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.
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.
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.’
‘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.
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.