Half a world away, Gaza is a burning topic for Southeast Asia’s domestic politics
The Oct. 7 massacre and the resulting Israel-Hamas conflict have powerful resonance in a region often divided by faith, with people — and governments — treading carefully
FOREIGN POLICY — In Indonesia, a presidential candidate and the foreign minister addressed hundreds of thousands of protestors. In Malaysia, the prime minister, draped in a Palestinian keffiyeh, led his own rally describing the situation as “insanity” and “the height of barbarism.” In Singapore, the government has simply banned displaying either side’s flag.
Though half a world away, the Hamas-led massacre of October 7 and the resulting war in Gaza are highly resonant in Southeast Asia. On that day, thousands of terrorists brutally murdered 1,200 people in southern Israel with stunning cruelty and depravity, and kidnapped 240 more to the Gaza Strip, leading Israel to declare war on Hamas and vow to remove it from power in the Strip.
In Thailand and the Philippines, sympathy for Gazan civilians caught in the fighting competes with anger over the many Thai and Filipino citizens working in Israel who were killed or kidnapped by Hamas terrorists. And in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the governments have issued carefully neutral statements — even as memories of the countries’ own past experiences of bombing stir.
Roughly 42 percent of Southeast Asia’s population is Muslim — and that’s played a key role in the region’s reaction to the Israel-Hamas war. Three broad responses have emerged: Muslim-majority democracies are uncompromisingly critical of Israel, quasi-democracies and democracies with substantial Muslim minorities adopt a more neutral position, and those outright dictatorships with few Muslim citizens are trying to ignore the conflict as much as they can.
The Muslim-majority states of Malaysia and Indonesia are unsurprisingly the most fervently pro-Palestinian voices in the region. Both remain among the few countries that have never recognized Israel diplomatically, and the Palestinian cause has long been publicly popular in both countries, used by politicians to burnish their credentials. In the wake of the Abraham Accords, some Israeli diplomats raised the hope that normalization of relations with Indonesia and Malaysia might follow. But the hope was always a thin one, despite quiet internal discussions by the Indonesian government.
Both countries have grown more pious in recent decades — with the issue of the Palestinians proving an important rallying point for Islamic political movements. Outside of Iran, no Muslim leader has taken a harder line on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who has personally addressed rallies and loudly voiced support for not just Palestinians but also Hamas. Anwar took a call with Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political bureau, on October 17, and has also resolutely opposed US efforts to ramp up sanctions against Hamas.
None of this is surprising. Ibrahim entered Malaysian politics as a student Islamic activist. His patron (and later rival), former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, frequently castigated Israel and its Western supporters and vociferously supported the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
Often this veered into antisemitism, with Mahathir accusing Jews of controlling the global media and undermining Malaysia’s economy. Popular opinion today remains virulently antisemitic in Malaysia. For Anwar, who leads a coalition supported mainly by ethnic minorities and is struggling to retain support from the Malay Muslim majority, leaning into the Palestinian issue is a no-brainer.
Yet, the stridency of this support has sometimes placed non-Muslim ethnic minorities in difficult positions, said James Chin, director of the Asia Institute at the University of Tasmania. This is not due to a lack of pro-Palestinian sympathies; ethnic minority politicians have resolutely displayed support for Palestinians. But a proposed Palestine Solidarity Week in schools stirred controversy as pictures of Malaysian schoolchildren apparently dressed as Hamas fighters, complete with toy guns, emerged.
“The thing that people will worry about is that Solidarity Week will end up as sort of glorifying Hamas,” Chin said. “People worry about the radicalization.” But minority groups’ concerns have put them in the crosshairs of Islamists, who question where the groups’ sympathies lie.
It is exactly this sort of division that Indonesia — which has numerous non-Muslim minorities — is keen to avoid. While Indonesian President Joko Widodo has adopted a lower-key approach than Anwar, public opinion is still universally condemnatory toward Israel. Much attention has focused on the bombing of the Indonesia Hospital in Gaza, which was built with donations from Indonesia.
But the way the conflict is framed has changed in important ways. For decades, the secular-nationalist forces that dominated Indonesian politics framed the conflict in anti-imperialist terms, in the same way the USSR did when it backed Egypt and other Arab states. Overly Islamic, let alone Islamist, politics were seen as a threat to national unity. Islamic understandings of Israel-Palestine only gained traction following the end the Suharto dictatorship in 1998, according to Broto Wardoyo, a Middle East expert at the University of Indonesia.
The older view remains influential. In April, Gus Yahya, the executive board chair of Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia’s largest Islamic organization, argued that the Israel-Palestinian conflict was a humanitarian issue, not a religious war. Since the October 7 onslaught, the organization has issued statements calling on people not to incite hostility on religious grounds. Clashes on the island of Sulawesi between Islamist groups and an apparently pro-Israeli local evangelical Christian group sparked acute concerns and a swift official response to tamp down tension.
Yet, there is undeniably a religious tinge to much of the public response. The massive rally in Jakarta, the capital, was formally interfaith. However, with much of the crowd draped in Islamic garb, the religious overtones were hard to miss. Other protests have also been orchestrated by more hardline religious groups, which in 2017 coordinated huge rallies against a Christian, Chinese governor accused of blasphemy. On October 31, when Indonesia’s counterterrorism force arrested 59 militants allegedly planning to attack police stations, a taskforce spokesman warned that pro-Palestinian protests and fundraising “raise passions to commit terrorist acts.”
Surprisingly, Indonesia’s position and concerns are not so far from those of its neighbor Singapore. Unlike Indonesia, Singapore, which has a majority ethnic Chinese population, has long entertained strong relations with Israel — and even a sneaking sense of solidarity as small, ethnically distinct states in potentially hostile neighborhoods. And the government’s ban on displaying Palestinian or Israeli flags sets it far apart from Indonesian politicians’ tendency to drape themselves in the former.
But managing Singapore’s diversity has also always been a key concern. Malay Muslims make up a substantial portion of Singapore’s citizenry and a huge migrant population only adds to the mix. Relations with the country’s Muslim majority neighbors are likewise important. Leading politicians have also expressed worries that Singapore might face increased terror threats due to its close relationship with Israel.
On November 6, Singapore’s parliament took the unusual step of passing a motion on the Israel-Hamas conflict, symbolically presented by Malay, Indian, and Chinese members of parliament (one from each ethnic group) from the ruling People’s Action Party. Stressing international law, the motion emphasized both Israel’s right to self-defense and the need for Israel to be proportional in its response; it also called for access to humanitarian aid and for Singaporeans not to be divided by foreign political events.
Indeed, the rising death toll in Gaza and videos of Israeli bombing on social media appears to be moving public opinion even in traditionally pro-Israeli groups. “There is a domestic reaction, and it cuts across all races and all religions,” said Michelle Teo, executive director of the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore. “Still, maybe that’s not a bad thing for us to see in Singapore, because it means people really see themselves as Singaporeans no matter what religion they are.”
Worries about internal divisions are also present in Thailand and the Philippines. Both countries have their own Muslim minorities and, unlike Singapore, a history of separatist Islamic terrorism perpetrated by local citizens.
In the Philippines, things are at a sensitive point, said Greg Poling, director of the Southeast Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The peace process in the island of Mindanao’s Bangsomoro region, where the Moro Muslim people live, has proved successful but is still ongoing; the first local elections since the area was granted special autonomy in 2018 were held just last year. “Things went reasonably well,” Poling said of the 2022 elections. “But the last thing [the government] want[s] to see is any sign that the relatively small number of Moros who still remain disaffected are getting new public sympathy.”
Despite this, the Philippines was the only Southeast Asian nation to abstain on the recent UN resolution calling for an Israel-Hamas ceasefire. The move was widely interpreted as tied to the Philippines’ status as a close ally of the United States, a relationship that the Philippine government is strengthening in response to Chinese pressure. So far, the reaction has been muted, with only a small protest in Manila, the capital, against the government’s stance.
Domestic attention is mostly directed toward the Filipino foreign workers caught up in the violence. Early reporting in the Philippines focused on four Filipinos who were killed, and one believed to have been taken hostage, when Hamas attacked Israel. Now, coverage has shifted to the evacuation of the small number of Filipinos who are residents of Gaza — complicating the narrative.
Thailand has suffered even more sharply than the Philippines in this regard. Thirty-four Thai citizens were killed and 24 were taken hostage during Hamas’s onslaught on Israel; many were migrant agricultural workers. All have since been freed, with figures from Thailand’s Muslim minority playing a key role in the negotiations. In keeping with these efforts, the Thai government has mainly taken a carefully neutral stance on the conflict, reversing on early comments by Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin that condemned Hamas’s October 7 massacre without the usual expressions of sympathy for Palestinians.
Public opinion seems less neutral, however. There have been small pro-Palestinian protests domestically. Others, outraged by the deaths, have taken a pro-Israel line — which has sometimes translated into Islamophobic attacks on the few Palestinian voices in the country, which come from the Muslim minorities.
Last in the region come Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. With few geopolitical stakes in wars in the Middle East and — barring Cambodia — no major Muslim minorities to speak of, these countries have mainly issued measured diplomatic statements calling for a ceasefire and done little else. Public opinion is also hard to read, with the dictatorships that govern these countries unsurprisingly not allowing much public protest.
Yet, these countries’ own violent pasts may be coloring popular perception of the situation. In Vietnam, at least, “there’s quite a bit of empathy for what the people in Gaza are undergoing referencing, especially among older people, their own experience of bombing,” said Murray Hiebert, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But that was not a political statement, as much as a humanitarian one.” This has even crept into statements by Vietnamese diplomats, who have invoked their country’s own past in condemning attacks on civilians and civil infrastructure.
Regardless of their exact response, as Israel’s assault on Gaza continues in its bid to remove the terror threat and free its hostages, even countries half a world away can’t quite close their eyes.
The writer is a freelance journalist covering Indonesia and other stories from around Southeast Asia.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
