Why does it matter to Indonesia if Australia moves its embassy to Jerusalem?

Indonesia and Australia were supposed to sign their long-awaited bilateral free-trade agreement last week at the East Asia Summit in Singapore. But the deal has apparently been put on hold.

Trade Minister Simon Birmingham said translation issues were partly to blame for the delay. But it’s hard to deny that Australia’s plan to relocate its embassy to Jerusalem loomed large.

Some Australian officials and politicians believe the embassy proposal is foolhardy, while others say that Indonesia shouldn’t ‘dictate’ Australian foreign policy. The issue, of course, isn’t about who dictates what. It’s simply that, as Newton’s third law says, ‘For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction’—even in foreign policy.

Will Jakarta unravel a trade deal that has taken years of painstaking negotiation over what some might argue is a ‘symbolic’, if not ‘emotional’, issue?

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict may not be Jakarta’s bread-and-butter national interest. But it touches on one of the key foundations of Indonesia’s foreign policy: the promise of independence and freedom from the debt of decolonisation.

Indonesian President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo said that Indonesia’s support for Palestine stems from President Sukarno’s pledge in 1962: as long as Palestine is not independent, Indonesia will always stand opposed to Israel. That promise can be traced back to before Indonesia’s independence in 1945. Palestinian nationalists then supported Jakarta’s quest and even helped persuade Egypt to recognise Indonesia.

For better or worse, Palestine was part of the formative period of Indonesia’s ‘independent and active’ foreign policy. But the support for Palestine doesn’t mean that Indonesia’s foreign policy is strongly ‘Islamic’.

As the current Indonesian ambassador to the UK, Rizal Sukma, has written, Islam has never been the defining framework for Indonesia’s foreign policy. When the ‘Islamic factor’ comes into play, it is always driven by domestic political considerations.

This brings us to the second reason for Indonesia’s opposition to the embassy proposal: in an election year, a weak stance in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict could become a rallying cry to upset Jokowi’s re-election chances.

Read the article by Evan Laksmana in The Strategist.