Monuments without a country: Indonesia’s empty gesture to Palestine

Madrid played host this week to a strange piece of theater. Ministers gathered to talk about rebuilding Palestinian culture — its cinema, its archives, its museums — at a conference bearing the bloodless title “International Conference on the Reconstruction of Cultural Sector in Palestine.” Indonesia’s culture minister, Fadli Zon, came home with pledges: a Palestinian museum wing at Taman Mini in Jakarta, a cultural center in Jerusalem, a slate of literary translations into Bahasa Indonesia. All very warm. All very photogenic. And all, frankly, beside the point while the thing that actually matters goes conveniently unmentioned. What exactly is the point of restoring a people’s culture if you have no intention of restoring their country? Culture is not a museum […]