The world is restless. Wars continue. Climate disasters worsen. Inequality deepens. Trust in international institutions is eroding. The UN, once envisioned as a guardian of global peace, now struggles even to hold the attention of its member states. 

Prabowo has a chance to deliver a speech that will be remembered. But people, both at home and abroad, are tired of propaganda, bombast and hollow promises. What they long for is honesty. Not perfection. Not posturing. Just the truth.

Indonesia was never meant to be a minor player in the moral imagination of the world. From the Bandung Conference in 1955 to President Sukarno’s powerful “To Build the World Anew” speech at the UN in 1960, Indonesia once spoke for the colonized, the oppressed and the silenced. Sukarno called for the dismantling of colonialism, the end of arrogance and the creation of a just and equal world. For decades, that moral voice has faded. But today, as the annihilation of the Palestinian people continues, those echoes return with urgency.

The crisis in Gaza is not just another war, and not merely a conflict between two sides. It is the systematic destruction of a people. To call this anything less is to participate in the lie.

At the UN General Assembly, Prabowo must call it what it is. Diplomatic language has its place, but sometimes words must burn. This is one of those times. If Prabowo stands before the world and declares that Palestine is a test of our shared conscience, that what is happening is genocide and ethnic cleansing, he will cut through the fog of equivocation that so often dominates the stage.

He should insist that justice for Palestine is essential to lasting peace in the Middle East. He should call clearly and without hesitation for a real two-state solution: a fully sovereign and independent Palestine along the pre-1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a secure Israel living in peace and dignity beside it.