If Indonesia really supports Palestine, it needs to do something about its pro-Israel politicians

Indonesia loves to tell the world it stands with Palestine. The government has no official relations with Israel. Leaders speak about Palestinian freedom at the United Nations. Millions of Indonesians, the largest Muslim population on earth, see the Palestinian cause as their own.

But inside Indonesia, elected politicians openly admire Israel and pay no price for it. The clearest example is Arya Wedakarna, a senator from Bali in Indonesia’s regional assembly, the DPD.

In 2015, during a public discussion in Denpasar, Wedakarna declared that Bali could become “like Israel” one day, since both are small territories surrounded by bigger neighbors and must fight to survive. He reached for an old Balinese idea, “puputan,” a fight to the last breath, to glorify a state built on the displacement of another people.

Eleven years later, that comment reads less like a throwaway line and more like a preview. When Israeli-owned businesses in Bali became national news this month, Indonesian commentators pointed straight back to Wedakarna’s old remarks, arguing it was no coincidence that Israeli residents were now operating openly on an island whose own senator once said he wanted it to resemble Israel.

Indonesia’s immigration ministry was forced to publicly respond, confirming that Israeli nationals living and running businesses in Bali largely travel on foreign passports through dual citizenship.

His admiration does not stop at Israel’s border. Indonesian users on X recently uncovered that Wedakarna’s Instagram account follows both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli embassy. The same account has drawn attention for a post reading simply “LOVE TRUMP,” published in the middle of international controversy over the Trump administration’s policies on Israel and Gaza. The post prompted questions from the Indonesian public about the ethics, morals, and responsibility expected of a sitting public official. Trump is the American president most responsible for moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and handing Israel unconditional cover for its actions against Palestinians. Israel, its prime minister, and Trump are not three separate enthusiasms. They are one politics.

None of this is a stray remark. It is a pattern, and an ugly one. For years, Wedakarna has pushed a version of Balinese identity that treats other Indonesians, especially Muslims, as intruders.

In late 2023, he was filmed at Bali’s main airport ordering staff to keep women wearing headscarves away from the front desk, snapping “this is not Middle East.” In 2017, he branded a visiting Muslim preacher a threat to Indonesia’s founding principles, simply for wanting to speak in Bali. Years earlier, he campaigned to keep Islamic banks off the island.

Put these pieces together and the picture is impossible to miss. Wedakarna’s affection for Israel and Trump is not a foreign policy quirk apart from his domestic record. It flows from the same instinct behind his attacks on hijabs and Muslim preachers. In every case, he celebrates a dominant group excluding a weaker one, and calls it strength: resilience when the group is Israelis holding land seized from Palestinians, culture when it is Balinese Hindus pushing Muslims to the margins of their own province. Strip away the branding and it is the same ideology twice: a refusal to share power, dressed up as heritage.

This stopped being a local embarrassment long ago. Wedakarna’s hijab remarks got him thrown out of the DPD in February 2024, after Indonesia’s own ethics body ruled he had broken his oath of office. He was formally replaced weeks later. But that punishment had nothing to do with his views on Israel or Trump, and it did not stick. He ran again months later and won his seat back with an even bigger vote count, 378,300 votes. Today he is back in the headlines, accused of pressuring a woman during a public mediation in Bali, and he still holds his seat.

So here is the plain truth: a sitting Indonesian senator can spend over a decade glorifying the state occupying Palestinian land and fawning over the American president who arms it, and never be held to account. He was punished, briefly, for insulting Muslim women. He has never faced a formal rebuke for holding up Israel and Trump as models for his own people.

That gap exposes how shallow Indonesia’s Palestine solidarity becomes once you look past the podium. Declaring support at the UN costs nothing. What proves a country means it is whether it confronts its own politicians. A senator praising Israel and calling Trump Nobel-worthy is not a minor inconsistency. He is openly contradicting his country’s stated foreign policy, and should be treated as such: a formal statement of concern, a real reckoning inside his party, a public response instead of the silence that has greeted him for over a decade.

This is not about punishing Wedakarna for holding an opinion. People are free to disagree about Israel and Palestine, even in Indonesia. But there is a vast difference between a private disagreement and a sitting senator celebrating an occupying state and its loudest foreign patron, while his own government insists it stands for the opposite.

Voters and party leaders deserve to weigh that contradiction. Right now, no one in power will even name it.

Indonesia does not need another speech about Palestine. It needs to look directly at politicians like Wedakarna and ask whether their record matches the values the country claims to hold. If it does not, silence is itself a decision, one that turns Indonesia’s solidarity with Palestine into theater instead of conviction.

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