"Indonesia's Red Thread of Diplomacy: Prabowo Settles a Historical Debt to Palestine"
Applause, murmurs, and a few stunned faces filled the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, September 23, 2025. From the grand podium, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto delivered a speech that quickly became a global talking point. It was not only his blunt and straightforward style that caught attention, but the political message he carried: Indonesia would recognize Israel---if, and only if, Israel first recognized Palestine as a sovereign state.
The sentence was brief, but its implications were immense. The world reacted with curiosity, hope, and skepticism. For some, Indonesia's proposal sounded radical. For others, it was a much-needed opening in a deadlocked conflict. To understand the weight of this step, however, one must look back at Indonesia's long, unwavering commitment to the Palestinian cause.
Since the Palestinian issue entered the UN agenda in 1948, Indonesia has consistently stood on the same side. When Palestine declared independence in 1988, Jakarta offered full support. Indonesia even co-sponsored resolutions condemning Israel. This was never a matter of following international trends; it was the moral extension of Indonesia's own anti-colonial struggle. Supporting Palestine is not just foreign policy. It is a historical debt inherited across generations.
Firm Value Diplomacy
The roots of this stance are deep. In 1960, President Soekarno stood at the same UN forum with his landmark speech To Build the World Anew. He called for a just world, free from colonialism and grounded in moral values. That spirit echoed earlier in the 1955 Bandung Conference, which forged solidarity among newly independent nations. No surprise then, that in 2023 UNESCO granted Soekarno's UN speech the Memory of the World status, recognizing it as a universal philosophical document, not merely an archival text.
What Prabowo voiced six decades later was a continuation of that tradition, but with a pragmatic twist. He did not stop at denouncing colonialism; he offered a clear formula of reciprocity: tit for tat. If Israel recognizes Palestine, Indonesia will recognize Israel. In that simple exchange, value-based diplomacy intersects with hard political reality.
Indonesia also went further than words. Prabowo pledged to deploy up to 20,000 peacekeepers in Gaza, underscoring that diplomacy should not remain trapped in negotiation halls but extend to the field as a humanitarian duty. Here, Indonesia's internationalism is translated into humanity, while its tradition of consensus-building is projected onto multilateralism at the UN.
In this sense, Prabowo's speech was more than political theater. It was the manifestation of Pancasila---the Indonesian state philosophy---in global diplomacy. From Soekarno to Prabowo, the red thread of Indonesian foreign policy remains the same: siding with humanity, though with evolving strategies.
Challenges and New Hopes
