This week, at the 28th anniversary celebration of the National Awakening Party (PKB) in Jakarta, President Prabowo Subianto reached for a line he’s reached for many times before. Indonesia gets along with everyone, he said, but backing Palestinian independence is the one thing nobody can talk him out of.

The crowd ate it up. Crowds always do, when a leader hands them exactly the applause line they came for.

But this isn’t a one-off. It’s a habit. Prabowo has said some version of this line at nearly every opportunity for the past two years, and every time he says it, his government is somewhere in the middle of doing the opposite. That isn’t a slip. It’s a method.

Indonesians who actually care about Palestine, and in the world’s largest Muslim majority country that is most people, have every reason to feel lied to, over and over, by the same man, on the same subject. Not because the words are wrong.

Because Prabowo has learned that saying the righteous thing loudly enough buys him cover to do the shameful thing quietly, again and again, without anyone in Jakarta calling it what it is.

Because Prabowo has learned that saying the righteous thing loudly enough buys him cover to do the shameful thing quietly, again and again, without anyone in Jakarta calling it what it is.

Start with his devotion to a two-state solution, which he trots out every chance he gets, like a man reciting a line he’s stopped believing but hasn’t stopped repeating. It’s a strange thing to keep proposing as the answer when so many people watching Gaza closely, Palestinian organizers, human rights investigators, a growing body of serious scholarship, have stopped describing a border dispute between equals at all.

They describe it a a genocide: engineered starvation, mass civilian slaughter, hospitals and universities pounded into rubble. Calling for two states side by side, as if that........

© Middle East Monitor