“Food unites us… not anymore!?” Indonesian pilgrims eating kosher and halal in Jerusalem

ABSTRACT

Eating good Asian food is important to Indonesians who travel in religious package tours to Jerusalem. Those Indonesians who travel to Jerusalem are mainly members of Indonesia’s Christian minority of around 26 million people. Only recently Jerusalem has also become a popular destination among the Muslim majority of Indonesia. Among Israelis and Palestinians who work in the tourism industry, Indonesians are known for their culinary preferences. They make sure that their customers will be satisfied with plain white rice and spicy Asian dishes. New demands for halal and kosher food challenge existing structures in the tourism sector in Jerusalem and reveal the shifting politics of eating religiously in Indonesia. Culinary controversies concern claims of a joint Indonesian culinary heritage in contrast to exclusively Muslim (and to some extent Christian) food and food spaces. Indonesians engage with global lines of conflict and bring their ideas of halal and kosher to tourist spaces in the Middle East. However, the question of taste lastly challenges the political narratives.

KEYWORDS:

• Pilgrimage
• tourism
• Israel/Palestine
• Indonesia
• Islam
• Christianity
• Pentecostalism
• Muslim-Christian relations
• halal
• food

Acknowledgments

The generosity and openness of numerous Jerusalemite travel agencies, tour guides, hotel and restaurant owners and of their Indonesian counterparts enabled me to explore the culinary complexities in guided religious package tours from Indonesia to Israel/Palestine. I am grateful to everyone who shared their point of view, experiences, meals, and travel spices with me. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the ISF Workshop on “Eating Religiously” at Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva and in a public lecture at Universitas Islam Negeri Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta. I thank all participants of these events for their useful feedback, especially Fran Markowitz and Nir Avieli, Bayu Mitra A. Kusuma and the food researchers of KUNCI Cultural Ctudies Center Yogyakarta, Khaerunnisa and Monika Swastyastu. Furthermore, I thank the two reviewers who provided very constructive feedback on the paper.

Work on this article was enabled through postdoctoral fellowships with the Center for the Study of Conversion at Ben-Gurion-University of the Negev and the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Social Sciences and Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Christian alignment with Israel is regionally distinctive. Among the people of Papua, for example, the Israeli flag is also a symbol of the independence movement (see Myrttinen 2015).

2. Halal certification was introduced in Malaysia in 1974 and in Indonesia in 1994 (Fischer 2012, 18).

3. Pancasila is the preamble of the Indonesian constitution, defining five guiding principles: Firstly, the belief in one God, followed by the principles of humanity, unity, democracy, and social justice. It uses the Indonesian expression “Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa” instead of the Jakarta Charta’s “Allah” in reference to the belief in “one God” and does not mention Islamic law.

4. According to the data by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, Indonesian tourist arrivals in 2014, 2015, 2016 ranged from 35,000 to 40,000 (see: http://www.cbs.gov.il/shnaton68/st23_05.pdf, accessed October 30, 2018).

5. On the growing presence of Pentecostal and Evangelical churches in Southeast Asia, see (Chong 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

Notes on contributors

Mirjam Lücking

Mirjam Lücking is a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests include pilgrimage and tourism, labor migration, and transnational connections between Indonesia and the Middle East.