On 4 June, Fifth Avenue in Manhattan was painted blue and white in the annual Celebration of Israel Parade in which around 40,000 people too part to mark the 75th anniversary of Israel’s founding,
including Hungary’s Ambassador to the UN Zsuzsanna Horváth.
Since 1956, hundreds of thousands of people have come together annually to march in the JCRC-NY Celebrate Israel Parade, expressing their love and support for the State of Israel. The theme of this year’s parade was ‘Renewing the Hope,’ which called for unity in the face of the growing contentiousness surrounding the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul. In a video message about the parade, Israeli President Isaac Herzog called on participants to ‘walk together in solidarity and to remind themselves of the power of our unity and togetherness of the spirit of peace and fraternity, to build and to renew and to heal.’
‘Israel Can Count on the Hungarian Government’
During this year’s march, Israel’s UN representative Gilad Erdan was accompanied by a delegation of senior diplomats from various countries, including Ambassador. Horváth. The parade also featured members of the US delegation and representatives from other countries such as the Georgian Republic, Guatemala, Lithuania, Ukraine, South Sudan, the Czech Republic, Moldova, Morocco, Australia, Romania, Eritrea, and Bulgaria.
The participation of the UN envoy was important since—as it was detailed in a previous Hungarian Conservative article—despite the fact that in 1947 the United Nation’s General Assembly adopted a resolution for the establishment of a Jewish and Arab State in the ‘British-controlled mandatory of Palestine’ and recognised the right of the Jewish people to establish their independence, since the 1970s, the Arab states have turned the UN against Israel to weaken the support of the legitimacy of the Jewish state in the international community.
As Hungarian Conservative reported at the end of May, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen visited Budapest, where he had a meeting with his Hungarian counterpart Péter Szijjártó who declared that ‘Israel can count on the Hungarian government when it comes to countering the biased, unbalanced and unfair treatment of Israel by international organisations, and the Hungarian government recognises the Jewish State’s right to protect itself and fight against terrorism which endangers the safety and security of its citizens.’
Eli Cohen expressed his gratitude for Hungary’s support for his country in the international community and its consistent support for Israel as a friend. ‘I would also like to thank the Hungarian government for its zero tolerance towards anti-Semitism. We appreciate this very much and thank you very much for your attitude towards the Jewish community,’ he said.
US Anti-Semitic Incidents Hit a Record in 2022
Harley Lippman, the CEO of Genesis10, was named the Grand Marshal of this year’s Celebration of Israel Parade. He was recently recognized in Poland for his efforts in uncovering Jewish mass graves from World War II that had not been previously discovered. Lippman is the descendant of Holocaust survivors who lost 86 family members, many of whom were Polish. With his work, he identified some 50 Polish Jewish mass graves killed at the hands of the Nazis between September 1939 and March 1942 and dumped in mass graves before concentration camps were constructed to carry out Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution.
‘With the rise of anti-Semitism at record levels, it’s more important than ever to show unity and support for Israel not just among American Jews, but non-Jews as well,’
Lippman said about the importance of the Israel Parade. ‘As we’ve learned from history, when people reveal their bad intentions, we have to pay attention. It’s not just Iran that wants to wipe Israel off the map, as there is plenty of hate here in NYC,’ Lippman added. He also reflected on the infamous anti-Semitic commencement speech of Fatima Mohammed, a law graduate at the City University of New York (CUNY), in which Mohammed had accused Israel of ‘indiscriminately murdering’ and ‘fomenting lynch mob’ and said that the Jewish state is a ‘project of settler colonialism’ and perpetuates ‘the ongoing Nakba’.
Two weeks later, although the chancellor of the CUNY condemned the speech as hate speech, the university gained the reputation for being the most anti-Semitic university in the US. As Jeffrey Lax, a CUNY professor, department chair, and a founder of Students and Faculty for Equality at CUNY, wrote in his New York Post op-ed: ‘The “cleansing” of Jewish students and lecturers from German universities from 1933 to 1935 was one of the Nazis’ first goals met. Ninety years later, in the metropolis with the world’s largest Jewish population, the City University of New York has successfully completed a yearslong initiative to expunge all Jews from its senior leadership.’ Lax was referring to the fact that this spring, the last remaining two Jewish leaders left the school’s 80-member senior leadership team in a city where about 20 per cent of the population is Jewish. As Lax noted, the university’s three most powerful leaders have documented ties or allegiances to the Hamas-connected Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. Lax no longer wears his yarmulke when he is at the CUNY, as a few years ago, when some fellow faculty members learned that he is Jewish and a Zionist, they started threatening and intimidating him, and discriminating against him and other Jewish professors and students by admitting that university events are deliberately on Friday nights so they couldn’t come.
Although the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission substantiated all of his claims last year, Lax said CUNY has still not addressed the hostile work environment. Similarly, when Tzvia Waronker, a CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice student, had to face anti-Semitic comments such as ‘the Jews control the world, kill babies and own all banks,’ the College leadership still held that these comments were not anti-Semitic.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams also said at the Celebration of Israel Parade that support for Israel must be not only substantive but also symbolic, and reminded that the importance of the parade is to ‘focus on ending anti-Semitism’.
The Anti-Defamation League published a study at the beginning of 2023 which measured anti-Semitic attitudes in the United States. The study shows a worrying increase in the level of anti-Semitic attitudes in the past few years as it states that over three-quarters of Americans (85 per cent) believe at least one anti-Jewish trope, as opposed to 61 per cent found in 2019. Although the report highlighted that 90 per cent of Americans agreed Israel ‘has a right to defend itself against those who want to destroy it,’ it also pointed out that many Americans believe in Israel-oriented anti-Semitic positions—40 per cent at least partly believe that Israel treats Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews, while 18 per cent feel uncomfortable spending time with a person who supports Israel. The report also shows a nearly 40 per cent correlation between belief in anti-Jewish tropes and anti-Israel beliefs, meaning that a substantial number of people who believe anti-Jewish tropes also have negative attitudes toward Israel. According to the ADL findings,
anti-Semitic incidents surged to historic levels in 2022 in the United States,
with a total of 3,697 hate-related incidents reported across the country, which is a 36 per cent increase from 2021 and the highest level ever recorded in the group’s history since it began keeping records in 1979.
The increase in anti-Semitism in the US may be partly due to the fact that most states do not require public school students to learn about the Holocaust. According to an Axios analysis of data from the National Conference of State Legislatures, Americans—especially Millennials and Gen Z members—don’t know basic facts about the Holocaust, which resulted in a rise in racist and antisemitic social media posts and an increase in antisemitic violence across the US.
‘Hungarian Zero-Tolerance Towards Anti-Semitism Should be Implemented Everywhere’
Although the Biden administration recognised the need to release a 60-page new strategy to combat anti-Semitism in the US, some Jewish groups have taken offense at what the White House says it considers anti-Semitism. They argue that President Biden has chosen a diluted definition of the term that doesn’t say it’s anti-Semitic to oppose Israel’s creation or hold the Jewish state to different standards than other countries. According to Jewish groups like the Zionist Organisation of America, the main problem with the strategy is that although it finally embraced the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism which labels as anti-Semitic ‘denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination’ by ‘claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour’ and ‘applying double standards’ to the Jewish state by ‘requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation,’ it also ‘welcomes and appreciates’ the rival definition of anti-Semitism known as the Nexus Document, which states that opposition to Zionism—i.e., the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and to live as a nation-state in their religious and ancestral homeland—is not necessarily anti-Semitic.
As Yacov Hadas-Handelsman, Ambassador of the State of Israel in Hungary, highlighted at the recent Danube Institute conference, it is essential to fight against modern-day anti-Semitism, which often appears in different forms of anti-Zionist or anti-Israel sentiments. He noted that criticism of the policies or actions of the Israeli government should be separated from anti-Zionism, which denies the legitimacy of the State of Israel and the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. The Ambassador added that anti-Zionism manifests itself in movements like the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) that aim to establish a state for the Palestinian people by destroying the State of Israel.
The Ambassador also praised the Hungarian policy of ‘zero tolerance towards anti-Semitism’ as an example that should be implemented everywhere.
In 2017, at a press conference in Budapest held jointly with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Hungary has proclaimed zero tolerance on anti-Semitism and stressed that Hungary had committed a crime by collaborating with the Nazis and failing to protect its Jewish citizens in World War II. The Hungarian Prime Minister emphasised already six years go that Hungary recognises Israel’s right to defend itself and declared that the tragedy of the Holocaust must never be allowed to happen and it’s Hungary’s duty to protect all of its citizens.
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