Indonesia was right to walk out at the UNGA. One Palestine, not two states, is what should come next

On September 24, Indonesian diplomats walked out of the UN General Assembly hall in New York. They left their seats just as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rose to speak.

They were not alone. Diplomats from several other countries left too, crowding the exit doors. Netanyahu mocked them, telling anyone still planning to leave that they should do it now, before he began.

The next day, Indonesia’s Foreign Ministry explained why. The walkout, it said, was solidarity with the Palestinian people. It was also a protest against what Jakarta called crimes against humanity and violations of international law in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories.

That walkout deserves respect. Most diplomatic protest happens quietly, in written statements or closed meetings. A walkout is loud. It tells the world, on camera, that a government will not sit and listen politely to a leader wanted by the International Criminal Court, whose country stands accused of war crimes.

For Indonesia, home to the largest Muslim population on earth and a longtime backer of Palestinian independence, the walkout matched decades of stated policy. It cost nothing in trade or security. But it said something true, in public, at the moment it mattered.

One day before that walkout, on September 23, Foreign Minister Sugiono had stood at a different podium in the same building. There, he urged the world to speed up something called the “two-state solution”: the old idea that peace means building two separate countries, Israel and Palestine, side by side.

He pointed to last year’s New York Declaration and a Security Council resolution as proof of new momentum, and asked more countries to formally recognize a Palestinian state. At a meeting of Islamic countries, he also told fellow ministers that Palestinian independence remains their central concern.

He insisted that the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, must carry out its work properly. He called for protection of humanitarian workers in conflict zones, and demanded real action to protect the legal and historical status of the holy sites in Jerusalem.

All of this is well meant. None of it changes a basic fact: the two-state solution, as a plan, no longer describes anything that can happen on the ground.

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Two states require two things at minimum. Land that a Palestinian state can stand on, and a political partner in Israel willing to accept it. Neither exists anymore in workable form.

Israeli settlements now cut through the West Bank so thickly that mapmakers struggle to draw one connected Palestinian territory. Gaza, after two years of war, is a landscape of rubble and displaced families unsure where they will sleep next month, let alone how they would govern themselves next decade.

Plans such as the E1 settlement project, which Indonesia itself has rejected, are designed to cut East Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank. That closes the last realistic path to a connected Palestinian state. Inside Israel too, politics have moved further from partition, not closer to it.

Repeating “two-state solution” in speech after speech, without naming what has already destroyed its foundation, turns a serious policy into a comfortable slogan. It lets everyone sound responsible while nothing changes on the ground.

Three days after the walkout, on September 26, Sugiono returned to the same hall for Indonesia’s national statement. He declared that Palestine has become the sharpest test of whether international law still means anything at all.

He was right about the test. But passing it now means admitting the two-state map is gone, not repeating it. The land, the settlements, and the people of historic Palestine and Israel are already tangled into one territory under one system of control.

The honest answer that matches this reality is a single, unified state of Palestine, where Palestinians and Israelis hold equal citizenship and equal rights under one law. That is no longer a radical idea. It is simply a description of the ground as it already is.

Indonesia does not need to abandon its support for Palestinian freedom to say this. It needs new tools to match a new argument: steady pressure through the International Criminal Court, coordination with the states that have already recognized Palestine, and a clear public case for one state, instead of a slogan that describes nothing left to build.

The walkout showed Indonesian diplomats will act, not just talk, when conscience is tested in public. That same willingness should now turn toward Indonesia’s own diplomatic script.

Walking out of a hall takes courage for a moment. Walking away from a comfortable but outdated formula takes more courage. It also matters more.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.