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.
Much of the world agrees that the Palestinians should have, and deserve, a state of their own. It’s a political ideal whose time should have come long ago. But the experience of Palestinian self-government, even in a limited sense, is not promising.
‘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.’
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.
‘Only the West killed God, and they did it twice for good measure: once on the cross, and more recently via the Enlightenment project to transform the world through progress, secularism, and science, rendering religion either rational or irrelevant.’
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 America, we have so many horrible things happening, you know, with the gender ideologies, the LGBTQ, and the open border, and all these different things. So, when we conservatives in America look around for friends, we don’t have to look much further than Hungary to see that you guys are doing a lot of things right that we’d like to replicate.’
‘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.’
At a recent Rubicon Institute conference in Budapest, historians and Middle East experts attempted to shed light on the complexities of the Arab–Israeli conflict and its regional and international contexts.
‘My message to the Hungarian people is this: The spirit of the Jewish people has taken a lot of hits over the years but we always come together to fight for our future and that is exactly what we will do again. We will all dance again, and I know the Hungarian people will dance with us. Thank you for your unwavering support.’
The Jerusalem Post has learned that the Hungarian and German governments have granted citizenship and issued passports to some of the Israeli hostages abducted on 7 October by Hamas. Some of those hostages have since been released, while others remain captive. The Hungarian MFAT has not yet commented on the report.
The international coalition led by Washington appears to be incapable of halting the attacks on transport vessels by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia. The inability to use the crucial Strait of Bab el-Mandeb is having a detrimental impact on world trade, directly and indirectly affecting Europe.
“For all the trials the Christians have endured—from famine during the Ottoman Empire to British bombardment during World War I and the rule of Hamas—the potential future for our Christian brethren in the Holy Land after the war is eventually over seems bleak.’
56-year-old Ilan Weisz, a father of three, was possibly held hostage for nearly three months, as authorities did not discover his body for an extended period of time.
In this article, historian László Bernát Veszprémy recounts the story of three Israeli prime ministers who resigned as a result of military debacles that happened under their leadership.
State Secretary for International Communication and Relations Zoltán Kovács also met with the Israeli Hungarian hostages’ relatives and wrote in his Facebook post: ‘No “context” needed—just release the hostages!’. The State Secretary’s post reacted to the outrageous responses of the presidents of America’s most prestigious universities, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT, to the question posed by Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik whether calling for the genocide of Jews went against the universities’ code of conduct. All three presidents answered that it depended ‘on the context’.
‘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.’
‘Before a military operation is even conceivable, Washington and the EU Member States must abandon the so-called “good relations” with Iran. There is nothing good in a “relation” where the other side is going to profit from it, and thereby continue to sponsor terrorists. After all is said and done, then, perhaps we can discuss, or even assume, good relaions.’
Israel has not only released many prisoners in the past in exchange for living soldiers, such as Gilad Shalit in 2011, but the abduction of Israeli corpses has also proven to be a ‘fruitful venture’ for terrorists. In the Jewish religion, dead bodies are highly revered, and attempts are always made to bury them as soon as possible.
The conference, held on 27 November 2023, brought together a diverse groups of speakers to discuss the repercussions of the Israel-Hamas war and the situation of the Christian community in Israel.
‘Many Jewish citizens from European nations like Sweden are enduring levels of hostility that are non-existent in Hungary. In contrast, Yacov Hadas-Handelsman, the current Israeli ambassador to Hungary, earlier this year named Hungary as one of the safest nations for Jews to live in. Furthermore, the Jewish community in Hungary is not only thriving, but also one of the largest in Europe.’
Jabotinsky was an old-fashioned nineteenth-century national liberal and a committed democrat, but it is still a matter of debate whether the same can be said of his supporters. The Zionist writer described his early worldview as ‘liberal anarchy’ in which ‘every individual is [worth as much as] a king’. The free market, freedom of the press, equality for women and respect for minority rights were fundamental tenets of his thinking. But there is good reason why there is an intense historiographical debate concerning Jabotinsky’s views.
‘I asked my colleague to assist us in ensuring that the two [remaining] Hungarian nationals who hold dual citizenship can be released from captivity as soon as possible,’ Péter Szijjártó shared, adding that it is excellent news that one of the affected individuals is demonstrably alive and stressed the importance of locating the other person. He expressed the hope that both can return home as soon as possible.
Mosab Hassan Yousef, known as the son of Hamas’s co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, held a historic speech at the United Nations this week in which he stressed: ‘If Israel fails in Gaza, the rest of the world will be next’. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also highlighted in a Fox News interview that if Israel ‘doesn’t win now, then Europe is next’.
A four-day humanitarian ceasefire has been agreed upon by Israel and Hamas, as confirmed by both parties and the mediator Qatar as well. The Palestinians agreed to the release of 50 Israeli hostages, mostly women and children, while Israel agreed to set free 150 Palestinian prisoners. However, PM Netanyahu of Israel insists his country is still at war.
Greta Thunberg has voiced the opinion that the Western media ‘brainwashes’ people about Israel, and recently wore a Palestinian scarf to a climate protest in Amsterdam. As a result, Fridays for Future Germany has repeatedly distanced itself from their Swedish comrade, saying that they do not compromise on antisemitism and that protecting Jewish lives is important to them. ‘She does not represent Fridays for Future Deutschland’, they tweeted.
After Hamas brutally attacked Israel on 7 October, the refugee camp on the shore of Lake Balaton in Hungary was converted into a safe haven for Israeli Jews who wanted to escape with their families from the horrors of war. The camp now houses around 250 people, including 100 children, most of whom have fled from Israel since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.
Two major British publications have alleged that the Hungarian government’s new billboard campaign promoting its national consultation, which depicts EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen along with Alex Soros, is actually antisemitic. That is despite the fact the Hungary has been one of Israel’s staunchest supporters in the Palestinian conflict, while antisemitic demonstrations are on the rise in the West.
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.