In order for both sides to live in harmony with each other, the Palestinians must first, as with other Islamic countries, acknowledge that Israel is an independent and sovereign country, regardless of how it got there.
While both sides had agreed to halt the fighting, each warned the other that it would respond with force to any violence.
Dov Gruner went on to become one of the finest examples of pre-state military heroism in Israeli history.
Herzl was a national visionary, but in a sense he was also a strongly anti-liberal thinker and thus, it is the task of today’s Hungarian public life to further acquaint itself with him.
‘The moment you are not criticizing Israel but demonizing it, using double standards against it, or delegitimizing it, it is not simply being critical of Israel and Zionism at large, but being an anti-Semite.’
Despite strong warnings from the United States and Israel, Poland passed a law imposing a thirty-year moratorium on all property restitutions regarding the communist era.
Hungary’s intention, by refusing the EU declaration, was neither to obstruct peace and stability, nor to pull back humanitarian support for the victims of violence or limit Europe’s ability to exert influence in the region.
‘Anyone who visits Hungary can witness a blooming, flourishing Jewish life, with rich festivals, lively cultural events, active social participation.’
The real change in the relations between the two countries date back to the early 2010s when such international and domestic events occurred which brought the two states, or rather its two leaders closer to each other than ever.
‘As opposed to the European mainstream, which proclaims multiculturalism but in reality wraps itself up in cultural arrogance, Hungary’s openness and pragmatic stance towards the seven eighths of the world that is outside the Western realm already confer an advantage upon us. If the framework of the world as we know it crumbles against our will, this cultural openness of ours may well supply the footing for us from which to enter the next period with confidence. For navigare necesse est—Sail we must.’
‘The progressive side has created a “Jewish question”. The left has discovered the concept of race, merged it with other dimensions of oppression (class, gender), and now they have made the Jews into a new oppressive caste alongside Christian Protestants. After 1967 they focused only on “Zionists” and “Israelis”; now the Jews of the diaspora are the opponents. They don’t even hide their intentions, attacking synagogues, looking for “enemies” who “look Jewish” in the classrooms and in the corridors. The attacks have nothing to do with Israel: they are intended to intimidate the Jewish American community.’
The European Commission has accused Eurovision organizers of ‘handing a gift to Eurosceptics and enemies of Europe’ by prohibiting fans from bringing the EU flag to Saturday’s final. This is just one of the many signs of tension felt among the progressive liberal elite, linked to the forthcoming European elections, where right-wing parties dominate the polls across the EU.
‘It is ironic…that the protesters, while having legitimate positions, have remained altogether silent on the atrocities committed by Hamas, to say nothing of their main sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran. In truth, ever since an estimated 750,000 Palestinians lost their homes amidst the creation of the State of Israel 1948, there have been American Jews deeply unsettled by Israeli policies toward both the Palestinian refugees and Arabs living under Israeli rule. These critics of old into the American Jewish establishment, such as leaders and staff members of the American Jewish Committee.’
‘I think the Biden administration behaved and spoke recklessly about Ukraine in the run-up to the war, and about the Ukrainian prospects for NATO accession and joining the EU—even though the United States obviously can have an opinion about that, but it’s not part of that process, while it is part of the NATO process. Whereas Trump had more of a carefully mixed record.’
Xi Jinping’s visit to Europe—the first in five years—is expected to be mainly business. The Chinese president is coming primarily to conclude new deals in the three countries he visited: France, Serbia, and Hungary. According to Carlos Roa, a guest researcher at the Danube Institute, Western analysts view the visit of the large Chinese delegation with concern for this very reason, as the trip seems more like a geopolitical signal.
Marking 80 years since over 550,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, the 20th March of the Living was held in Budapest on 5 May. This year’s march also honoured those murdered during the 7 October Hamas massacre.
While the intensity of the widespread protests across the country obviously varies from university to university, students seem to have come a long way from peacefully expressing solidarity with Palestinian civilians and opposition to the war. The slogans accusing Israel of genocide, calling for a free Palestine and relativising Hamas’ atrocities are only the mildest versions of the chants repeated by the students. According to a Jewish-American student at Columbia University, he has heard chants on campus in recent weeks such as “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground’; “Globalize the Intifada”; “We are Hamas”; “October 7 will happen again and again”, and “Go back to Poland”.
‘My young friends, our responsibility is immense. We are the last generation that could rely solely on our parents to differentiate between right and wrong. Yet, we are also fully immersed in the technological advancements of the 21st century. We have an opportunity to globalize conservatism.’
‘It’s hard not to think of another Hungarian who was a radical back in his student days: Viktor Orbán, who took on the existing Communist power structure. In fact, the two Hungarian political activists who began as student radicals—Orbán and Molnárfi—uncannily represent rival futures for Europe. With European elections approaching in June, the two make quite the symbolic pair.’
‘Hopefully, under a second Trump administration, we’re going to see a new high in Hungarian–American relations that we haven’t seen since Kossuth visited America back in the 1850s,’ Republican Congressional Aide Johnny Szani pointed out in an interview with Hungarian Conservative.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed the decree expanding the country’s martial law on 23 April, which, in practice, means the derogation from certain obligations undertaken by the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The new decree also includes limitations on the consular services that Ukrainians can access abroad if their military registration documents are not updated.
‘Our continent is effectively under siege—we can see that if we are willing to move away from the narratives that interpret migration solely as a ‘refugee issue’ and acknowledge that mass migration can also be a tool for terrorism and destabilization. The number of irregular migrants arriving in the Canary Islands more than tripled in January this year compared to the previous year. Germany is overwhelmed. Reception capacity was already exceeded in 2023, when 330,000 asylum applications were submitted in just a year, mostly from Muslim countries.’
‘Now, the only remaining fortresses of conservatives are small media outlets, and they strongly need international cooperation, not only for the credibility, but also to protect them against the attacks of the government,’ President of the Board and co-founder of Ordo Iuris Institute, Jerzy Kwaśniewski pointed out in an interview with Hungarian Conservative.
‘Colonel Buskila explained that ‘‘there were two waves of the attack: in the first, there were the 2500 terrorists who infiltrated Israel and then in the second wave hundreds, maybe one thousand Gazan civilians took advantage of the fact that their border was open and rushed into Israel with knives just to kill people and steal.’’ Colonel Buskila added that these Gazans didn’t spare anything, and after they killed Israeli civilians in the kibbutzim, they stole everything, even the batteries, from those Israeli civilians’ cars whom they murdered.’
The recent signing of a military and defence industry cooperation agreement between Hungary and the United Arab Emirates introduces a new dimension to their bilateral relations. Hungary’s status as a NATO member, combined with the UAE’s robust partnership with the alliance, suggests that this agreement may lead to a more pronounced role for Hungary in security collaborations between NATO and the Gulf region.
The former Head of Child safety lost her job at the tech giant for taking part in a sit-in protest against Google doing business with the Israeli government. However, a subsequent search into her social media history uncovered that she has also had very strange opinions on sexual assault.
The US Senate has broken the months-long stalemate by voting in favour of the Ukraine aid bill. The political significance of this decision is indisputable, but what implications does it hold for the course of the war?
For the first time in the 2024 primary season, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in turnout in a swing state. President Trump also got a substantially lower vote total than President Biden. However, Pennsylvania was the only state in which President Trump was polling behind President Biden to begin with, and he can still win in November by taking states where he has been performing better, both in the polls and in the primaries.
In a February episode of the Reflections from Budapest podcast the Director-General of the Tikvah Fund highlighted the neo-Marxist narrative in the West which holds that ‘weak is just’, and since the Palestinians are presented as weak, Israel is portrayed as their oppressor.
‘Like many, I still cannot believe that Wilders could become prime minister, given his years of demagogic outbursts and his abysmal reputation among the parts of the nation that ‘matter’. He shocked polite society with condescending statements about Dutch Muslims and unworkable, discriminatory policy proposals.’
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.