Hungarian Conservative

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”.

In a recent op-ed John Bolton argues that the White House failed to recognize that the real conflict in the region is not between the Palestinians or Arabs and Israel, but Iran’s war against Israel.

‘The patterns that emerge from examples drawn from 150 years of terrorism and counterterrorism are clear. When a tactic works, it is copied and adapted to new times and new situations. Attacks on civilians, women and children strike terror and provoke governments to react. When governments overreact and kill large numbers of civilians, regardless of the provocation, governments lose support, lose legitimacy, and in the modern world, soon find both popular opinion and later the world community will turn against them, making ultimate defeat inevitable.’

‘Reality does not seem to bother some journalists, politicians and influencers. They are not interested in offering solutions, for instance by exerting pressure on the Palestinians to hand over those responsible for terrorism; all they are interested in is condemning Israel’s actions.’

According to General Avivi, Hamas’s brutal attack on 7 October in Israel was possible because of two terrible decisions: the Oslo Accords and the 2005 disengagement of Israeli troops from Gaza. The Oslo Accords implemented in 1994 resulted in the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the major cities of Gaza and the transfer of weapons and control to the Palestinian Authority. This decision resulted in Gaza, previously not considered a significant military issue, becoming a top security problem for Israel.

According to Ambassador Yacov Hadas-Handelsman the Gaza War is not just against Israel and it is not a political strife anymore, but a cultural and religious conflict.

‘We must defeat, not pacify, the Palestinian dream of annihilating Israel. Defeat, not come to terms with nor even deter. But this may well turn out to be a historical turning point of history beyond Israel because it is a wake-up call for the West in general. The West has lost its immune system in a multicultural haze that has left it unable to see differences.’

Hungary and Czechia have been the only members of the EU that have consistently declared support for the Israeli government, both before and since the 7 October massacres. Last December, they were among the ten nations that voted against a resolution at the UN General Assembly calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

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.

‘In the end, what for Hamas is a military defeat and a humanitarian disaster has become a resounding political victory. Bringing the Palestinian cause back into the forefront of world attention will for years to come to be the ultimate legacy of the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October.’

‘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.

‘In Gaza, Judea, and Samaria, we will have to do de-Nazification programmes just like Germany after WW II, to de-Nazify the society from all of these antisemitic textbooks and praising of terrorists…All of this will have to change.’

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.

As Kenneth M. Pollack phrased in his The Hill article, ‘a ceasefire now would only lead to more war and more killing in the future.’ Pollack added that ‘when you reward an aggressor and prevent the attacked from fighting back, you simply encourage that aggressor to attack again, and encourage other would-be aggressors to do the same.’

Moscow has failed to condemn the 7 October Hamas attack as terrorism, and Putin has likened the Gaza blockade by Israel to the siege of Leningrad by Nazi Germany, effectively poisoning the previously amicable Russia–Israel relations.