Madrid hosted an unusual spectacle this week as ministers convened to discuss the rebuilding of Palestinian culture — its cinema, archives, and museums — under the formal banner of the “International Conference on the Reconstruction of Cultural Sector in Palestine.”
Indonesia’s Culture Minister, Fadli Zon, returned home bearing pledges: a Palestinian museum wing at Taman Mini in Jakarta, a cultural center in Jerusalem, and a series of literary translations into Bahasa Indonesia. The gestures were warm and highly photogenic.
Yet they remain fundamentally misplaced while the central issue is conveniently ignored.
What exactly is the point of restoring a people’s culture if you have no intention of restoring their country?
Culture is not a museum exhibit. It is not embroidery beneath glass, awaiting admiration from a foreign minister on a conference sideline. It is what a people create while they live.
And Palestinians currently live under siege, bombardment, and a two-year campaign that the world’s foremost human rights institutions — along with a growing number of Israel’s own former security officials — have ceased to euphemize and now plainly name: genocide.
You do not answer genocide with a translation grant. You do not answer the flattening of a people’s universities, hospitals, and archives with a promise to co-produce a film.
Minister Zon says he wants Indonesians to know Palestine “not only through conflict, but through civilization, art, tradition.” That statement should give him pause. It frames the extermination of a people as an unfortunate distraction from cultural content, when the extermination is the story — and everything being cataloged is being erased alongside the bodies.
Consider what Jakarta actually proposed. A wing in an amusement park, dedicated to “the Palestinian struggle” — struggle rendered as diorama, something to walk past en route to the food court.
A cultural center proposed for Jerusalem, a city whose disputed sovereignty lies at the heart of this catastrophe, as if erecting a building there resolves anything rather than decorating the wound.
Co-produced films. Translated poems. A memorandum of understanding, and now a memorandum to follow the memorandum.
None of it reopens a single university flattened in Gaza. None of it grants a filmmaker in Ramallah a permit to enter his own capital. None of it feeds a single child.
This is not solidarity. It is a government choosing the cheapest, safest, most exportable way to appear concerned while demanding nothing of itself.
Indonesia knows better. This is no naive state encountering the issue for the first time. It has refused to open an embassy in Israel since independence. It votes for Palestinian statehood at the UN reflexively, ritually, as it has since Bandung in 1955.
Its diplomats read the same reports as everyone else — documenting mass starvation as a weapon, hospitals reduced to rubble with patients inside, entire families erased in single strikes, and a death toll revised upward because the counting is interrupted by more killing.
Knowing this and responding with a museum wing is no oversight. It is a choice: the cost-free version of solidarity — no sanctions, no severed trade, no real confrontation, no risk to an export contract — over the version that might matter to someone in the rubble.
Here is the truth Indonesia’s cultural diplomacy is built to avoid saying out loud: there is no “restoring” a people’s heritage while that people has no state left to hold it in.
You cannot preserve a house’s furniture while the house is condemned, bulldozed, and built over by another’s settlers. Sooner or later one must ask what the archived furniture is for, if no home stands to receive it — if the inheritors are killed faster than their poems are translated.
If Indonesia’s decades of rhetoric mean anything, the honest conclusion is not a two-state compromise dead in practice for years and kept alive to excuse inaction while the map shrinks.
It is one state across historic Palestine — one people, one vote, one government accountable to all who live there, with no ethnic hierarchy governing water, permits, or existence.
That is harder to say in Madrid than “we’re funding a museum.” It carries real cost: recognition, ICJ prosecution, meaningful sanctions, an arms embargo, rupture with a state committing mass atrocities.
Indonesia has said none of it. It offered a museum.
That is the safest imitation of solidarity — visible, warm, cost-free, and almost entirely irrelevant to those it claims to honour. Build the wing if must be built. But never call it justice. It is not.