Hungary, Israel's Most Sincere Friend

Israel's fight against terror is Hungary's fight against migration.

Miklos Szantho, Director General of the Center for Fundamental Rights, speaks at the International Pro-Israel Summit held at the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest, October 9, 2023. (Photo: MTI/Noemi Bruzak)

Let's first establish a non-insignificant fact: Hungary is the safest place in Europe today – Jews included – and the Hungarian Right is Israel’s closest ally on the continent.

Here, anti-Zionism fueled by mass migration is unheard of, because we defend our borders. Here, Israeli – or, for that matter, Hungarian – flags are not set alight on campuses, because we do not allow woke ideology to enter our universities and because Hungary stands up for Israel in every international forum, unlike, unfortunately, many countries of the so-called developed world.

While the International Pro-Israel Summit, organized by the Center for Fundamental Rights, is not about the political battle royal going on in America , please allow me one small digression. Have you noticed that since Donald Trump left office, one global crisis follows the another? There is a reason for that. Those seeking to spur unrest are exploiting weakness. Trump, however, is a strong leader – the very embodiment of “peace through strength”, and it can be reasonably assumed that the brutal terrorist attack of October 7th, just like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, would not have happened under a Trump administration.

Indeed, those who dare to play games with the strong American leader are few and far between: Putin did not launch a war between 2017 and 2020, and it was Trump who brokered the Abraham Accords, the agreement offering the best chance for peace in the Middle East. The massacre perpetrated by Hamas was engineered precisely to undermine all this, now under a weak White House administration. What I am about to address, however, is true not only for Israel, the United States or Hungary, but for the West as a whole. Two mighty forces are engaged in struggle for the soul of our civilization. One represents life, the other destruction.

On the one side stand the multitude of people rallying under the banner of God, Homeland, Family.

It is us who understand the crucial significance of our deep-rooted faith and ethics. Who see the nation both as the heir of centuries of hard work by our forefathers, and the steward tasked with preserving our children’s future. Because we are grounded in history but stand tall in the here and now, we have no choice but to deal with reality on its own terms, we must of necessity be realists. We are the embodiment of common sense.

Across the political divide, we find self-proclaimed progressives who preach peace but mean war, understand democracy as the rule of elites and institutions, and equate tolerance with the tolerance of extremes. This elite is under the spell of a new religion – or rather cult – and is the mouthpiece of neo-Marxist doctrine and wokeism, now rebranded as “the struggle for social justice”. They are determined to “wipe out the past for good” and to be “unburdened by what has been” – our history. They see nations not as common cause of millions who have lived, are living and are yet to live, but as an obstacle on the way to a borderless uniform mass of people devoid of culture and identity. And since their dystopian vision is incompatible with the existing world, they have no choice but to hope that reality will eventually bend to their will.

The Red-Green coalition

Today, these postmodernist forces are occupying the pinnacles of power in Brussels and Washington, D. C. Geopolitical reality, however, refuses to bow to their will, which renders them ever more frustrated and prone to making mistakes; this, in turn, brings increasing trouble upon all of us. Whether or not the terrorists besieging the Jewish State or those setting fire to Israeli – and American – flags on campuses across the U. S. are aware of it or not, they themselves are merely tools in the hands of the woke sect.

Israel is under attack because it dares exist. By both the terrorists and the Left. Its millennia-old nationhood is an afront to both Islamist jihadists and the woke cult. They are infuriated by the fact that Israel is a prosperous, technologically advanced democracy and a successful nation-state building on both its traditions and its exceptional, God-given nationhood. And the conformist revolt led by the woke elite, acting as the vanguard of so-called “progress” in the West, explicitly fuels anti-Israel sentiment.

To what end, one may ask. Because the political Left, having abandoned the working class and forgotten the trauma of the European Holocaust, is hoping to win votes from the large masses of immigrants brought to the continent, and therefore turns a blind eye to anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe. This explains why pro-Hamas protests are tearing through the streets of Western Europe and elite college campuses overseas. Modern liberalism, increasingly bearing the hallmark of socialism, has always preached revolt against tradition, national and religious identity, and so-called “oppressive structures”.

However, we have unfortunately come to the point where the “struggle for social justice” has replaced class struggle to become the new race theory. Cancel culture, having set about the abolishment of historical consciousness and memory, has simply repackaged anti-Semitism, and this has caught up with Jewish communities worldwide and Israel itself. This is how, for example, the symbolic politics of sporting an Arafat scarf has morphed into a cynical anti-Zionism which, like the rule of law proceedings against Hungary, wraps anti-Israeli politics in something of a cloak of human rights rhetoric.

The progressive Left has gone down a dangerous and misguided path by becoming complicit in tolerating anti-Semitism in Western Europe. We must therefore stand up against it not merely because we still remember the sacred pledge of “never again”, but also out of sheer self-defense.

Two Nations, One Way of Life

Many may wonder how Hungary and the Hungarian Right became one of – if not the – truest and most consistent friends of Israel in the Western world. There is a reason for that too. Because we managed to prevent mass immigration, we have been spared the violence, the bombs, the knifing attacks of Islamist terror. Nonetheless, the globalist Left sees in us the same threat as in Israel: a country built on the pillars of Faith and Nation, where the child is not a “dangerous carbon footprint” but our most important earthly legacy. Both the Hungarian and the Jewish peoples measure their history in thousands of years, yet both states have relatively recently experienced the fundamental triumph of claiming or reclaiming sovereignty. That is precisely why we are all ready to buck global trends if our sovereignty is under threat.

Israel thus fights for the same fundamental values Hungary stands for. The friendship we extend to you is not a “free gift”, nor is it an atonement for the horrors of the 20th century. Rather, it is a recognition of the fact that on the turbulent seas of history the ships of state of Israel and Hungary seek the same safe harbor: sovereignty and just peace.

In the midst of conflict, one must always look for the way to peace. In fact, the more brutal the struggle, the more urgent the need to stop the bloodshed. Having said that, peace can be delivered only through strength; that is why we need at least common-sense leadership in Brussels and a strong statesman in the White House.

All wars inevitably come to an end at some point. Those who will perish on the battlefield or fall victim to terrorists tomorrow are yet alive today. That is why we all strive for a peace that guarantees Israel’s security, statehood, and independence.

I possess neither a magic wand nor a crystal ball, just as I cannot untie the Gordian knot that is the Middle East. It is indeed you, our Jewish friends, whom the Almighty has tasked with forging a lasting peace for Israel. What Hungary can do is to offer our centuries of experience of the many dangers this region has often confronted us with. Here, we were – and still often still are – faced with adversaries who either couldn’t or wouldn’t see Hungary’s point of view. At the same time, a millennium of existence as an island in the sea of foreign peoples has made us very good at diplomacy and building connectivity. Today, ours is the only country in Europe that stands for connectivity and boasts a network of diplomatic relations that we are happy to put at the disposal of our friends.

You can also be assured that we will work, as we have done in the past, to block any anti-Jewish or anti-Israel initiatives in both the EU and the UN. We will work to prevent the globalist Left dominating these organizations from bankrolling terrorists. And we will fight with all our might against mass migration, which is directly linked to the increasingly vicious anti-Semitism engulfing our continent. In conclusion: it is important to understand that Israel’s fight against terror is essentially the same fight – and often against the same entities – waged by us here for border protection and against migration.

To be even clearer: the fight against anti-Zionism and hostility toward Israel is the same fight waged by us in defense of our European values and way of life. That is why it is all the more urgent to fulfil sovereigntist connectivity by strengthening the international alliance of patriotic forces.

Hungarian and Israeli conservatives have been around long enough to know that history will come to a halt for no one. There is no point in building a Tower of Babel; there will never be a moment when us earthly mortals can declare an ultimate triumph. Israel and Hungary will march into the future, shoulder-to-shoulder guarding our faith, culture, tradition and nationhood. This is our offer of tolerance: let everyone do as they please, but leave us be, to lead our lives of normality.

(This is an edited version of Miklos Szantho's speech delivered at the 2nd International Pro-Israel Summit organized in Budapest by the Center for Fundamental Rights, October 1, 2024.)