JERUSALEM—Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban is to visit Israel July 18-20.
It will be his first visit to Israel.
Last week, the Hungarian premier held talks with Israel’s National Security Advisor Meir Ben-Shabbat in Budapest as part of a meeting of security advisors from the Visegrad Group and Israel. The talks focused on security challenges in Europe and the Middle East and on Orban’s upcoming visit. . The Visegrad group includes Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
Among EU member states, Hungary has consistently abstained rather than vote against Israel. It abstained in December in the UN General Assembly vote condemning the US for moving its embassy to Jerusalem; in May when the UN Human Rights Commission voted to establish an investigative committee into the violence along the Gaza border; and earlier this month, when the UN General Assembly condemned the Gaza violence and passed a resolution calling for protection of the Palestinian civilian population.
Last week opposition Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid and Meretz Chairwoman Tamar Zandberg both called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call of the planned visit because of Orban’s use of “anti-Semitic propaganda.”
“Viktor Orban should not visit Israel,” Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid said in a radio interview. “Orban is the man who said that Miklos Horthy [Hungary’s Nazi-allied World War II leader] is a great leader and he [Horthy] murdered my grandparents in Hungary. The fact that Netanyahu is making us best friends with these regimes in Europe is worrisome.”
In 2015, Orban admitted his country’s role in the Holocaust, saying many Hungarians chose “bad instead of good” in helping deport Jews to Nazi death camps.
When Orban was reelected Prime Minister last April, a European Jewish group congratulated him for his reelection and asked him to continue defending Jewish rights and supporting Israel.
’You have been a stalwart defender of Israel on the world stage, recently going against the prevailing EU winds and supporting the move to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,’’ wrote Rabbi Menachem Margolin, head of the European Jewish Association (EJA), in a letter to Orban. ‘’As long as you continue to show the right way ahead when it comes to defending and upholding Jewish rights, you will continue to enjoy our support”, he added.