The first guest of the new edition of the Danube Info podcast was Or Yissachar, a national security researcher and team lead in the Israeli high-tech industry, leading the Israel Defence and Security Forum’s Content Division and Research Department.

Hanukkah, the eight-day Jewish Festival of Lights, commemorates the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem in the second century after it was liberated. This year’s Hanukkah will start on 25 December and end on 2 January 2025.

In a recent analysis former Hungarian ambassador to Israel Levente Benkő highlights that for Israel, Hamas’s brutal attack necessitated a forceful response in order to restore deterrence. He points out that Israel has no choice but to confront its enemies decisively, even with or without the help of the US, starting with Hamas in Gaza. By doing so, while not eliminating resistance to Israel as such, at least prevents it from taking the form of an organized insurgency. 

On 28 October, despite international opposition, Israeli lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to approve two bills that essentially ban the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East from operating in Israel and severely restrict its activities in Gaza and the West Bank, due to certain staff members’ direct ties to Hamas and other terrorist groups.

According to the OIDAC’s 2022/2023 report, there was a 44 per cent increase in crimes against Christians in those two years. In 2022, OIDAC documented as many as 749 anti-Christian hate crimes. The report points out that there is a reasonable probability that the actual numbers are higher, due to limited reporting as a result of the crimes’ chilling effect on victims, and the lack of media coverage. OIDAC found that Christian converts of Muslim origin are particularly vulnerable to violence.

The 18 September resolution doesn’t mention Hamas’ brutal incursion into Israel on 7 October or the 101 hostages that are still being held captive in Gaza. It also conspicuously avoids mention of the continuing Palestinian attacks on Israel. Hungary was one of the fourteen nations that voted against the resolution that holds Israel solely responsible for the conflict.

The pro-Israel experts and politicians who gathered at the Israel Defence and Security Forum (IDSF) and the Danube Institute’s conference titled October Effect: Strategic Implications for Israel and Europe in the Middle East War, held on 9 September at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, discussed and analysed the rise of antisemitism in the West, the ramifications of Israel’s war in Gaza, and the emerging Russia –China–Iran axis.

The Hungarian government and Jewish communities, along with thousands of ordinary Hungarians, have shown full support of and solidarity with the State of Israel and the Jewish people in a number of ways since 7 October. We have listed the most important ones on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of Hungary–Israel relations.

In a podcast conversation with his daughter, Mikhaila Peterson, Dr Peterson reacted to the court’s dismissal by stating: ‘I’ll be sitting down with an expert, whatever that means, and they’re going to do whatever it is they think they can do to make me into an entirely different sort of creature than I am. And so I’m sort of morbidly curious about that. Yeah, Jordan Peterson’s reeducation is coming to the airwaves soon.’

In the days after the attack Israeli and international Jewish organizations raised around half a million dollars for the grieving Druze families affected by the horrific attack. Head of the Majdal Shams City Council Dolan Abu Saleh highlighted that the Druze want peace in the region.

‘What has been going on at Columbia, how the professors are treating Jewish students, how they wouldn’t give you a letter of reference if you were a Zionist, all this has been normalized to the extent that it led to the recent encampments. So, when you normalize the narrative against Jews and Zionists so much that it is engrained in people that it’s okay to hate them, and there are no consequences, that’s when we end up seeing what happened a couple of months ago at the Ivy League colleges in America.’

‘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.’

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.’

‘It’s really important to understand that we’re not operating military to military with ground rules and understanding of military bases in uniform as these terrorists are not wearing uniforms and are embedding themselves in schools, hospitals, public areas, kindergartens, homes, hiding weapons in those areas, making themselves and the people around them targets. So it’s a very, very complex situation to fight in. Secondly, I think that Israel understands not only the humane side but also that it’s important to allow more and more humanitarian aid to enter because our goal is to eliminate Hamas and not to harm the people of Gaza,’ IDF Staff Sergeant Nicki told Hungarian Conservative in a recent interview.

On 21 May, pro-Palestinian individuals aggressively disrupted an even at the Danube Institute. However, they failed to silence the Israeli representatives who came to Hungary to bear witness to the brutality of Hamas on 7 October. What they managed to do, however, was to illustrate a crucial difference between the two sides: while Israeli advocates presented their arguments intelligently and peacefully, related their painful experiences, and even when they were shouted at answered questions, the Palestinian protesters had no substantive arguments; instead, they shouted antisemitic slogans full of hatred, and in a deeply disrespectful manner, tried to do everything to silence the Israelis and those who support them.

Lieutenant Colonel Shoshani pointed out that ‘in this horrible reality, even though we showed evidence of the barbaric sexual violence by Hamas on 7 October, the world still doesn’t believe it happened,’ which demonstrates how people tend to believe only what they want to, even when presented with facts.

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.

General Amir Avivi, the founder of the Israel Defence and Security Forum, also highlighted in his briefing following the IRI attack that the fact that Israel and its allies intercepted 99 per cent of the rockets ‘showed that Israel could cope with a direct attack from Iran, and can coordinate efficiently with its allies to defend itself.’

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.

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.’

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.

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’.

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.

Although Finnish MP Päivi Räsänen was acquitted by a court of second instance, the legal battle, unfortunately, may not be fully won. As Räsänen wrote in a press release, she hopes ‘the prosecutor will be satisfied with the decision, but if not, I am ready to defend freedom of expression and religion also before the Supreme Court of Finland, and if necessary, even before the European Court of Human Rights.’  It soon turned out that the prosecutor is considering turning to the Supreme Court.

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.’

‘It is still hard to believe how quick Western mainstream media outlets were to uncritically share propaganda information provided by a terrorist organization, Hamas, which only two weeks before massacred, kidnapped, raped, burnt, and tortured innocent Israeli Jews and foreigners alike.’