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by Dr. Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat

In recent months, as I continued investigating how pro-Israel narratives are being systematically injected into Indonesia’s social media ecosystem, I encountered yet another account demanding scrutiny. Operating alongside other digital efforts to sanitize Israel’s record, this account advances normalization not through debate or diplomacy, but through relentless repetition, emotional manipulation and the strategic erasure of context. The Instagram and Facebook account @israellovesindonesia is one such example.

At first glance, the account appears marginal. Active since August 2020, it has published more than 1,600 posts on Instagram but attracted only about 1,114 followers. Engagement is thin; likes rarely exceed 50, and comments are often sparse. When discussions do surface, many Indonesian users openly accuse the account of being a “buzzer,” shorthand for coordinated propaganda. Its Facebook counterpart, with roughly 1,000 followers, shows similarly limited reach.

But influence does not always announce itself through scale. Often, it works through persistence.

What @israellovesindonesia seeks to do is not to persuade Indonesians in a single moment, but to gradually dull resistance. The account relentlessly promotes positive news about Israel from mainstream outlets, highlights Israeli advances in agriculture and technology, and repeatedly urges Indonesia to sign what it calls a “Historic Peace Agreement.” Before October 2023, its feed was saturated with carefully curated images of coexistence: Israeli Jews providing medical aid, sharing Ramadan greetings and engaging in charitable acts. These posts were not neutral. They were designed to detach Israel’s image from its policies — to replace occupation with optics.

READ: Indonesia’s classrooms are not sites for Zionist social engineering

After October 2023, as Gaza was devastated, tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed, and Israel’s campaign was increasingly described by legal scholars, human rights organizations and states as genocidal, the tone shifted. The account pivoted toward emotionally manipulative storytelling, foregrounding narratives about Israeli hostages allegedly taken by Hamas while erasing the broader context of siege, apartheid and a genocide unfolding in full view of the world. More recently, it has begun openly endorsing Israeli geopolitical maneuvers, including Israel’s recognition of Somaliland — a move widely criticized as cynical and destabilizing.

On Facebook, the effects of this messaging are already visible. Posts quoting U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s assertion that Gaza should not be rebuilt until Hamas is disarmed have drawn comments explicitly endorsing collective punishment. One user wrote, “Why keep terrorists alive? Spending huge amounts of money to rebuild Gaza will only turn it back into a terrorist nest. That’s a waste of money.” Another added, “It’s only normal that it shouldn’t be rebuilt — there are too many Hamas terrorists, as long as Hamas hasn’t been wiped out.”

These comments matter. They show how normalization functions in practice: by reframing genocide as security policy, mass civilian destruction as pragmatism, and Palestinian life as expendable.

In another post about South Africa revoking visas for Palestinians accused of misuse, commenters mocked Pretoria’s pro-Palestinian stance using religious contempt and whataboutism. This rhetorical maneuver — deflection instead of accountability — is a familiar companion to atrocity. It allows genocide to be minimized, relativized or dismissed altogether.

These accounts are not spontaneous. They are connected to The Peace Factory, founded by Ronny Edry, an Israeli graphic designer celebrated in Western media for his 2012 viral image declaring, “Iranians, we will never bomb your country.” Edry has since presented his work at TED, MIT and other international forums, promoting a vision of peace built through people-to-people messaging rather than politics.

READ: Why Indonesia’s two-state stance works in Israel’s favour

But peace without truth is not peace. It is propaganda.

Campaigns like The Peace Factory deliberately evacuate power from the conversation. They erase occupation, apartheid and now genocide, replacing them with abstract appeals to empathy and mutual understanding. They ask the colonized to affirm the humanity of the colonizer while remaining silent about systems of domination and mass killing. In the context of Palestine, this is not naïveté. It is ideological laundering.

The danger is not that @israellovesindonesia will suddenly convince Indonesians to abandon Palestine. The danger is that normalization advances quietly and persistently, wrapped in the language of pragmatism, until genocide becomes background noise and outrage is trained to fade. Occupation is not a side issue. Apartheid is not an inconvenience. Genocide is not a policy disagreement to be managed away.

Indonesia’s position on Palestine is not incidental. It is rooted in the country’s founding identity. The Indonesian Constitution explicitly rejects colonialism in all its forms — a principle forged through Indonesia’s own experience of dispossession and struggle. To normalize relations with Israel while Palestinians endure occupation, apartheid and genocide would not be realism. It would be a moral collapse.

Peace cannot be built on curated social media feeds while Palestine lies in ruins. Friendship cannot be forged by demanding silence in the face of genocide. And normalization does not become ethical simply because it arrives wrapped in the language of love. Indonesia must resist this soft-power offensive — not because it is loud, but because it is patient, disciplined and designed to make injustice, even genocide, feel ordinary.

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

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License