For reasons unknown, the Facebook page of the Hungarian pro-Israel news website Neokohn.hu was banned by Meta on Sunday. EMIH Chief Rabbi Slomó Köves’ page was also removed. Both pages have since been restored, but the incidents are quite troubling, considering the that the bans appear to have had no basis whatsoever.
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 truth, “the long arc of harassment, assault, and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance, and abetment by Israeli officials”, states The New York Times. This is not to downplay the terrorist threat against Israelis by Palestinian jihadists. However, interviews with more than one hundred people—current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police, and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership—there appears to be a long history of crime without punishment.’
The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has sought arrest warrants for several leading Israeli politicians and members of the Hamas political leadership, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Allies of Israel, led by Viktor Orbán and Joe Biden, have described the prosecutor’s decision on the Jewish state’s leadership as absurd and shameful.
‘Horrible wars are going on right at this moment in the world, and no one in the West seems to care that much. Why does something happening in the Middle East make such repercussions and make emotions run this high in Western universities? What is the ‘secret appeal’ of taking the side of the Palestinians in the Israel–Hamas war that inspired so many students in Ivy League schools to go out and protest in the way they did? May it be the case that it is the schools themselves that generate false narratives of the history behind this conflict to manipulate students into an inevitable conclusion?’
In the latest episodes of the Danube Institute’s podcast co-chair of the Israeli Sovereignty Movement Nadia Matar spoke about the nature of radical Islamist terrorism. To demonstrate her point, she showed a flag from the city of Bethlehem with the Arabic phrase ‘We will murder Jews on Saturdays and we will murder Christians on Sundays’ written on it.
The bill will now go to the Democratic-majority Senate, where it is not expected to face any obstacles and could be signed by President Joe Biden within a week. Hard-line Republicans have again vowed to impeach House Speaker Mike Johnson for bringing the proposal to the House floor.
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.
According to multiple media sources, Israel may have conducted a retaliatory strike against Iran on Friday. However, Iranian officials claim they are uncertain whether it was an external attack or an infiltration from within the Persian state.
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.’
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.