Indonesia cannot claim solidarity with Palestine while it maintains ties with Elbit

A photograph is circulating from the Farnborough International Airshow in England, held from 20 to 24 July. It shows Lieutenant General Rui F.G.P. Duarte, a senior Indonesian defence official, posing in front of the stand of Elbit Systems. Elbit is Israel’s largest privately owned arms company, and one of the main manufacturers arming the assault on Gaza.

Duarte was there representing Indonesia’s defence minister. The visit itself came through Indonesia’s Ministry of Defence, which confirmed that Duarte attended Farnborough from 20 to 24 July on the minister’s behalf. The photo of him at the Elbit stand was then posted by the ministry itself, on its own Instagram account. Nobody forced this photograph into existence. Jakarta published it, proudly, as if there were nothing to hide.

Here is a simple test. A government cannot claim to stand with Palestine while its own defence establishment maintains ties with Elbit Systems. Not quiet ties. Not “diversified supplier” ties. Any ties at all. This photograph shows Indonesia failing that test, in public, on its own Instagram feed.

This is the point the photograph proves: solidarity and Elbit cannot coexist. A government that poses beside this company’s logo, however briefly, has already answered the question of where its real loyalties lie.

Indonesia has no diplomatic relations with Israel. Its passports carry travel restrictions to Israel. Its foreign ministry never stops repeating its support for Palestinians. Indonesian students, Islamic mass organisations, and ordinary citizens have spent two years organising boycotts of companies tied to the genocide in Gaza. Indonesia’s public image is built on the Palestinian cause more than almost any other country outside the Middle East. That is exactly why this photograph is a betrayal, not a footnote.

Start with what Elbit actually is. Elbit is not on the sidelines of this war. It is one of the companies that makes the war possible. According to Campaign Against Arms Trade, Elbit is Israel’s leading supplier of tank and artillery munitions, through its land division, which absorbed the formerly state-owned Israel Military Industries after Elbit acquired it in 2018.

Elbit makes the Hermes drones that have hunted Palestinians in Gaza for more than fifteen years. Leaked documents showed British intelligence, GCHQ, intercepting Hermes drone video feeds as far back as 2009 — proof of just how long this surveillance machine has been running over a besieged, occupied population.

Elbit’s Lidar, laser imaging and ranging technology, has reportedly been used to map Gaza’s underground tunnel networks. Its Hermes 450 drone was named by The Intercept as the aircraft used in the widely publicised 2014 killing of four Palestinian children playing on a beach in Gaza. Its drones have since been implicated in attacks on humanitarian workers in Gaza in April 2024, and in strikes in southern Lebanon in March 2024. In 2021, the Israeli military deployed Hermes 900 drones over Gaza equipped with Spike MR guided missiles. Elbit’s technology also equips Israel’s fleet of F-16 fighter jets, built by Lockheed Martin, which have flattened entire neighbourhoods in Gaza, and Elbit is heavily involved in the training facilities of Israel’s air force.

This is a company built on the machinery of occupation and mass killing. And an Indonesian general chose to smile in front of its logo. There is no version of Palestinian solidarity that survives contact with that fact.

Even some Western governments, longtime backers of Israel, have started putting distance between themselves and this company. French authorities shut down and blacked out the stands of five Israeli defence firms at the Paris Air Show, Israel Aerospace Industries, Rafael, UVision, Elbit Systems and Aeronautics, using black partitions, after Israel refused to remove offensive weapons from the displays as agreed.

Spain cancelled a roughly €700 million contract with Elbit for PULS precision artillery systems, a deal that had been agreed roughly two years earlier. Activists around the world have pushed institutions from MIT in the United States, to city councils in Canada, the United Kingdom and Romania, into cutting ties with Elbit. Bolivia, Belize, Colombia and Nicaragua have gone further still, severing diplomatic relations with Israel entirely over the war.

So while other states are scrambling to distance themselves from this company, an Indonesian officer walked up to its stand and posed for the camera. Indonesia had nothing to lose by staying away. It chose not to.

This is the part Jakarta hopes nobody looks at too closely. Indonesia’s military relationship with Israel is not a one-off lapse. It is a structural feature of the Indonesian security establishment, documented in detail by Israel’s own military-intelligence archives, going back to 1968, when quiet, unofficial military and intelligence contacts opened between the two states.

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By 1971, Indonesia was buying counter-battery radar, for accurate artillery fire, from Israel Military Industries, the very company Elbit later absorbed. In March 1974, a team of 27 officers and 90 soldiers from the Indonesian Army travelled to Israel for a two-month course in artillery radar, land surveillance, electronic intelligence and signals intelligence, run by the Israeli Army. In January 1975, a 60-man team from the Indonesian Navy and Air Force went to Israel to learn special insertion techniques and covert operations from Shayetet 13 and the Israeli Navy. That November, the result of this training was the establishment of a Special Forces Training School, which trained small Kopassus units in airborne and seaborne insertion.

In August 1976, the Indonesian and Israeli Air Force chiefs of s taff met during a supposedly coincidental visit to Tehran, to discuss Indonesia’s procurement of 35 Douglas A-4 Skyhawk fighter aircraft from Israel, which were ultimately delivered in 1981 and 1982.

In 2006, Indonesia made a $6 million deal with the Philippine company Kital for the delivery of four Israeli Searcher-II drones, intended for surveillance of the Indonesian archipelago and the Malacca Strait. Indonesian forces have also been reported using riot-control vehicles from the Israeli company Beit Alfa Technologies, though no public data exists on exactly how many were purchased.

In 2021, Indonesia’s Central Statistics Agency, BPS, recorded arms imports from Israel under three separate Harmonized System codes: one covering artillery weapons such as rifles, mortars and howitzers, one covering spare parts and accessories for revolvers and pistols, and one covering spare parts and accessories for revolvers and sighting or heading guns. That same November, Israel’s National Security Adviser, Eyal Hulata, and the chargé d’affaires at Israel’s Manama embassy, Itay Tagner, were documented meeting Indonesia’s defence minister at an international event in Bahrain.

In 2022, Indonesia took part, alongside Israel and 24 other nations, in Rim of the Pacific, RIMPAC, the world’s largest maritime exercise, hosted by the United States Third Fleet off Hawaii and Southern California. And since 2009, a chamber of commerce promoting Israeli-Indonesian trade, a subsidiary of the Israel-Asia Chamber of Commerce, has operated quietly out of Tel Aviv, despite the absence of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

None of this is compatible with the story Jakarta tells the world, and tells its own people, about where it stands.

This photograph does not create a scandal out of nothing. It rips the curtain off one that Jakarta has hidden behind for over fifty years. For decades, the Indonesian government has kept two things in separate rooms: loud, public statements of solidarity with Palestinians, and quiet, deniable military ties with Israel and Israeli-linked arms companies. That arrangement is no longer sustainable, and it was never honest to begin with. A country cannot claim solidarity with Palestine while any part of its state maintains ties, however indirect, with Elbit Systems. The two positions cancel each other out.

Statements of solidarity cost Jakarta nothing. Access to Israeli radar, drones and training has evidently been judged worth the risk, a risk the government clearly did not expect to materialise in a single Instagram post.

Palestinians do not need Indonesian hashtags. They need governments that put their money and their military procurement where their mouths are. Every dollar of Indonesian public money that ends up, even indirectly, propping up Elbit or any other arm of the war on Gaza is a direct betrayal of the solidarity Jakarta claims to embody.

The Indonesian government owes its own people, who overwhelmingly support Palestinian freedom, a real explanation, not a vague line about “diversifying suppliers,” but a full public accounting of every military, intelligence and commercial tie it has maintained with Israel and Israeli arms companies since 1968, and a clear commitment to end all of them, starting with Elbit. Anything less is complicity dressed up as neutrality.

The ministry will likely call the Farnborough visit routine diplomatic courtesy. It may point to the need to diversify arms suppliers in an unstable global market. Both claims might be technically true. Neither one changes the test: you cannot stand with Palestine and stand beside Elbit. Indonesia is currently failing.

The real question is not whether this photograph was appropriate. It is whether Jakarta is willing to sever every tie to Elbit Systems and the arms industry behind it, because until it does, its solidarity with Palestine is a slogan, not a policy.

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