ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Israel’s relations with Indonesia, Asia’s third most populous country and home to the world’s largest Muslim population. The two countries have never established formal diplomatic relations. Indonesia, which is located far away from the Middle East and co-exists peacefully with Israel, still adheres to a strict position that stipulates the establishment of diplomatic relations on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the two-state solution with pre-1967 borders and East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian independent state. Playing a consistent role in international forums in promoting and defending the Palestinian cause, Indonesia has repeatedly denied having any element of interactions with Israel that might be interpreted as official contact. Yet people-to-people relations between nongovernmental entities, bilateral trade relations between private sector companies, and tourist contacts do exist on a limited scale. Hence, this chapter also looks into the complexity of the relations and offers insights into the prospects of diplomatic relations between the two countries in the future.
