Prabowo’s September visit to the UAE: Pushing Indonesia deeper into the Middle East conversation?

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s landing in Abu Dhabi on 12 September was not simply another diplomatic stopover. Coming just days after Israel’s unprecedented airstrike on Doha—a strike that killed five Hamas delegates and a Qatari officer during cease-fire talks—his presence signalled that Indonesia intends to play a far more active role in Middle Eastern diplomacy than ever before.

Prabowo’s first destination had been Doha itself, where he stood beside Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to declare Indonesia’s solidarity with Qatar. From there, he flew to Abu Dhabi to meet United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, urging regional unity in the face of escalating instability.

For a country geographically distant from the region, Indonesia’s engagement might seem surprising. Yet Prabowo appears to be shaping a new foreign policy posture. As the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation and Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, Indonesia has long possessed untapped diplomatic weight. His predecessor, Joko Widodo, focused primarily on domestic development and avoided entanglement in the Middle East’s intractable conflicts. Prabowo, by contrast, is moving quickly to position Jakarta as both a partner and a voice of conscience.

But his choice of Abu Dhabi as a stage raises difficult questions. The UAE normalised relations with Israel in 2020 under the Abraham Accords, betting that diplomatic and economic engagement could soften Israeli behavior. Five years later, that wager has failed. Instead of peace, Israel has intensified settlement expansion, tightened its siege of Gaza, and now extended aggression to Qatar itself. Normalisation has not moderated Israel—it has emboldened it. By seeking Emirati partnership in responding to Israel’s latest attack, Prabowo risks tethering Indonesia’s credibility to a policy that has proven illusory.

If Indonesia is serious about offering fresh ideas, it should be willing to challenge those failed assumptions. For decades, the “two-state solution” has served as the mantra of peace talks, even as Israeli leaders openly rejected Palestinian statehood and built facts on the ground that made partition impossible. The Doha strike underscores the reality: Israel is not seeking coexistence, but domination.

It may be time for Indonesia and its Gulf partners to consider a new path. A single state—where Jews and Palestinians share equal rights under one legal system—remains unthinkable to many. Yet so too did the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, until it happened. The alternative is endless cycles of violence, occupation, and asymmetric “peace processes” that merely provide cover for continued dispossession. By raising the prospect of genuine equality, Jakarta could help shift the conversation away from failed frameworks and toward something more honest.

None of this diminishes the significance of Prabowo’s presence. In a week when the United Nations Security Council condemned Israel’s strike without even naming the perpetrator, Indonesia’s leader chose to stand in Doha and Abu Dhabi, shoulder to shoulder with those directly threatened. Diplomacy often defaults to carefully worded communiqués. Sometimes, though, presence itself is power.

Indonesia’s next steps will determine whether this new activism amounts to more than symbolism. Can Jakarta maintain Gulf ties without being drawn into normalization politics? Will it press for accountability by challenging Israel’s impunity at international forums and rallying partners toward real pressure? And most importantly, will it dare to champion an alternative to a peace process that has long served as cover for occupation?

For now, one thing is certain: the Middle East is watching Indonesia more closely than before. By flying into the region at a moment of crisis, Prabowo Subianto made it clear that distance is no excuse for detachment. If he can match that visibility with vision—challenging both Israel’s domination and the illusions that enable it—Indonesia may yet emerge as an unexpected voice for justice in a region starved of it.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.