History has a long memory in Jakarta. In 1955, as newly decolonised nations gathered in Bandung, Indonesia placed Palestine at the moral heart of its foreign policy, not as a slogan but as a principle: freedom is indivisible. 

Seven decades later, that inheritance has returned with force, as Indonesia steps into one of the most contested diplomatic experiments of the post-Gaza war era. The decision by President Prabowo Subianto to sign on to the Trump-led Board of Peace in Davos has reopened an old question with new urgency: how does a principled middle power remain true to its history while navigating a deeply asymmetrical global order?

This moment is urgent: renewed UN Security Council debate and OCHA’s latest situation reports documenting new winter casualties and mass displacement make Gaza’s humanitarian emergency acute even as Davos launched a parallel Board of Peace process.

Indonesia’s relationship with Palestine is not transactional. It predates statehood, alliances, and global institutions. Palestinian leaders supported Indonesian independence in the 1940s, and Indonesia has never recognised Israel. That moral clarity has translated into sustained diplomatic action: support for UN resolutions, leadership in the Non-Aligned Movement, and consistent advocacy for a two-state solution. Today, Indonesia remains the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy, home to more than 275 million people, and a country whose constitutional mandate explicitly commits it to global peace and social justice.

Against that backdrop, the Board of Peace arrives as both opportunity and provocation. Announced by US President Donald Trump at the World Economic Forum in January 2026, the Board claims to oversee Gaza’s ceasefire and reconstruction. Indonesia’s participation has been framed domestically as an attempt to shape outcomes from within, to ensure that Gaza’s future remains anchored in international law and Palestinian self-determination. The language is familiar, pragmatic, and rooted in Indonesia’s long-standing ‘free and active’ foreign policy tradition.

Yet the structure and symbolism of the Board raise profound unease. The official materials unveiled in Davos made almost no reference to Palestinians themselves. There was little acknowledgment of the scale of devastation: more than 70,000 Palestinians reported killed, around 95 per cent of Gaza’s population displaced, and critical infrastructure flattened, according to international agencies and regional reporting. UN teams on the ground report displaced families sleeping in flooded tents after winter storms, children suffering hypothermia and makeshift shelter sites ripped apart — images that a redevelopment brochure should never silence.

Instead, glossy plans spoke of ports, housing, and futuristic redevelopment, as though Gaza were an empty site rather than a traumatised society.

This dissonance matters. Reconstruction without justice risks becoming erasure. Development without political resolution risks entrenching conflict. Think tanks from the Middle East Institute to the International Crisis Group have long warned that post-conflict rebuilding detached from sovereignty only hardens grievances. Indonesia understands this instinctively. Its own history of anti-colonial struggle, and its successful peace process in Aceh in 2005 demonstrate that guns fall silent only when dignity is restored.

The Board’s governance model compounds the concern. It is chaired by President Trump himself, with membership by invitation and decision-making power heavily centralised. The Board’s architecture — a president-chaired ‘founding executive council’, membership by invitation and even a reported $1 billion ‘permanent seat’ contribution — is a literal operationalisation of privatised multilateralism: selective, pay-to-play, and structurally detached from UN universality. 

The recent rescinding of Canada’s invitation after public disagreement illustrates the fragility of dissent within this structure. Analysts in Asia and Europe have likened the Board to a privatised multilateralism, a club rather than an institution, with limited accountability and blurred alignment with the UN system. None of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, apart from the United States, has joined.

Most strikingly, Israel has a seat at the table while Palestinians do not. This asymmetry reverberates across the Muslim world. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s participation, despite ongoing international legal scrutiny over the Gaza war, contrasts sharply with the absence of any Palestinian authority or civil representation. For a country like Indonesia, whose legitimacy in this space rests on moral consistency, this imbalance is not a technical flaw but a strategic risk.

By lending its name to a board that sidelines Palestinian representation, Indonesia risks trading the moral authority it has cultivated for decades — and normalising a template of reconstruction that privileges investment over sovereignty.

And yet withdrawal is not cost-free either. Global power is rarely exercised in ideal forums. Indonesia’s calculation appears to be that absence cedes influence, while presence at least preserves the possibility of steering outcomes. That logic has precedent. As a major contributor to UN peacekeeping missions, Indonesia has repeatedly engaged imperfect systems to protect civilians and advance stability. Its defence forces, diplomats, and civil society have accumulated credibility as honest brokers, not enforcers.

The challenge now is to convert participation into leverage. That means insisting that any stabilisation force in Gaza operates strictly under UN mandates, with civilian protection at its core. It means refusing to legitimise reconstruction plans that bypass Palestinian consent or pre-empt final-status negotiations. It means, above all, keeping the two-state solution non-negotiable, not as rhetoric but as a measurable benchmark against which the Board’s actions are judged. 

Indonesia should press for a UN Security Council-mandated interim civilian administration with formal Palestinian representation, a measurable benchmark (Palestinian consent and representation in any governing body at ≥60%) and a convening coalition of OIC–ASEAN–AU states to monitor compliance.

Comparisons matter here. Other middle powers — Turkey, Egypt, Malaysia — face similar tensions, but Indonesia’s voice carries particular weight. It straddles the Global South and the G20, Islamic solidarity and democratic pluralism. When Indonesia speaks about Palestine, it does so not as a proxy, but as a country that has lived the consequences of denied sovereignty. That is why its choices resonate far beyond Southeast Asia.

Turkey, Egypt, Malaysia and Brazil face the same dilemma, and Jakarta’s choice will set a precedent: either middle powers collectively defend representative, UN-anchored reconstruction, or they quietly legitimise gated, investor-first rebuilds.

For the Global South and the wide constellation of middle powers, the lesson runs deeper and cuts closer to the bone. This moment is not merely about Indonesia, Gaza, or one controversial diplomatic forum; it is about whether emerging states can still bend the architecture of global politics toward justice without being absorbed by it. The age in which moral authority belonged exclusively to great powers has long passed, yet its habits linger. What is unfolding now is a quieter contest: between influence that is borrowed and influence that is earned.

Across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, countries that once stood on the margins now carry demographic weight, economic relevance, and diplomatic reach. Brazil, South Africa, Türkiye, Mexico, Egypt, Nigeria, Malaysia — each navigates the same uneasy terrain Indonesia now walks. Participation in new, imperfect forums offers access, visibility, and leverage, but also the risk of becoming ornamental, present but unheard. The true test for these states is not whether they are invited to the table, but whether they are willing to redraw the table when its design betrays the values it claims to serve.

Indonesia’s dilemma exposes a defining question for middle powers: can engagement coexist with resistance? History suggests it must. The Non-Aligned Movement was born not from abstention, but from active refusal to be subsumed. Bandung did not reject dialogue with power; it rejected the idea that power alone defines legitimacy. That spirit is urgently needed again, in an era when reconstruction plans are unveiled without reckoning, and peace is discussed in the language of investment rather than rights.

Gaza sharpens this challenge because it strips diplomacy of abstraction. Concrete can be poured quickly; freedom cannot. Infrastructure can be photographed; dignity cannot. For the Global South, whose own histories are etched with imposed development and deferred sovereignty, this distinction is not academic. It is a lived memory. Any process that treats Palestinian survival as a technical problem rather than a political injustice will resonate uncomfortably across post-colonial capitals that know how often “stability” has been used to excuse silence.

Middle powers are often told their role is to stabilise, to moderate, to soften the edges of great-power ambition. Yet moments like this demand something harder: the courage to disrupt. Credibility will not come from proximity to power, but from the willingness to risk exclusion when lines are crossed. Recalibration and even withdrawal are not failures of diplomacy; they are, at times, its highest expression.

What is at stake is the future character of global order itself. If emerging states allow new institutions to replicate old hierarchies under new names, the promise of a multipolar world will ring hollow. But if they insist — collectively, consistently — that peace without justice is unfinished, and reconstruction without representation is incomplete, then the centre of gravity in global diplomacy may yet shift.

Indonesia’s path will be watched not because it is perfect, but because it is familiar. Its choices mirror those confronting many others. In Gaza, the measure of leadership will not be the speed of rebuilding, nor the scale of investment, but whether the rebuilt future belongs to those who have endured its destruction. For the Global South and the world’s middle powers, that is not just a foreign policy question. It is a reckoning with history and a declaration of what kind of future is worth standing for.

A better future for Palestine cannot be engineered from boardrooms alone. It must be grounded in history, law, and human experience. Indonesia’s dilemma is the test of our time: will middle powers bend global order toward justice, or will they trade the moral capital of history for the hollow prestige of a seat at a costly, unaccountable table?

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