The Israel ties Indonesia’s Bogor Agricultural University once had

Inside a greenhouse in Bogor, an Indonesian student watched an Israeli engineer explain how to make water disappear into soil, drop by drop. No one in the room thought to ask where the technology, or the expert, had come from, or what it meant to learn irrigation from a company built on land taken from someone else. For years, that quiet blind spot ran through parts of IPB University, Indonesia’s top agricultural school. It was suddenly, deliberately closed in 2025.

In May 2022, students at IPB’s vocational campus in Bogor gathered to learn about greenhouses, the glass or plastic-covered structures farmers use to grow crops in a controlled environment.

Among the speakers was Dr. Orian Shalev, a farming expert flown in from Netafim’s headquarters in Israel, the home base of a company that makes drip irrigation systems, which deliver water straight to a plant’s roots through small tubes instead of spraying an entire field.

Standing next to staff from Netafim’s Indonesian branch, Dr. Shalev showed off what the company called “Generation 4.0 Greenhouse” technology, newer and more automated greenhouse equipment. The university’s vocational school described the event as support for then-Rector Arif Satria’s push toward more advanced farming methods. On its face, it looked like an ordinary campus talk, the kind that barely makes local news.

Look closer, though, and the relationship went well beyond one Saturday lecture. By that point, Netafim Indonesia had already built two greenhouses for IPB’s vocational school, one in Bogor and one in the nearby town of Sukabumi. By 2022 the company said it had also installed irrigation systems on about 16,000 hectares of open farmland across Indonesia, plus roughly 50 hectares of greenhouse projects.

Netafim’s commercial manager for Indonesia is himself a graduate of IPB. At the time, he described the university as a long-running partner, noting the two sides had already finished “several projects together.” Seen in that light, the Bogor seminar looked less like a one-time event and more like a public update on an ongoing business relationship, one where equipment made by an Israeli company sat inside a working farm used to train Indonesian agriculture students, unquestioned.

The greenhouse was not an isolated case, either. A second, older tie involved animal health research rather than farm equipment. Years before the greenhouse seminars, IPB’s veterinary school took part in a joint study with Israel’s Kimron Veterinary Institute, a government-run animal health lab in the Israeli town of Bet Dagan.

The study tracked how Newcastle Disease, a virus that can kill large numbers of chickens, was spreading across Asia and the Middle East. That subject matters because chicken farming, from small backyard flocks to large commercial operations, is a major part of Indonesia’s rural economy.

The published study lists its authors’ home institutions, and “Faculty of Veterinary Medicine-Bogor Agricultural University, Bogor, Indonesia” appears just a few lines above “Kimron Veterinary Institute, Bet Dagan, Israel,” the two names printed side by side, as ordinary co-authors on a scientific paper, as though nothing about that pairing needed explaining. A second, related paper on the same virus lists researchers from both institutions together as well.

No embassy or government office signed off on either study. It happened the way a lot of scientific research does, with samples and data shared directly between labs, and no one above the research team weighing in on whether it should happen.

Taken together, these episodes point to a pattern that is easy to miss. Indonesia has never had official diplomatic relations with Israel, and its government has said for decades that it supports Palestinian statehood. Yet for years, individual academic activities, a seminar here, a shared research paper there, carried on anyway, treated as ordinary science or ordinary business, somehow separate from that official policy.

Indonesia was hardly alone in this. Universities, companies, and cultural organizations in many countries have kept working relationships with Israeli institutions even as their governments issued public statements criticizing Israeli government actions, including the war in Gaza. Every seminar, every co-authored paper, every quiet business deal lent a small measure of normalcy to that relationship, whether anyone in the room meant it to or not. IPB eventually decided it did not want to keep lending that normalcy, and acted on it.

That decision came through an internal notice, what Indonesian institutions call a surat edaran, or circular, a written instruction sent to everyone in an organization. Circular number 45928/IT3/PK.02.01/M/B/2025 was issued on 15 September 2025 and signed by then-Rector Arif Satria.

It ordered everyone at IPB, teaching staff, students, and researchers, to stop all official cooperation with anyone connected to Israel, effective immediately. No joint seminars. No conferences. No shared research projects. No exchange programs, whether the Israeli connection was direct or indirect. Anyone organizing a university event was now required to confirm beforehand that no Israeli institution or individual was involved. The letter explained the decision as a show of solidarity with Palestinian independence, in line with the Indonesian government’s own position.

That single notice closed off exactly the kind of activity described above, a foreign company’s expert teaching in an IPB greenhouse, a foreign research institute’s name appearing alongside IPB’s in a published study. Those ties were real, and until September 2025, no one at the university had treated them as a problem worth addressing. Since the circular, they belong to IPB’s past rather than its present.

They leave behind a broader reminder. Ties like these can exist quietly at any university, often below the notice of anyone outside the specific department involved. Other Indonesian campuses may want to ask themselves the same question IPB eventually did: whether a visiting speaker, a research partner, or a company sponsor has ties to Israel, and whether that fits with the country’s stated position.

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