Hungarian Conservative

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.’

Foreign pro-Palestinian demonstrators disrupted a conference in Budapest on Tuesday where Israel’s ambassador to Hungary Jakov Hadas-Handelsman was also speaking. At around the same time, anti-Israel graffiti flooded the Hungarian capital. For many months, such phenomena were unknown in Hungary, but now it seems that the conflict and hatred are being imported from abroad.

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.

After vetoing the call for a ceasefire in Gaza in February, Hungary ultimately subscribed to a joint statement on 21 March for the first time since the outbreak of the Israel–Hamas war. Thus, EU leaders have unanimously called for ‘an immediate humanitarian halt leading to a sustainable ceasefire’ in Gaza.

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.

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.

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.

Paul Kessler, a 69-year-old Jewish man attended a pro-Israel gathering in Thousand Oaks, California when a pro-Palestine group showed up. He died after a punch knocked him to the ground and hit his head. The police have already questioned a suspect, but released them, as they have received conflicting eyewitness reports about who the aggressor was.

The following is Part II of a three-part analysis that sets out to illustrate the three fault lines that are about to redraw the geostrategic map of the Old World.

The following is Part I of a three-part analysis that sets out to illustrate the three fault lines that are about to redraw the geostrategic map of the Old World.

The recent outbreak of violence in the Middle East may soon lead to the opening of another front, where Israel would clash with Hezbollah. But what is this Lebanese Shia organization, and how did it come to be?

With the brutal terrorist attack on Israel, Hamas came to spotlight in the news. In this article, we look at the origins and the ideology of the Palestinian terrorist organization that committed the abominable massacre of Israeli civilians.

Wizz Air has cancelled all flights to Israel until 15 November but is continuously reviewing the situation. The airline is in constant contact with Israeli, Hungarian, and international authorities, monitoring the events in Israel.

In an interview with Hungarian news website Index, Mazsihisz Chief Rabbi Róbert Frölich declared that Budapest and Hungary as a whole are ‘an island of peace’ for the Jewish community.

Israel have always had few allies in the Middle East in its fight for self-preservation. However, one small ethnoreligious group is an exception. The Druze have sided with the Jewish state ever since its inception, adhering to a ‘covenant of blood’ between Jews and the Druze.

The Foreign Minister of Hungary stressed the importance of connectivity between the ‘interdependent’ Eastern and Western economies, and cautioned against dividing the world into political blocs again. On the same day, he also gave an update on the 15 Hungarian citizens still in Gaza.

Two pro-Hamas protests were also banned in Budapest last week. PM Viktor Orbán has vowed not to allow any ‘pro-terror demonstrations’ in Hungary.

The anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews demonstrating in New York are therefore not necessarily a curiosity. They are representatives of an old and historically legitimate school of thought, albeit completely marginalized and despised in their own religious milieu as well. Their presence simply demonstrates that Judaism is diverse, that there are all kinds of trends within it, and that it is not possible to treat this community as a single monolith.

On 7 October, the terrorist group Hamas commenced the largest and bloodiest attack against Israel since the Yom Kippur War. In many ways, the aggression echoes not only the 1973 war, but also the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on the US as well.

Airlines are systematically cancelling or suspending their flights to Israel since the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas launched a comprehensive attack on the Jewish state on Saturday morning, resulting in hundreds of casualties. This resulted in significant drops in the companies’ share prices.

Minister Szijjártó expressed Hungary’s deep concern over the Israel terrorist attacks and their potential consequences, which could easily lead to one of the largest humanitarian disasters in history. He believes that this tragedy occurred at the worst possible time, as the process of normalizing the situation had just begun, and significant steps had been taken towards peace, which now could be jeopardized and rendered null.

‘The first thing we can wish for Israel in the current situation is that it should regain control over the entire territory of the state of Israel and establish the security guarantees needed to prevent similar bestial attacks from happening in the future,’ Gulyás said.

‘All things being equal, the roots to the actual deadly conflict are profound, as already mentioned. Yet it does not help the cause of peace to keep doing business with Iran, just as the United States has done under the Obama administration and is still doing under the present one.’

The situation in Israel remains ‘extremely worrying’, with some areas practically in a state of war, Minister Szijjártó said, according to a statement by the Foreign Ministry. The Hungarian government’s top priority in such a case of emergency is to ensure the safety of Hungarians, he added.

‘These recent bloody events—and the videos of Arab crowds celebrating them, not just in Gaza, but in Europe too—show perfectly what a significant part of the Muslim Arab world thinks about the issue. The problem is not that Israel is ‘running the world’s largest concentration camp’ in Gaza (a distasteful and debatable claim in the first place, but let’s not go into that now). This conflict existed before the majority of people alive today were born.’

Meanwhile, PM Orbán of Hungary offered his moral support for Israel, writing ‘our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Israel in these dark hours’.

At their meeting earlier this week, Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Amichai Chikli and Hungarian State Secretary Miklós Soltész concurred that anti-Israel attitudes have evolved into a new variety of antisemitism, and they demand particular consideration on a global scale.

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.