The "Jew" in the Imagination of Indonesian Muslims (original) (raw)

Abstract

Nowadays, one of the troubles of our globalized world is the open conflict between Israel and Palestine, which soaks up the world attentions like a maelstrom. More disturbing, conceivably the conflict has put the Muslims community vis-à-vis with other parties (Jews, Westerners, Christians, etc.). Thus, it affected Indonesia position in the upheaval in the form of Indonesian Muslims’ strong criticism toward Israel. As the largest Muslim population in the world, Indonesian position could not be easily undermined, though no diplomatic tie with Israel and significant Jewish community absent in Indonesia. The site of the struggle for Indonesian Muslim is in the signification of the ‘Jew’. The ‘Jew’ for some Indonesian Muslims negatively connoted for it is presumably always hostile to Islam. This thesis attempts to understand the negative construction through discourse analysis of the ‘Jew’ in the context of Israel-Palestine conflict and the emergence of Islam revivalism, which on both aspects coincide with the existing religious narrative of Jews. The discourse of Jews under scrutiny is in a Muslim media named Republika daily newspaper. From the discourse analysis conducted, some conclusions could be drawn: (1) the construction of the ‘Jew’ is no immediate connection with the factual Jews; (2) the hatred toward the ‘Jew’ (antisemitism) is reflected in the hatred toward the ‘Zionist’ (anti-Zionism), i.e. any element (domestic/abroad) considered hostile to Islam; (3) the struggle with the ‘Zionist’ reflected domestic struggle between this group with other Indonesian communities; (4) and the anti-Jewish sentiment reflected the resistance toward the massive global change and Western influence that concurred with the strong Islamic aspiration, which modeled the Islamic past glory. In this thesis, I argue that only specific groups of Muslims elaborate the discourse and took it as ‘the case to fight’. There are some suggestions to deal with such strong anti-Jewish atmosphere in Indonesia, i.e. (1) propose alternative reading of the ‘Jew’; (2) prevent the usage of ‘Jew’ construction in dealing with domestic problem; and, (3) having connection with the factual Jewish community.

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