President Prabowo Subianto’s public posture in New York last week — a vociferous condemnation of Israel’s strikes on Gaza from the United Nations podium, immediately followed by a private ceremony honoring Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates with Indonesia’s highest civilian award — crystallizes a contradiction that matters for diplomacy, human-rights advocacy, and corporate accountability.
Indonesia’s diplomatic identity has long been intertwined with the Palestinian cause. As a consistent vote in favor of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations and as the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, Jakarta’s rhetorical emphasis on Palestinian suffering is a central plank of its foreign-policy brand. At the same time President Prabowo’s office publicly framed his New York meetings — including the meeting where he awarded Bill Gates the Bintang Jasa Utama — as recognition of decades of philanthropic support for Indonesian health, agriculture and education programs. The presidential office and Indonesian press reported that Gates’ foundation has delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in direct assistance and catalyzed broader investments in public health and vaccine production in the country.
These two positions — principled speaker for Palestinian rights and host to a private award for a Western philanthropist closely linked to one of the globe’s largest tech firms — are not merely symbolic. They collide in precisely the arena where technology, warfare, and humanitarian risk converge: cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence.
Those investigations prompted an urgent external review at Microsoft. After internal and external scrutiny, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, Brad Smith, publicly confirmed the company had “ceased and disabled a set of services” to a unit within Israel’s Ministry of Defence that, according to the review, had used cloud storage and certain AI services in ways that violated Microsoft’s terms of service prohibiting mass civilian surveillance. The decision was limited and targeted — and Microsoft emphasized that much of its commercial and cybersecurity work in the region would continue.
At the same session of the U.N. General Assembly, President Prabowo publicly denounced the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza and expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people. That juxtaposition — a public denunciation of Israel’s conduct and a private celebration of a Western tech philanthropist with ties to Microsoft — is precisely the contradiction noted by critics and observers following the New York event. The argument advanced by civil-society commentators is simple: praising philanthropic investments while honoring a principal associated with a corporation alleged to have enabled surveillance and targeting abroad sends mixed messages about where Indonesia draws the line on accountability.
Indonesia can reconcile principle and pragmatism by using its diplomatic weight to insist on transparency, auditability, and enforceable human-rights safeguards from technology partners — while preserving legitimate philanthropic cooperation that advances public welfare. Absent those changes, moments of symbolic solidarity at the U.N. will continue to ring hollow when set beside private ceremonies that confer prestige on actors linked to contested corporate practices. The moral test in New York was not simply a matter of ceremony; it was a test of whether principle could be turned into policy. The evidence collected by investigative reporting, the employee activism inside Microsoft, and Microsoft’s partial enforcement all show that the underlying problem is real, systemic and solvable — provided states, corporations and civil society agree to make transparency and accountability the price of partnership.
Source: Countercurrents Standing with Palestine, honoring Microsoft: Prabowo’s contradiction in New York | Countercurrents
Background
Indonesia’s diplomatic identity has long been intertwined with the Palestinian cause. As a consistent vote in favor of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations and as the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, Jakarta’s rhetorical emphasis on Palestinian suffering is a central plank of its foreign-policy brand. At the same time President Prabowo’s office publicly framed his New York meetings — including the meeting where he awarded Bill Gates the Bintang Jasa Utama — as recognition of decades of philanthropic support for Indonesian health, agriculture and education programs. The presidential office and Indonesian press reported that Gates’ foundation has delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in direct assistance and catalyzed broader investments in public health and vaccine production in the country. These two positions — principled speaker for Palestinian rights and host to a private award for a Western philanthropist closely linked to one of the globe’s largest tech firms — are not merely symbolic. They collide in precisely the arena where technology, warfare, and humanitarian risk converge: cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence.
Overview of the allegations against Microsoft
What investigative reporting found
Independent investigative reporting in 2025 documented large-scale operational links between Israel’s military intelligence units and commercial cloud and AI platforms, most notably Microsoft Azure. The Guardian — working with +972 Magazine and Local Call — reported that Unit 8200, Israel’s elite signals-intelligence formation, had used bespoke Azure environments to ingest, transcribe, translate and index millions of Palestinian phone calls and associated metadata, building an archive of many terabytes of audio that could be queried at scale. That reporting alleged the cloud-backed system fed analytic pipelines later used in operational planning.Those investigations prompted an urgent external review at Microsoft. After internal and external scrutiny, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, Brad Smith, publicly confirmed the company had “ceased and disabled a set of services” to a unit within Israel’s Ministry of Defence that, according to the review, had used cloud storage and certain AI services in ways that violated Microsoft’s terms of service prohibiting mass civilian surveillance. The decision was limited and targeted — and Microsoft emphasized that much of its commercial and cybersecurity work in the region would continue.
The technical allegations in plain language
- Investigators reported bespoke Azure partitions in European datacenters where intercepted call content was stored and indexed for machine-assisted analysis.
- AI-driven tools reportedly produced risk scores and “lists” of persons of interest, dramatically accelerating the speed and scale of target generation.
- Sources inside Israeli intelligence described systems — given names like “Lavender” and “The Gospel” in reporting — that combined translation, transcription, linkage analysis and behavioral features to nominate targets for arrest or strike consideration.
Multiple independent outlets corroborated the broad picture
This reporting was not confined to a single outlet. The Guardian’s investigation was subsequently covered, corroborated and expanded by major international outlets — including Al Jazeera, Reuters and the Associated Press — which described Microsoft’s internal review, the company’s operational response, and the broader employee unrest sparked by these revelations. Those outlets all confirm that Microsoft restricted specific services for particular Ministry of Defence subscriptions after finding evidence that supported elements of the investigations.Microsoft, employees and the activism inside the company
Worker-led protests and corporate discipline
The allegations triggered a wave of employee activism inside Microsoft. Staff and allied activists staged demonstrations at Microsoft campuses, hosted encampments, disrupted events — including a high-profile interruption at the company’s 50th-anniversary celebration — and for a time established protest occupations. Some actions culminated in arrests and firings. Four employees were terminated after an on-site sit-in at an executive office in late August 2025; other employees who protested publicly were also disciplined. Activist groups such as “No Azure for Apartheid” organized these campaigns and pushed demands for Microsoft to cease all forms of technical support to the Israeli military. Microsoft said the firings followed “serious breaches of company policies” and characterized some of the actions as safety risks.Corporate responses and limits of visibility
Microsoft has emphasized two core points in its public narrative: 1) its terms prohibit technology use for mass surveillance of civilians, and 2) it faces practical visibility limits where customers operate sovereign or customer-managed environments. The company commissioned an external review with outside counsel and technical advisers, and it publicly signalled that some services would be disabled where the evidence showed misuse. That sequence — investigative reporting, employee pressure, corporate review, partial suspension — marks an important but partial response. Critics and activists say the steps are limited and reactive; Microsoft counters that enforcement must be evidence-based and that wholesale termination of longstanding security contracts raises national-security and continuity concerns.The Prabowo-Gates encounter: facts and optics
President Prabowo met Bill Gates in New York on September 23, 2025, on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly and awarded Gates the Bintang Jasa Utama in recognition of long-standing philanthropic support to Indonesian health, vaccine and agricultural projects. Indonesian official communications and multiple news agencies documented the meeting and the award, noting estimates — cited by Indonesian officials — of hundreds of millions of dollars in direct support and several billion dollars in broader impact since the Gates Foundation began operating in Indonesia.At the same session of the U.N. General Assembly, President Prabowo publicly denounced the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza and expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people. That juxtaposition — a public denunciation of Israel’s conduct and a private celebration of a Western tech philanthropist with ties to Microsoft — is precisely the contradiction noted by critics and observers following the New York event. The argument advanced by civil-society commentators is simple: praising philanthropic investments while honoring a principal associated with a corporation alleged to have enabled surveillance and targeting abroad sends mixed messages about where Indonesia draws the line on accountability.
Critical analysis: why the contradiction matters
1) Principle vs. pragmatism — the diplomatic and moral tension
A state’s foreign-policy credibility is partly performative: speeches, votes, and gestures signal commitment. Indonesia’s rhetorical leadership on Palestine has been consistent; the optics of awarding a decoration to a figure linked with a firm that has acknowledged problematic ties to military surveillance undermines that perceived leadership. The decision to honor Bill Gates is defensible on grounds of philanthropy and public-health impact. But honoring philanthropic impact while failing to address corporate complicity — or at least to raise those concerns publicly in parallel — creates a perception of selective moral accounting.2) Philanthropy does not erase accountability
The Gates Foundation’s contributions to vaccines, public-health research and technology transfer in Indonesia are material and measurable. Philanthropy, however, is not a legal or ethical shield for corporate conduct. Public honors — especially those from a head of state — are political acts that confer prestige. When a national leader confers the highest civilian medal on a figure associated with a firm under intense ethical scrutiny, the action elevates a private actor’s reputation at a moment when that actor’s corporate arm is alleged to have enabled harm. That reputational laundering is what critics call out — not denial of Gates’ philanthropic record, but concern that philanthropy has been allowed to crowd out accountability. Indonesian officials themselves cited the health benefits in explaining the award; that factual claim is publicly documented.3) Dual-use technology and the limits of vendor responsibility
The Microsoft case raises a structural problem shared by every hyperscaler: cloud and AI platforms are dual-use by design. The ability to store and analyze massive datasets is a legitimate public-good capability for healthcare, disaster response and scientific research — and the same tooling can be repurposed for intrusive mass surveillance. Cloud vendors’ contractual clauses and terms of service can ban abusive end uses, but enforcement and auditability are often weak when customers deploy services in sovereign-controlled or isolated environments. Microsoft’s partial enforcement — disabling a “set of services” for a single IMOD unit — demonstrates both that enforcement is possible and that it is operationally messy. The company’s move falls short of a systemic solution: it treats a symptom (specific misuse) rather than the systemic capacity gap (how to prevent or detect misuse at scale).4) Credibility and accountability are strategic assets
For Indonesia, credibility on Palestine is a strategic asset in regional diplomacy and in multilateral forums. When that credibility is called into question by a high-visibility act that seems inconsistent with rhetorical commitments, it creates vulnerabilities: opponents will cast Indonesian solidarity as selective, undermining Jakarta’s leverage in coalition-building for international pressure or humanitarian relief. The diplomatic calculus that treats philanthropic ties as politically sacrosanct at the expense of accountability is short-termist.Verifiable facts, contested claims and necessary caution
- Verifiable: Prabowo awarded Bill Gates the Bintang Jasa Utama at a New York event on September 23, 2025. That meeting and award are documented in Indonesian government releases and international press coverage.
- Verifiable: Investigative reporting from The Guardian (with +972 Magazine and Local Call) described bespoke Azure usage by Israeli intelligence; subsequent reporting and Microsoft’s own statements led the company to disable specific services tied to an IMOD subscription. These steps are documented by multiple outlets and Microsoft’s communications.
- Contested / partially verified: The precise causal link between Microsoft’s services and individual lethal operations (for example, attributing a specific strike to an Azure query) is difficult to prove publicly without independent forensic logs and tribunal-level evidence. Investigations rely on leaked documents, insider testimony and technical reconstructions; they compellingly show a troubling architecture, but many granular causal claims remain in the domain of credible journalistic reconstruction rather than court-adjudicated fact. Readers should treat highly specific attributions of particular killings to a single cloud service as subject to caution until forensic audits are published.
Policy and diplomatic options for Indonesia
If Jakarta is serious about aligning words and deeds on human rights, it has a menu of feasible, proportionate steps that preserve diplomatic engagement while insisting on higher standards:- Demand corporate transparency: require public disclosure of contracts, redacted where necessary for legitimate security reasons, for companies receiving government honors or engaged in government partnerships.
- Make honors conditional on corporate human-rights due diligence: when awarding national distinctions to international actors tied to firms operating in conflict zones, establish an internal review to assess reputational risks and public-consideration criteria.
- Button up official procurement and partnership clauses: require enforceable audit rights, independent human-rights impact assessments, and remedial clauses in public-private partnerships that involve foreign tech providers working on sensitive infrastructure.
- Use multilateral venues to push for cloud governance norms: press for international standards that regulate the sale of cloud and AI services to military/intelligence entities, or that create enforceable transparency and audit frameworks for hyperscalers.
- Support independent forensic audits: advocate for third-party, independent forensic review mechanisms — neutral and technical — that can adjudicate disputed claims about misuse of cloud and AI systems.
- Protect worker whistleblowers and respect contestatory voices: encourage corporate frameworks that protect internal dissent and provide safe channels for staff to raise human-rights concerns without fear of retribution.
Risks and trade-offs
- Political blowback: Conditioning honors or explicitly querying philanthropic recipients about corporate ties will generate diplomatic tension with donor governments and private foundations; Jakarta must weigh short-term frictions against long-term credibility.
- Economic calculus: Indonesia benefits from foreign health investments and capacity building. Overly punitive measures risk slowing those flows; policy must therefore be surgical — demanding transparency and enforceable safeguards rather than reflexive exclusion.
- Technical limits: Forensic verification of alleged misuse often requires access to classified logs or to provider telemetry that vendors resist disclosing. Therefore, reforms must be practical, building auditability into procurement and contracting processes ahead of crises.
Conclusion
The Prabowo-Gates episode in New York is more than a headline about optics; it is a case study in modern geopolitical friction where philanthropy, technology, and human rights intersect. Praising health and education work is merited. But bestowing state honors without simultaneously interrogating the corporate arrangements that may enable harm undermines the credibility of diplomatic moral claims.Indonesia can reconcile principle and pragmatism by using its diplomatic weight to insist on transparency, auditability, and enforceable human-rights safeguards from technology partners — while preserving legitimate philanthropic cooperation that advances public welfare. Absent those changes, moments of symbolic solidarity at the U.N. will continue to ring hollow when set beside private ceremonies that confer prestige on actors linked to contested corporate practices. The moral test in New York was not simply a matter of ceremony; it was a test of whether principle could be turned into policy. The evidence collected by investigative reporting, the employee activism inside Microsoft, and Microsoft’s partial enforcement all show that the underlying problem is real, systemic and solvable — provided states, corporations and civil society agree to make transparency and accountability the price of partnership.
Source: Countercurrents Standing with Palestine, honoring Microsoft: Prabowo’s contradiction in New York | Countercurrents
