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.

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.

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.

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.