Source: Asia Pacific Report
COMMENTARY: By Dr Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat
Last Saturday, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto was in the middle of a speech when he stopped talking, wiped his eyes with a small towel, and apologised to the crowd.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I just remembered our brothers and sisters in Palestine. They are being slaughtered, they are bombed, they are attacked again and again. And we seem powerless to help them.”
He was speaking at Pondok Modern Darussalam Gontor in Ponorogo, East Java, one of Indonesia’s oldest Islamic boarding schools, marking its 100th anniversary.
Later, the Palestinian ambassador gave him a keffiyeh, the scarf that symbolises Palestine. Prabowo cried again, then chanted “Free Palestine” several times, saying a strong Indonesia can help its oppressed “brothers and sisters.”
It was an emotional moment. But Palestinians in Gaza do not need tears from a school celebration in East Java. They need action.
Start with what Prabowo still seems to believe should happen to Palestine: a two-state solution, the old idea that Israel and a Palestinian state can exist side by side in peace, and the official position of most governments for 30 years.
But does anyone who matters still actually want it?
No longer trust a plan
Palestinians do not, not in the form it has taken for decades. After two years of bombing that flattened Gaza and killed tens of thousands of people, most no longer trust a plan that leaves their security and borders in the hands of others.
Israel does not want it either. Israeli leaders have expanded settlements in the West Bank for years, cutting Palestinian land into pieces too small and scattered to ever become a real state.
So, when a leader cries and repeats “two-state solution,” we should ask him plainly: after everything the world has watched in Gaza, do you still believe Israel wants peace?
A United Nations commission of inquiry has documented what it calls genocide there. Tears mean little if the plan behind them is the same formula that failed for 30 years.
If the two-state solution is dead, silence is not the answer. A real solution could mean equal rights for everyone between the river and the sea, in one state. It could mean a Palestinian state with real borders, a real army, and control of its own resources, not the walled-off pieces offered so far.
Prabowo Serukan “Free Palestine” dan Dikalungi Keffiyeh oleh Dubes Palestina
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— Kompas.com (@kompascom) September 19, 2026
What matters most is who decides. A solution designed for Palestinians in a boardroom, not with them at the table, is not a solution.
That is also the problem with the “Board of Peace,” set up by world leaders to oversee Gaza’s future once the fighting quietens down. A board made mostly of foreign powers, without Palestinians in control of their own land.
This is not liberation
It is not liberation, but another arrangement where outsiders decide the fate of a people who have already had enough decisions made for them. Indonesia has a proud history of standing against colonialism, and supporting this goes against everything it claims to believe.
But the deepest problem is closer to home. While Prabowo cries in public for Palestine, Israeli companies continue quiet business on Indonesian soil. Ormat Technologies, an Israeli-founded energy company, won a geothermal concession in Halmahera, North Maluku, earlier this year, and is now developing it.
If the President is serious, he needs to look at his own country’s companies, mines and energy concessions, and ask: are we still doing business with the people responsible for Gaza?
Indonesia is the largest Muslim majority country in the world, with real economic weight and moral standing on this issue. It does not officially recognise Israel and has long supported Palestine at the UN.
That gives Prabowo something rare among world leaders: the credibility to actually do something, not just say something.
A scarf wiped across wet eyes will be forgotten by next week. A serious investigation into which Indonesian entities still profit from ties with Israel, followed by real consequences, would not be.
Neither would it be forgotten if Prabowo used Indonesia’s voice to push for a real solution, instead of recycling a peace process that has already failed.
Crying is human. Leadership is different. Palestinians have watched enough leaders cry for them while nothing changes.
If Prabowo wants his tears to mean something, he should turn them into policy: investigate the companies his own country still does business with, and back a future for Palestine that Palestinians actually choose.
- Indonesia also has a decolonisation issue since 1969 over its Melanesian provinces in the Papuan region — known as West Papua among Pacific nations.
Dr Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is the director of the Indonesia-MENA desk at the Centre for Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS) in Jakarta and a research affiliate at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. He spent more than a decade living and traveling across the Middle East. Republished from Middle East Monitor.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/21/prabowos-tears-and-cries-of-free-palestine-are-not-enough/