It is a significant development because these four have been staunch supporters and defenders of Israel. Now, the only thing that stops Palestine from becoming a full UN member from its current observer status is the United States with its veto power.

Diplomatic pressures are piling up, with Israel and the United States increasingly isolated. Diplomacy may be slow, but it still can help change the situation on the ground. The UN is the place where the rest of the world can help Palestinians.

The gesture of the four countries would be more convincing if they also stopped supplying arms to Israel. This is all the more pertinent after an independent inquiry by the UN Human Rights Council declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

These four, along with most of the rest of the world, also need to go beyond recognition and even beyond peace, and work toward real freedom and sovereignty for the Palestinians.

First and foremost, pressure must be brought on Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza and the killings and harassment of Palestinians in the West Bank. We must use this momentum to push for a lasting solution that recognizes and guarantees the sovereignty of the two states, Israel and Palestine, coexisting side by side.

Each time we talk about the two-state solution, it is worth restating that the envisaged Palestinian state must be based on the 1967 border with Jerusalem as its capital, and any peace deal must include the right of return for displaced Palestinians.

These three nonnegotiable terms have become the main stumbling blocks, giving Israel the pretext to abandon talks and continue to grab more land and build settlements across the West Bank.

Now that the UN has put the two-state solution back on the front burner, we must put pressure on Israel to agree to these three terms. We are counting on Britain, France, Canada and Australia to lend their support if they are serious about following up on their decision to recognize Palestine.

US President Donald Trump, during his meeting in New York last week with leaders from selected Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries, including President Prabowo Subianto, said he was working on a peace plan to end the Gaza war. Any plan that does not include recognition of Palestinians’ inalienable rights, however, will likely fall short. Nevertheless, we should give Trump a fair hearing before making any further judgment about his peace plan.

All these developments, including the genocide in Gaza, vindicate Indonesia’s long-held policy of supporting the struggle for an independent Palestinian state, a policy that we have consistently applied since Indonesia’s first president Sukarno in the 1950s.

Unlike the current generation of leaders in Indonesia, Sukarno and his fellow freedom fighters experienced firsthand the horrors of living under colonialism and occupation. They knew that the fight for freedom must be carried out both on the ground and at the diplomatic level to garner international support.

President Prabowo alluded to this in his speech when he said: “We Indonesians know what it means to be denied justice and what it means to live in apartheid, to live in poverty, and to be denied equal opportunity. We also knew what solidarity can do.”

Now it is payback time.

Indonesia was among the first countries to recognize Palestine when it was declared in 1988. And Indonesia has stood its ground in not opening diplomatic ties with Israel until Palestinians gained an independent and sovereign homeland.

Indonesia must now continue with the campaign in the UN to end the war and push Israel and Palestine to reach a settlement once and for all. Like other nations around the world, Palestinians deserve peace, but they also deserve their freedom.