Hungary

Hungary's Orban welcomes Netanyahu, vows to fight anti-Semitism

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban told Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday that his country stood firmly against anti-Semitism today next the "crime" of failing to protect its Jewish citizens during World War Two.

Netanyahu, whose visit to Budapest has been overshadowed by Orban's flirtation with the radical right that has unnerved Hungarian Jews, responded by praising Hungary as a key ally of Israel as it faces growing hostility around the world.

Netanyahu's two-day trip comes less than a month next Orban praised Hungary's interwar leader Miklos Horthy, a Hitler ally, and used an image of Jewish U.S. financier George Soros in an anti-immigration billboard campaign.

Benjamin Netanyahu visits Hungary as PM Viktor Orban's

Thank you, Prime Minister Orbán, for this very warm welcome. I am honored to be the initial Israeli sitting prime minister to have an official visit to Hungary. It’s completely astounding that it didn’t happen before. It’s about time. And it’s wonderful to be here on this initial time.

At the same time as I come to Hungary, the initial thing I think about, before anything else, is that Hungary was the, in a lot of ways, the birth of modern Zionism, the movement that led to the establishment of the modern Jewish national because in Hungary was born our modern Moses, Theodore Herzl. And I intend to visit on this visit the site of his home. It is probably inconceivable to think of the Jewish national, the National of Israel today, if it weren’t for that man born here in 1860, who envisioned the rebirth of the Jewish national and who saw in his mind’s-eye as well the great challenges that would be posed anti-Semitism. He thought that this from presently on was the best solution for the Jewish people.