Thursday Sunnah Fasting Reminder: From the Streets of Bandung to the Siege of Gaza
On September 1, 2025, armored trucks rolled into the streets of Jakarta, Bandung, and Yogyakarta. By the end of the weekend, at least 10 Indonesians were dead, more than 500 injured, and 20 still missing. Among the dead: 21-year-old Rheza Sandy Pratama in Yogyakarta, 19-year-old Iko Juliant Junior in Semarang, and 16-year-old Andika Lutfi Falah in Jakarta. All were students, killed after taking part in protests against corruption and lavish allowances of Indonesia’s lawmakers.
The political elites are now busy, not with accountability, but damage control. Political parties now put some of their MPs in the House of Representatives as “non-active” to diffuse public anger. But “non-active” is not a legal term; it certainly does not have any legal consequences. Those “non-active” MPs, who have insulted the public calling them “morons” (tolol) and complaining about Jakarta’s traffic and, instead of fixing them, demanded a housing allowance tenfold of people’s wages, are still entitled to get paid salary and allowances. What are these “non-active” status then? Paid holidays?
Some of these MPs even ran away abroad, saying that they are “afraid” to come home. Afraid of whom? Indonesians? Who they are supposed to serve?
Amidst Indonesia’s recession, the difficulty of finding jobs, and the weakening of our purchasing power, some Members of Parliament still go on leisurely “business trips” abroad. When they encounter Indonesian students overseas, they avoid them. Who are they serving? Why are they afraid? Do we look like irrational people to whom they cannot be held accountable, cannot be reasoned with? Do you know who else thought that way about Indonesians? The colonizers — the Dutch in the 1940s.
President Prabowo Subianto labeled demonstrators as “traitors,” conveniently using the term “terrorism,” and unleashed police and military repression across the country. Is it a coincidence, then, who else is conveniently using the “terrorism” label? It is Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. He stood before Netanyahu’s cabinet and declared that volunteers aboard the Sumud Global Flotilla should be designated “terrorists.”
Indonesia and Palestine are bound together here by a common thread: the weaponization of “terrorism” as a tool to silence dissent, criminalize solidarity, and grant the state a blank check for violence. In Jakarta, the “terrorist” label justifies batons, bullets, and armored patrols against students. In Tel Aviv, it justifies naval blockades, prison cells, and the starvation of an entire people.
Western human rights institutions, meanwhile, limit the horizon of critique. On September 2, Human Rights Watch’s Asia director Meenakshi Ganguly called Prabowo “irresponsible.” The UN’s Ravina Shamdasani urged “dialogue.” Amnesty Indonesia’s Usman Hamid demanded “democratic means.” These statements may appear principled, but they reduce structural violence to technical violations. They speak the language of “restraint” and “professionalism,” as if repression were simply a matter of bad training, rather than the logical outcome of militarized capitalism in Indonesia and settler colonialism in Palestine.
This contradiction cuts deepest in Indonesia. In 1955, at the Bandung Conference, newly independent nations of Asia and Africa gathered to reject colonial domination and assert the right of peoples to determine their future. Indonesia stood proudly at the forefront of that movement. The Bandung Spirit became a beacon for anti-colonial struggles — including Palestine’s. Yet seventy years later, Indonesia’s own rulers deploy colonial tactics against their citizens: tear gas in campuses, police raids on activists, armored vehicles in shopping malls. The state has become what it once condemned.
Palestine today is the naked edge of colonial violence. The siege of Gaza — starvation as warfare, mass imprisonment, aerial bombardment — is a continuation of the same imperial logic Bandung sought to overturn. The Sumud Global Flotilla, now sailing against Israel’s blockade, is more than a humanitarian mission. It is Bandung’s unfinished project: ordinary people refusing the categories of empire, breaking blockades with their own hands, and declaring that freedom in Gaza is inseparable from freedom in Jakarta.
We don’t want peace; we want justice.
We are told to wait, to calm down, to be “reasonable.” But history shows that justice has never been granted to those who waited politely. It has always been seized by those who refused to bow.
And so we say it clearly: we will not settle for a peace of submission. We demand justice — in the streets of Jakarta, in the refugee camps of Gaza, and everywhere empire insists that people must be silent.
This Thursday, as we fast, we refuse to forget. Each hunger pang binds us to Rheza, Iko, Andika — and to every Palestinian under siege. We hunger not for peace without justice, but for justice itself.
Written in preparation of Thursday Sunnah fasting on 12 Rabiulawal 1447 Unified Global Hijri Calendar (UGHC) or 4 September 2025 AD