Eurasia Press & News
The reverberations from Netanyahu’s visit to Hungary continue to be felt, with Orban’s move to leave the ICC drawing criticism from across Europe. The country’s Jewish community has also been left divided on the ever-closer alliance between the two leaders.
Hungary’s decision to leave the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC), announced on April 3 during the visit of Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu to the country, has drawn strong reactions from EU politicians and legal commentators. The deepening ties between Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Israeli counterpart are also being viewed warily by many inside Hungary’s Jewish community.
On April 9, Renew Europe, the liberal grouping in the European Parliament, issued a statement condemning Hungary’s withdrawal from the ICC and asserting a breach of EU law. “Hungary’s withdrawal from the ICC is a further betrayal of European values,” stated Renew Europe’s president, Valerie Hayer.
Her colleague Sandro Gozi, Renew Europe’s coordinator in the EU parliament’s Constitutional Affairs committee, went further: “We must impose targeted sanctions and explore all legal avenues to hold Orban accountable for this breach of EU law.”
The two French MEPs’ call has yet to be taken up by member states, but has been amplified by academic experts. “The discrepancy between Hungary’s actions and its obligations under the EU acquis [legal system] is becoming untenable,” according to Peter Van Elsuwege, professor of EU law and Jean Monnet Chair at Ghent University in Belgium, in an article published on the same day as Renew Europe’s statement.
The EU has made the grant of membership to candidate countries conditional on their ratification of the ICC’s founding statute. Members have committed themselves collectively to support the ICC’s “effective and efficient functioning” by means of EU legislation promulgated in 2011. EU members are, likewise, bound by a 2006 EU-ICC cooperation agreement on intelligence sharing.
The Hungarian government’s framing of its withdrawal from the ICC in terms of a principled response to an alleged antisemitic bias against Israel on the court’s part has also been challenged.
“The Orban government’s explanation is implausible,” says Stephen Pogany emeritus professor of international law at the University of Warwick in the UK and now based in Hungary. Pogany points to a majority opinion among international law experts that Israel’s conduct of hostilities in Gaza breaches various requirements of international humanitarian law.
In Pogany’s view, Orban’s move likely stems from other motives, especially a desire to further consolidate his relations with US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump is a longtime critic of the court, while Putin is himself currently subject to an ICC arrest warrant.
“Dictators and authoritarian leaders prefer to evade scrutiny by international bodies,” he notes.
Mixed reactions to visit
While the announcement of Hungary’s withdrawal from the ICC during Netanyahu’s visit to Hungary on April 2-6 drew criticism internationally, the trip as a whole met with a mixed response from within Hungary’s Jewish community.
Leaders of the Ch’abad ultra-Orthodox community (known locally as EMIH) struck an enthusiastic note when addressing the Israeli prime minister during his meeting with local Jewish organisations in Budapest on April 4. “Hungary today is the safest place in Europe for Jews,” said an EMIH spokesman. “The fondness and appreciation that a leader like Viktor Orban has for you also sends a message to all the people of Hungary.”
Conversely, according to Ivan Merker a Jewish activist and commentator in Budapest, “though supportive of Israel, the Hungarian Jewish community is largely politically liberal and sees Netanyahu as the Israeli Orban.”
Consequently, “many people have ambivalent feelings about him at the very least,” he adds.
On the evening of April 5, around 80 protesters from the Hungarian chapter of Arzenu, which represents religious-Zionists from Judaism’s Reformed, Progressive and Liberal traditions, gathered in Dob Street, central Budapest. Demonstrators waving Israeli flags listened to speakers angered by the actions of Netanyahu’s government since the October 7 pogrom in 2023. Protestors maintained that the Israeli prime minister’s approach has been motivated more by a desire for his own political survival than ensuring the hostages’ safe return.
Sceptics also highlight the contrast between Netanyahu’s endorsement of Orban’s claims to have “zero tolerance” of antisemitism and the recent award of state honours to two prominent writers known for their antisemitic views. This builds on Orban’s own use of antisemitic tropes when referencing the Hungarian-born philanthropist George Soros.
“Orban not only tolerates antisemitism when it suits him, but incites it in order to bolster support for himself and his party,” argues Pogany, who has also written extensively on the history of antisemitism in Hungary.
The dissonance between Netanyahu’s highlighting during his visit of how Iran stood behind a multi-pronged attack on Israel and Viktor Orban’s cultivation of close ties with Tehran likewise occasioned comment. In a statement delivered to the press while standing beside the Hungarian prime minister on April 3, Netanyahu said that, “Radical Islam in the Middle East is spearheaded by one country, and that is Iran…the Iranian terror axis threatens not only us but Europe”.
“Maybe there are some in Europe who don’t understand this, but Viktor Orban understands this,” he added, raising eyebrows amongst some. Since the October 7 attacks, Hungary has maintained a controversial nuclear energy deal from 2017 with Iran, and even augmented it with a new trade agreement.
On April 4, Netanyahu received an honorary degree from Budapest’s National University of Public Service (NKE), which trains officer candidates for Hungary’s armed forces. The Hungarian Jewish magazine Szombat highlighted the move’s incongruity given that last year NKE hosted former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a notorious Holocaust denier, to lecture on “Shared Values in a Global Environment”.
Politicians playing favourites
Different views of Netanyahu’s visit overlap partially with structural cleavages inside Hungary’s Jewish world, divisions which both national leaders seem happy to exploit. The key fault line runs between EMIH (constituting between 5-10 per cent of Hungarian Jews) and the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities (Mazsihisz), representing the country’s majority Neolog tradition.
BIRN’s sources stress that close ties to Israel and good working relations with its government matter to all of Hungary’s Jewish denominations. Nevertheless, strains have sometimes been evident in relations between Netanyahu and Mazsihisz’s leadership.
During the Israeli prime minister’s previous visit to Budapest in 2017, Mazsihisz’s then president, Andras Heisler, used a public address delivered before both Netanyahu and Orban in Budapest’s Dohany Street synagogue to voice frustration with Israel’s government for failing to challenge the antisemitic connotations of Fidesz’s campaign against George Soros. Heisler spoke of Hungarian Jews feeling let down by an Israeli Foreign Ministry statement affirming such criticism as legitimate.
Conversely, EMIH’s Executive Rabbi Slomo Koves has cultivated ties with Orban, praising him as a supporter of Hungary’s Jews and of Israel. Ch’abad’s Israeli branch is close to Netanyahu’s Likud party and the denomination plays an important informal role in structuring relations between the political actors. Recent Hungarian state spending on EMIH has been markedly disproportionate to its size. Such generous support for a small denomination echoes large subsidies for Hungary’s tiny Russian Orthodox Church. In both cases, funding likely reflects the community’s diplomatic importance.
Mazsihisz’s relations with the Hungarian and Israeli governments have improved of late. Even so, Netanyahu appeared to snub the organisation, with his office omitting any mention of Mazsihisz in communications about the meeting with local Jewish leaders on April 4 and focusing exclusively on EMIH instead.
Orban’s withdrawal from the ICC has strengthened his standing with illiberal actors internationally, but the long-term consequences of Netanyahu’s visit for Hungary’s ties to its EU partners, and for good relations within Hungary’s fractured Jewish community, look far less encouraging.
