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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.