Hungarian Conservative

‘His holocaust-survivor grandfather highlighted that he should kiss his weapon as now, unlike during the Holocaust, the Jewish people have the privilege from God to defend themselves. This is why, as Dr Ansbacher explained, when Hamas invaded Israel, they didn’t find helpless Jewish people, but thousands of strong soldiers, police officers, Special Forces, and also regular people who were able to defend themselves.’

In an official statement of the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Hungarian government expressed its disagreement with the recent findings of the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, according to which Israel’s presence in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem is ‘unlawful’, while Israel’s ‘policies and practices’ in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, including ‘the maintenance and expansion of settlements’, amount to the ‘annexation of large parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.’

As Itamar Eichner phrased in his Ynet News article, ‘Without the opposition from Israel’s friends in the EU, such as Hungary, the Czech Republic, Austria, and Germany, the EU might have already passed sanctions against Israel. Foreign policy decisions in the EU require consensus, which Israel’s allies prevent.’

At the weekly government press briefing last week the Hungarian PM’s chief of staff, Minister Gergely Gulyás stated that Hungary would not enforce the ICC arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu. He declared that it is not appropriate to use a court as a political tool, and it should be remembered that the ‘utterly ruthless, disgraceful and despicable terrorist attack’ suffered by Israel was the root cause of everything that is happening in the Gaza Strip.

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.

‘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.’

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.

All but one EU Member State, Hungary, have condemned Israel’s potential ground invasion of Rafah, scheduled to happen if all hostages are not freed by the start of the Ramadan. This is not the first time the Orbán administration has stood up for Israel.

While South Africa alleges that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, it failed to condemn some of the most severe human rights abuses of our times in the past. Pretoria’s assertion that its engagement to prevent grave human rights violations, fulfilling its responsibilities ‘under a treaty obligation to prevent genocide from occurring’ is a political stunt and a blatant attempt to exploit the international legal system.

‘Europe should have woken up already when millions of people swarmed through its borders, and absolutely nothing was done, with the responsible agencies simply welcoming migrants and not enforcing border control,’ Israeli security expert Or Yissachar told Hungarian Conservative.

It is high time the Ambassador (or rather, Embarassador) stopped hurling baseless accusations at the Orbán government, and instead, got down to doing what the real mission of an ambassador is: foster bilateral relations. Last time we checked, ruining the Hungarian-US relationship is not part of the job.   

AFP is one of the three major global news agencies. Yet, in their paid photo library service, images of a major march against antisemitism that took place on 12 November in Paris, France are not available (or at least not searchable), but photos of a much smaller event happening on the same day, organized by the left-wing LFI party are. In addition, the results of search keywords related to the Israeli-Palestine conflict also give curious results.

There is a group of people who will demand photos of Jewish victims and then, when they get them, rejoice in the fact of the killings. Meanwhile, one cannot forget that there is obviously a benign, uninformed majority that can be persuaded by either side, and Israel must not give up the possibility of persuasion.