do not reflect the vision, policy, or editorial position of Ekhon.)
