Prabowo keeps lying on Palestine

This week, at the 28th anniversary celebration of the National Awakening Party (PKB) in Jakarta, President Prabowo Subianto reached for a line he’s reached for many times before. Indonesia gets along with everyone, he said, but backing Palestinian independence is the one thing nobody can talk him out of.

The crowd ate it up. Crowds always do, when a leader hands them exactly the applause line they came for.

But this isn’t a one-off. It’s a habit. Prabowo has said some version of this line at nearly every opportunity for the past two years, and every time he says it, his government is somewhere in the middle of doing the opposite. That isn’t a slip. It’s a method.

Indonesians who actually care about Palestine, and in the world’s largest Muslim majority country that is most people, have every reason to feel lied to, over and over, by the same man, on the same subject. Not because the words are wrong.

Because Prabowo has learned that saying the righteous thing loudly enough buys him cover to do the shameful thing quietly, again and again, without anyone in Jakarta calling it what it is.

Start with his devotion to a two-state solution, which he trots out every chance he gets, like a man reciting a line he’s stopped believing but hasn’t stopped repeating. It’s a strange thing to keep proposing as the answer when so many people watching Gaza closely, Palestinian organizers, human rights investigators, a growing body of serious scholarship, have stopped describing a border dispute between equals at all.

They describe it as a genocide: engineered starvation, mass civilian slaughter, hospitals and universities pounded into rubble. Calling for two states side by side, as if that settles anything, lets Prabowo pose as a statesman while asking Israel to stop exactly nothing. It isn’t diplomacy. It’s the same lie, recited on a loop until it starts to sound like policy.

Then follow the money, because the money is where the truth shows up. Danantara, Indonesia’s new sovereign wealth fund, spent much of last year chasing BlackRock like a suitor. Its chief executive flew to BlackRock’s Manhattan office. BlackRock later turned up among a dozen investment firms Prabowo personally courted in Washington.

BlackRock holds major stakes in the very companies manufacturing the weapons Israel is using on Gaza. Even lawmakers inside Prabowo’s own coalition couldn’t choke down the hypocrisy in silence. Courting a financier of the war machine while claiming to support the Palestinians isn’t sophisticated statecraft. It’s the same lie, wearing a different outfit, this time with an invoice attached.

Halmahera tells the identical story with dirt instead of paper. Indonesia handed a geothermal concession there to a subsidiary of Ormat Technologies, an Israeli company down to its bones, built on Israeli engineering and Israeli capital.

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A country that has refused to recognize Israel for the whole of its modern existence is now rolling out the red carpet for Israeli linked industry, on an island already being gutted for nickel. The public is asked to swallow the fiction that this has nothing to do with foreign policy. It has everything to do with it. Money laundered through a permit is still money, and it still comes from where it comes from.

Then, in the same week as his speech, there’s Abdul Karim Raed Miqdad, and this is the case that should turn stomachs. A Palestinian man was seized in Tangerang and put on a plane out of the country in under a day. Not enough time to reach a lawyer, let alone mount any kind of defense.

Indonesian officials call it a routine Interpol matter. They’ve rushed, almost frantically, to insist he’s merely a businessman and not an activist, a remarkably convenient thing to volunteer about someone whose own family and human rights monitors say is precisely the opposite. A red notice is a request, not a verdict, and Interpol’s own rules explicitly forbid using one for anything political.

Whoever Miqdad really is, a government that brands itself Palestine’s most loyal friend in Southeast Asia rushed a Palestinian man toward a country that could deliver him straight into Israeli hands. It moved with the speed of a state trying to make sure nobody had time to stop it, and only bothered explaining itself once the outrage had already caught fire. That is not the behaviour of a government keeping a promise. It’s the behaviour of one that has told this particular lie so many times it no longer expects to be caught.

And then, of course, there’s the Board of Peace. Prabowo signed onto it at Davos, committing Indonesian troops to a Gaza reconstruction scheme designed by the Trump administration, one that gives actual Palestinians almost no say over their own future.

His government insists this is leverage, a seat at the table, a way to fight for Palestinian sovereignty from the inside. It reads a lot more like surrender: a founding member of the nonaligned movement writing a nine figure check to help police somebody else’s occupied territory, on terms dictated from Washington, at a table where Donald Trump sits at the head and decides who gets to speak.

None of this, on its own, would prove Prabowo is lying. Repeated this many times, across this many years, on this many fronts, it stops being a coincidence and starts being a record. Every one of these episodes followed the same speech, the same line, the same applause. And every one of them contradicted it just as plainly as the last.

What he’s built isn’t a foreign policy. It’s a script he performs so often that the performance has become the point, passionate at the podium, nowhere to be found the moment it might cost him something real.

The Indonesians who marched for Gaza, who gave up Israeli linked brands, who believed him the first time he called this a genocide, and the second, and the third, deserve better than a president who keeps handing them the same line and calling it conviction. They don’t need another speech. They need one policy he’s willing to defend when it actually costs him.

Until he produces it, “nonnegotiable” is just the word he keeps repeating right before he negotiates it away, again.

Prabowo isn’t lying about Palestine once. He is lying about it constantly, and calling it a foreign policy.

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