On Saturday, President Prabowo Subianto paused mid-speech at Pondok Modern Darussalam Gontor in Ponorogo, East Java, wiped his eyes with a small towel, and apologized to the audience. “I am sorry,” he said. “I just remembered our brothers and sisters in Palestine. They are being slaughtered, bombed, attacked again and again. And we seem powerless to help them.”
The event marked the 100th anniversary of one of Indonesia’s oldest Islamic boarding schools. Later, the Palestinian ambassador presented him with a keffiyeh, and Prabowo cried again, chanting “Free Palestine” several times, asserting that 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.
Prabowo still advocates a two-state solution — the decades-old idea of Israel and a Palestinian state coexisting peacefully, the official position of most governments for thirty years. But does anyone who matters still actually want it?
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, most no longer trust a plan that leaves their security and borders in others’ hands. Israel does not want it either. Israeli leaders have expanded settlements in the West Bank for years, cutting Palestinian land into fragments too small and scattered to ever form a viable 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 thirty 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 fragments offered so far. 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 fighting quiets. A board made mostly of foreign powers, without Palestinians in control of their own land, 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 opposing 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 examine his own country’s companies, mines, and energy concessions and ask: are we still doing business with those responsible for Gaza?
Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, with real economic weight and moral standing on this issue. It does not officially recognize 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.
