Singapore/Jakarta: A push for Australia to recognise a Palestinian state has been welcomed in Indonesia, whose president Joko Widodo is headed to Canberra in a fortnight for his first visit of the country in more than three years.
Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi, will meet with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in early July, returning the favour after the then newly minted Australian leader flew to Jakarta within days of Labor's election victory last year.
Bilateral and regional issues such as trade and investment and Australia's AUKUS submarines deal are expected to be in the spotlight as the two come face to face again.
But Widodo's visit also coincides with a renewed drive from within Labor to recognise Palestine - an issue of major importance to Muslim-majority Indonesia - with the Victorian wing of the party passing a motion at its state conference backing a formal acknowledgment in the current term of government.
Five years after the Morrison government announced Australia would declare West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and entertained shifting the Australian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, it is a development that would be warmly received by Australia's near neighbour.
Former Indonesian vice-president Jusuf Kalla, who was Widodo's deputy between 2014 and 2019, said on Monday an Australian decision to recognise Palestine as a state would be significant because "it will be followed by other countries".
"If Australia recognises Palestine just as the UN Resolution [which is] the two-state solution, it will become an important step to help making peace in the Middle East particularly between Israel and Palestine," said Kalla, who was also vice-president to Widodo's predecessor Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono between 2004 and 2009.
Australia's official position is that it supports a two-state solution involving Israel and a future Palestinian state that can co-exist peacefully.
Official recognition of Palestine risks infuriating Israel but would bring Australia into greater alignment not only with Indonesia, a long-time champion of the Palestinian cause, but with most of Asia as well as other close neighbours such as Papua New Guinea.
Indonesia was taken aback in October 2018 when prime minister Scott Morrison, in the lead-up to the Wentworth byelection, raised the prospect of a controversial relocation of the Australian embassy to Jerusalem in what would have mirrored then United States president Donald Trump's decision to move the American embassy to the holy city from Tel Aviv.
The shock forecast, which was made as Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki happened to be on an official visit to Jakarta, delayed the signing of Australia's free trade agreement with Indonesia.
While the proposed embassy shift was called off two months later, Morrison went ahead with recognising West Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
That decision followed Trump's declaration of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital but was reversed last year by the Albanese government, which must now grapple with whether to take the next step in acknowledging a Palestinian state.
John McCarthy, a former Australian ambassador to Indonesia, the US, Japan, Vietnam and Thailand and an ex-Australian high commissioner to India, said such a call would be met very positively in Jakarta.
"[To Indonesians] it would show enhanced Australian understanding of global south perspectives rather than placing overwhelming emphasis on the relationships with the US, the Quad and China and the mechanisms that are pertinent to those relationships," he said.
"It would be showing a broader Australian perspective than would have been suggested in the past few years."
Teuku Faizasyah, a spokesman for Indonesia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said it did not comment on political discourse in Australia.
"For Indonesia, [a] two-state solution is the only solution," he said.
Palestinian sovereignty is one of the few international issues that genuinely resonates with the average citizen in Indonesia, which does not have formal ties with Israel, and it carries great political weight as a result.
In March, Widodo's possible successor, Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo, publicly opposed the participation of an Israeli team at the FIFA Under-20 World Cup in Indonesia, as did Bali Governor Wayan Koster. The country was stripped of hosting rights by the sport's world governing body but Pranowo was just weeks later named as the ruling Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle's presidential candidate.
There are 139 UN member nations that recognise Palestine, with Mexico the latest to join that group.
Widodo was last in Australia in February 2020, when he addressed a joint sitting of the Australian Parliament, but Australia-Indonesia annual leaders' visits were put on hold during the pandemic.
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