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.
‘The indiscriminate attack on 7 October that killed approximately twelve-hundred innocent Israeli citizens cannot go unpunished. Yet there are rules of war that need to be respected.’
The objective of the exercise is to test the military’s readiness for and response to an imagined situation threatening Hungary’s security. Another goal is to test the capabilities of the civilian public administration when it comes to troop movements and logistics, the Hungarian Defence Minister noted.
While Turkish–Hungarian relations are based on mutual interests, Ankara regards Hungary as a strong ally, and a country that is linked to Turkey by a sense of kinship, according to Turkish Ambassador to Hungary Gülşen Karanis Ekşioğlu.
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.’
On the margins of the sixth China International Import Expo, Economic Development Minister Márton Nagy held talks with the leaders of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), the world’s largest commercial lender, emphasizing Hungary’s aim of becoming a regional financial hub in addition to being the meeting point for Eastern and Western capital and cutting-edge technology.
Katalin Novák met with her Israeli counterpart, President Isaac Herzog, to show her moral support to the recently attacked Israel, as well as for the Hungarian community living in Israel. She also called for the immediate release of hostages, some of whom are of Hungarian ancestry, taken by the Islamist terror group Hamas.
While the largest German paper Bild took a sympathetic tone toward refugees back in 2015, that has since changed. On 29 October, they published a 50-point anti-migration manifesto in which they proclaim, among other things, that ‘anyone who considers our constitution and our legal system a collection of non-binding recommendations should leave Germany as soon as possible,’ and ‘anyone who wants to live here permanently must learn German’.
Hungary’s interests lie in peace, the Hungarian foreign minister said, adding that this was the reason why the government considered it important to take part in the work of the OTS, as the Turkic states ‘always stand by peaceful settlements and reducing the risk of escalation’.
‘The fact is, however, that the continent’s current economic situation finds only a relatively small number of EU countries in a giving mood. French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday that the European Commission’s current proposal was not ‘realistic’ and that the Brussels-based body was asking too much. Similar comments have come from Berlin.’
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.