I am not an historian, decent author or a journalist, and the chances are that unless there is a link or reference to somewhere else, the perpetrator is yours truly – Renaud Sarda. I created this blog as a focal point, to arm people with arguments and facts that they can perhaps use to counter biased media reporting and anti-Israel propaganda, and to help counter (BDS) campaign. I am a Zionist/Sephardi/Jew who will fly the Israeli flag, and defend whatever Israel does.
At the General Election last year, the Labour Party, under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, secured 40 per cent of the vote. That was a considerable advance on the showing under Ed Miliband in 2015 (30.4 per cent) or under Gordon Brown in 2010 (29 per cent). Or, for that matter, under Tony Blair in 2005 (35.2 per cent). This was a shocking result given the appalling views that Corbyn has expressed on a range of subjects.
It was already apparent that many anti–semites had come to regard the Labour Party as providing them with a “safe space”. Corbyn has described Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends”. Yet the anti–semitism of these groups is explicit and extreme. The Hamas Charter calls for the murder of Jews, not just in Israel but around the world. It endorses The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious fraudulent text used by those promoting Jewish conspiracy theories.
In recent days we have seen confirmation of the depth of anti-semitism in the modern Labour Party. But it was already pretty well known last year. Despite that 12,878,460 shrugged and voted Labour anyway.
Will anything change? Perhaps. The Jewish Leadership Council protest outside Parliament this week had the slogan “Enough is Enough”. It struck a chord. There comes a point at which a fair minded person with a mild interest in current affairs can no longer give Corbyn and his Party the benefit of the doubt on this issue. Surely there is a limit to how many Facebook groups Corbyn joined without noticing the content, or murals he endorsed without looking at them, or terrorists he can describe as “friends” and then say he is being merely diplomatic? Blaming everything on the Daily Mail is an inadequate response.
It is not just about Corbyn. A YouGov poll of Labour Party members for The Times was published this morning. It asked:
“There has been quite a lot of news coverage recently about antisemitism in the Labour Party. Which of the following statements comes closest to your view?”
Three options were given:
Only 19 percent went for:
“It is a serious and genuine problem that the party leadership needs to take urgent action to address.”
By contrast 47 percent chose:
“It is a genuine problem, but its extent is being deliberately exaggerated to damage Labour and Jeremy Corbyn, or to stifle criticism of Israel.”
There were 30 percent who plumped for:
“It is not a serious problem at all, and is being hyped up to undermine Labour and Jeremy Corbyn, or to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel.”
So even if Corbyn resigned (which he shows no sign of contemplating) that would not mean that anti-semitism would vanish from the Labour Party. But it is certainly hard to see how many in the Jewish community could wish to see Jeremy Corbyn returned as Prime Minister after the General Election. The Jewish population in the UK is relatively small – around 300,000 or about half a percent of the population of the UK. But in a some constituencies the number of Jewish voters is considerable. They include some marginal constituencies. In Finchley and Golders Green, the Conservative MP, Mike Freer, had a majority last year of 1,657. Matthew Offord, also a Conservative MP, has a majority of 1,072 in Hendon. Then there is Harrow East where the Conservative MP, Bob Blackman, has a majority of 1,757. Theresa Villiers, again a Conservative MP, only hung on in Chipping Barnet by 353. All these seats are on the list that Labour needs to gain to put Corbyn into Downing Street.
Seats with large Jewish populations which returned Labour MPs last year include Ilford North and Bury South. I suspect that many Jewish people were content to vote for their Labour candidate on the assumption that there was no risk of a Labour Government. Would they take that chance another time?
Although the local elections should be about local issues it is inevitable that the results for Barnet Council will be taken as a measure of the strength of feeling on this issue. If after all this coverage, Labour still gain control of the Council then the Corbynistas will say there is nothing to worry about.
On the other hand, it should not be assumed that only the Jewish community are affronted by Jeremy Corbyn’s stance on this issue. Another YouGov poll, this time among the general public, has found a significant decline in his personal approval rating. It is possible that he has finally run out of excuses.
THE equality of rights for all Israeli citizens was demonstrated at a meeting in Newton MearnsSynagogue.
I was present at the event which was organised jointly by the Confederation of Friends of Israel Scotland and Reservists on Duty, an Israeli NGO established in December 2015 by Israeli reserve soldiers and officers to act against the BDS campaign
Guest speakers were Lebanese Christian Israeli Jonathan Elkhoury, Bedouin Israeli Mohammad Kaabiya and Druze Israeli Khateeb Lorena, who talked about the rights they enjoyed in the Jewish State.
Mr Elkhoury, 25, was born in Lebanon, the son of a South Lebanese Army officer.
When Hezbollah took over South Lebanon, they said that they would persecute everyone who had worked with Israel.
Mr Elkhoury said: “Israel opened its borders for us and my father came over, but we stayed behind.
“Hezbollah destroyed everything that Israel had built for us and left us with nothing. They started entering the homes of members of the South Lebanon Army, took men away and tortured and killed them.
“I was eight years old and that was very difficult for me.”
In 2001, Mr Elkhoury’s mother decided it was time to move to Israel, where special schools and educational centres had been opened up for members of the SLA and their families.
His family moved to Haifa where he now lives and he has served in the IDF.
Mr Kaabiya, 27, spoke of his grandfather, the Kabiya Tribe Sheik, saving and rescuing pioneer Alexander Zaid in 1936 and of the formation of a Bedouin unit in the Palmach.
As a teenager, his ambition was to be an Israeli officer.
Mr Kaabiya said: “I served in a helicopter unit, helping to save injured soldiers and others in trouble.
“Many times, we took Palestinian children to be treated in Israeli hospitals. Today, every week my unit has been helping the Syrian refugees.
“Many times, the soldiers are putting themselves at risk to help people across the border. They don’t care about the identity of the people they go to help.
“After three years in the unit, I worked for the Checkpoint Authority and I have also helped to integrate Bedouin soldiers into the army.
“Israel is the shell that protects all of its citizensand we feel that it is our duty to serve in the army.”
Ms Lorena, 21, who is a student and comes from a small village in the north of Israel, said: “Every year, 85 per cent of Druze men are in the army.
“We have all our rights and there is nowhere we can freely express ourselves and our religion except Israel.
“In Israel, I get more rights as a Druze than I would anywhere else in the world.
“In my society, only men can serve in combat units in the army. I have served in a group undertaking leadership activities.”
The speakers were asked if Israel can be considered an apartheid state for the way it is treating people in the West Bank and Gaza.
Mr Kaabiya said: “Yes, there is apartheid in the West Bank, but it is by the Palestinian Authorities.
“The people living in the refugee camps are not allowed to vote and there is a lot of corruption there. If people don’t support Fatah, they have to pay more taxes and can’t get work.
“They are keeping people in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza and that is apartheid.”
Asked if they thought that pro-Palestinian activists are really just anti-Israel, Mr Elkhoury said: “I tell those who say that they are pro-Palestinian that they are not doing anything to help them.
“They are just blinded by hate. The world is silent about what is happening to the Palestinians and how they are treated by their own people — how they are treated in the Arab countries where they are living as refugees.
“The Palestinians who stayed in Israel have full rights.
“We need you to share our stories with everyone you meet, because this is the real Israel we know.”
The meeting was chaired by COFIS convenor Nigel Goodrich, who said: “This evening we have nailed the lie about Israel being an apartheid state.
“Israel is a lighthouse nation and we should defend her honour and stand up for her.”
If you look at the data, life keeps improving in the Palestinian Territories.
Correction, 3/20/18: The piece originally stated that at the end of the Six-Day War in 1967, "Israel took over the Palestinian Territories." During the Six-Day War, the territories in question belonged to Jordan, not "Palestine." The piece has been updated accordingly.
* * *
Of the various complaints made against Israelis, the worst has been the charge that the country is committing genocide. To wit: Nobel laureate José Saramago not long ago claimed that “what is happening in Palestine is a crime we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz.” While not every critic of Israel takes this line, enough influential academics and journalists have made similar claims, so that world opinion now judges Israel to be scarcely better than North Korea.
But “genocide” isn’t merely a matter of opinion; it’s measurable. Massive empirical data about life in Israel and the Palestinian territories has been compiled by distinguished Israeli journalist Ben-Dror Yemini and his recently translated 2014 book Industry of Lies shows just how ludicrous the genocide charge is.
Begin with life expectancy. At the end of the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel took over the territories from Jordan, the average Palestinian in the West Bank and Gaza expected to live just 49 years, according to a U.N. report. In 1975, Palestinian life expectancy rose to 56; by 1984, it climbed to 66. Yemini notes that this is “a rise of almost seventeen years in longevity within seventeen years of Israeli rule.” Since 1984, Palestinians have lived an average of 75 years. That’s not only higher than the global average, but longer than the life expectancy in many Arab and South American countries—and even in some European countries. Israeli Arabs, meanwhile, have the highest life expectancy in the Muslim world.
Infant mortality is another marker of genocide and happily it’s been declining in Palestinian life, having shown dramatic improvement since 1967. Also a happy statistic: the high birth and low death rates of Palestinians in Gaza put the territory near the top of the world in population growth. It is a strange kind of “genocide” that creates the conditions for a population of people to flourish.
But it isn’t just the Palestinian people who have flourished. Infrastructure has also meaningfully improved—most notably, Palestinian access to clean drinking water. Under Jordanian occupation, only 4 out of 708 Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank had modern water supply systems and running water.
Five years after Israel took over, the network of fresh water sources grew by 50 percent and continued to expand: By 2004, 641 Palestinian communities—accounting for 96 percent of the population—had running water, even in seasons of low rainfall. True, Hamas’s reckless sewage management and over-pumping from Gaza’s aquifer are aggravating regional challenges; but pioneering Israeli conservationtactics and technologies (such as drip irrigation and desalination plants) offer hope for the whole area. “One of the driest countries on Earth now makes more freshwater than it needs,” cheeredScientific American.
With improvements in physical well-being have come advances in culture. Palestinian literacy is impressive indeed: an astonishing 91 percent adult literacy rate. That makes the Palestinians the most educated population in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, according to a 2006 World Bank report.
Israeli Arabs are also doing quite well academically, especially Arab Christians—who outperform Jews in matriculation certificates. “Christian Arabs do better than the Israeli Jewish population at large,” Yemini writes. “If the charge of significant [anti-Arab] discrimination were true, it is hard to imagine such an outcome.”
And if voting with their feet is any indication, a majority of Israeli Arabs prefer to live in Israel rather than other countries, as suggested in various polls. Many even favor Israeli-ruled East Jerusalem over Palestinian citizenship in the territories.
But what about all the bloodshed? Isn’t the Israeli-Palestinian conflict among the worst the world has ever seen? You wouldn’t use a word like “genocide” if it wasn’t, would you? As Yemini underscores: This is a big “no.” Over the last 70 years, 5 million lives have been lost in wars across the Middle East and North Africa; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict accounts for less than one percent of the death toll.
And even the larger Arab-Israeli conflict is way down the list of the world’s most lethal wars. Consider one comparison: In the Algerian War, France killed more Muslims in eight years than all the people killed in the entire 100 years of the Arab-Israeli conflict. About ten times more. And during those eight years, the French killed far more Algerians—nearly 30 times more—than Israelis killed Palestinians since 1948. “Relative to population size,” Yemini says, “more Palestinians have died in traffic accidents than in violent clashes with Israel.”
Given the extensive media coverage of this minor conflict, you would think academics and journalists might provide the public with more of these relevant comparisons. But comparative analysis is rarely how they explore the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Like advertisers selling a product, they single out and sensationalize. Professors such as Harvard’s Stephen Walt and University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer admitted as much in their scorched-earth attack on the Jewish state: “Our focus will be primarily on Israeli behavior,” the professors confessed in The Israel Lobby, “and no attempt will be made to compare it with the actions of other states in the region or in other parts of the world.”
Virtually anything can be made to look ugly when you isolate it and put it under a microscope: People are people and they often behave in ugly ways. This fact is part of the human condition, and not unique to Israelis or Palestinians or anyone else. And if what you’re looking to confirm is your own biases, there will always be anecdata you can find to support your case.
Israelis and Palestinians certainly have imperfections. Their shared home isn’t yet the land of milk and honey, but nor is it the hellhole often depicted by intellectuals and the media. To understand this truth, all you have to do is look at the objective data.
Next time a commentator starts to catastrophize about Israel, cheer them up with truths of increasing Palestinian life expectancy, declining infant mortality, growing populations, improved water conditions, amazing literacy, comparatively low casualty rates, and much of the other good news in Yemini’s level-headed book.
Jonah Cohen is the communications director for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).
On a state visit to Israel, Bulgarian President Rumen Radev became the first world leader to visit Israel’s national Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) in Beersheba, The Times of Israel reported Thursday.
Radev and other Bulgarian officials and businessmen discussed cooperation in the area of cybersecurity with their Israeli counterparts.
The head of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, Yigal Unna, described how the facility operated, how it cooperates with other cybersecurity authorities in Israel, and how his organization met the challenges of the most immediate cybersecurity threats to the Bulgarian delegation.
The visit was part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s effort to expand cooperation between Israel and Eastern and Central European nations.
The Bulgarians toured the CERT facility, which also houses Israel’s National Cyber Security Center; the Government Security Operations Center, which protects government agencies; and the Cyber Center and financial continuity department, which works together with both the finance and energy ministries.
They also visited Beersheba’s cyber park, which operates in conjunction with Israel’s national CERT, Ben Gurion University and about 20 companies involved in cybersecurity.
While greeting Radev on Thursday, Netanyahu mentioned the strong ties Israel has with Bulgaria, and mentioned the president’s visit to Beersheba. “Israel is at the forefront of all this scientific research and technological know-how,” Netanyahu told Radev. “We’re eager to share it with our friends. You are our friends, we share with you the past, a vibrant present and unbelievable future.”
After congratulating Israel on its 70th birthday, Radev expressed interest in the promise of Israel’s high-tech accomplishments, “We are deeply interested to take the Israeli example to build a society that is both socially engaged and integrated. I mean basically the hi-tech, I mean the cyber security, and science and education.”
The flight from Delhi to Tel Aviv via the airspace of Oman, Saudi Arabia and Jordan took seven and a half hours.
Air India flight AI 139 from Delhi to Tel Aviv made history yesterday by becoming the first commercial flight to fly to Israel over Saudi Arabia. The flight via the airspace of Oman, Saudi Arabia and Jordan took seven and a half hours, two hours less than if it had been required to circumvent Saudi Arabia.
There were only 75 passengers aboard the gleaming Boeing 788 Dreamliner, which landed at Ben Gurion Airport, but Air India is confident that its three weekly flights on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursday will prove to be profitable.
On hand to greet the historic flight was Minister of Transport Yisrael Katz and Minister of Tourism Yariv Levin.
Katz told AFP, "This is an historic moment. For the first time, there has been an official connection between the State of Israel and Saudi Arabia,”
Levin echoed these sentiments. "This evening we are celebrating moving closer together our relations with India and the first ever civil connection with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. We welcome the plane's crew and its passengers."
He added, "This flight will contribute to increasing tourist traffic from India which is seeing a major upsurge. Opening this new route is part of the marketing revolution that is bringing about new records in tourists coming to Israel."
Not everybody was celebrating. El Al Israel Airlines Ltd. (TASE: ELAL) has not been granted rights to fly over Saudi Arabia on its Tel Aviv - Mumbai route and the Israeli carrier's CEO Gonen Usishkin is protesting unfair competition. He told "Yediot Ahronot", "The government is not acting for our benefit. We expect equal opportunity and it's a shame that the government and the prime minister do not take that into account."
Ninety minutes after landing in Israel, at 11.15 pm, the aircraft took off on the return leg to Delhi, via the same route.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on March 23, 2018
March 21, 2018 | A former head of the Mossad, Tamir Pardo, says he has recruited over 30 hackers from Israel’s security and intel services for his cybersecurity firm XM Cyber, founded two years ago and for which he serves as president. Pardo told Reuters that XM Cyber aims to secure networks by imitating how real hackers operate and simulating attacks to expose vulnerabilities. “I thought there are so many companies with great products but they are not focusing on the right question,” Pardo told Reuters. “The real question is are my crown jewels really protected.” Pardo said he staffed his teams with hackers from the Mossad, the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, and the army’s elite intelligence unit 8200. The former spy chief, who headed the Mossad from 2011 to 2016, said his clients include insurance companies, banks and critical infrastructure companies in Israel, the US and Europe. Last month, Pardo warned at the MUNI-EXPO urban innovation event at the Tel Aviv Convention Center that cyber threats amounted to “a nuclear weapon — a soft and silent nuclear weapon,” and that using such threats, one “can damage societies, destroy states, and win a war without firing a shot.”
In January 2018, the WJC conducted comprehensive research about online anti-Semitism in January 2018 compared to January 2016. Our research found that the use of anti-Semitic symbols and posts denying the Holocaust increased dramatically in January 2018 compared to that same period in 2016.
Some anti-Semitic content has already been deleted by Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Yet, there are still many more posts out there!
Today, we are calling on you to report any anti-Semitic posts to these companies to make sure they will be deleted. With your help we can make it happen. So please click on posts and report them to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
A Quick Guide for Reporting Anti-Semitic Posts on Social Media On Facebook, at the bottom of the image click on the option button then report the post, select “I think it shouldn’t be on Facebook” and then “This is inappropriate, annoying or not funny.” And then submit it.
On Twitter, find right corner of a tweet and click the down-facing arrow. When the list appears, scroll down and click on the “Report Tweet” button. Then when a new screen comes up choose the “It's abusive or harmful” option and click next to send the report.
Instagram, on the bottom of the post click on the “three dots” button. Then click the “Report inappropriate” tab followed by the “This photo shouldn’t be on Instagram” tab and then finally the “Hate Speech or symbol.”
In early March, János Lázár, a senior Hungarian minister, posted a video on Facebook complaining about the lack of “white Christians” in Vienna. Muslim migrants, he warned, were destroying the city—and if someone didn’t do something, they would transform Budapest, Hungary’s capital, in a similar way. “If we let them in...our cities,” Lazar told his followers, “the consequences will be crime, impoverishment, dirt, filth and impossible urban conditions.”
Lázár is chief of staff to Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, and his post came about a month before the country goes to the polls in April. It was a classic move from Orbán, something his Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz) had done many times before: play to voters’ fears over Islam and immigration. Facebook removed the video, but it became the latest salvo in a political battle that has made Orbán beloved by the far right in Europe—and loathed by anyone left of France’s Marine Le Pen.
That battle began in 2015, when hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees crossed the Mediterranean and began their journey across Europe, often by foot. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced an open-door policy to refugees fleeing Syria, Orbán had a razor-wire fence erected on his country’s border. Across the continent, he was vilified. “The refugees won't be stopped if we just build fences,” Merkel, who grew up behind the Berlin Wall, said of Orbán at the time. “And I've lived behind a fence for long enough.” At a summit in Riga, Latvia, that same year, European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker greeted Orbán, saying: “Hello, dictator.” Hungarians were initially sympathetic to desperate refugees sleeping in parks and train stations before trying to reach France and Germany. But their attitudes quickly hardened. A spate of Islamic State militant group (ISIS) attacks in European cities only increased fear and anger toward migrants, most of whom were Muslim. It was a shift, analysts say, that Orbán and Fidesz deftly exploited.
Over the past three years, the prime minister and his party have maintained a narrow focus on refugees, positioning their re-election campaign in opposition to Merkel’s efforts to require all EU member states to resettle a quota of migrants. In response, Hungarian billionaire financier George Soros, who has called for Europe to accept refugees, has also become one of the Orbán’s primary targets. (Soros, who is Jewish, has claimed the campaign against him is anti-Semitic.)
So far, Orbán’s three-pronged attack—against Muslim migrants, Soros and the EU—appears to have worked, although some say the prime minister’s support is waning. Still, most critics say it is not a question of whether his Fidesz party will win in April, but by how much. Which other far-right groups in Europe see as a hopeful sign for what they can achieve.
Viktor Orbán, Hungary's prime minister, and supporters attend a rally in Budapest, Hungary, on March 15, 2012. "Hungary won't be a colony," Orbán told a crowd of tens of thousands of Hungarians on a national holiday commemorating the 1848 revolution. AKOS STILLER/BLOOMBERG/GETTY
Orbán had an auspicious start in politics during the dying days of the Soviet occupation of Hungary. In 1989, at a ceremony honoring the Communist leader Imre Nagy—whom Moscow executed decades prior—he called for Soviet troops to leave Hungary. A year later, after the Soviets departed, Orbán won a seat in parliament, where he and his Fidesz contemporaries became known for their fiery speeches and anti-establishment politics.
By the mid-1990s, however, Orbán had persuaded his party, Fidesz, to move far to the right. In a nation invaded and conquered first by the Mongols, then the Ottomans, then the Nazis and finally the Soviets, he realized that playing to nationalism could help them win. At the forefront of his rhetoric: the legacy of the Treaty of Trianon, which in 1920 saw 75 percent of Hungary confiscated and given to Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia following World War I. Orbán exploited this sense of grievance and betrayal in the run-up to the 1998 elections, when, at 35, he became the country’s youngest prime minister. Defeated four years later, he then became opposition leader when Hungary joined the European Union in 2004.
After the global financial crisis, which battered Hungary’s economy, Orbán returned to power in 2010, winning a landslide election. One of his first acts in office was to restore voting rights and citizenship to the descendants of Hungarians displaced by Trianon. A two-thirds majority in parliament gave Orbán the power to introduce a new constitution, bring on allies to head both the state audit and prosecutor’s office and pack Hungary’s constitutional court with Fidesz appointees. The prime minister lowered the retirement age for judges, forcing hundreds from office, and had Hungary’s election law rewritten to favor Fidesz.
Meanwhile, Orbán’s coterie of wealthy businessmen and tycoons steadily bought up the country’s dwindling independent media outlets. By 2017, all of Hungary’s 18 regional newspapers were owned by pro-government oligarchs. “That is the great difference between Hungary and the United States,” says Paul Lendvai, the Hungarian journalist and author of Orbán: Europe’s New Strongman. “There is no New York Times or CNN. There are no free newspapers or television. They eliminated them.”
But it’s not just the lack of dissenting voices. In 2017, Transparency International warned that the erosion of institutions in Hungary was among the worst in Eastern Europe, and corruption allegations have dogged Orbán during his eight years in power. According to the Hungarian edition of Forbes, the Orbán family, which once lived in a one-room house in rural Hungary, now has a net worth of 23 million euros ($28.3 million), most of it earned since 2010. In March, the EU’s anti-fraud office began investigating Orbán’s son-in-law, István Tiborcz, over a series of public lighting projects. And the far-right Jobbik party, which would appear to be a natural ally of the prime minister given his anti-immigration rhetoric, has called on him to resign and campaigned with the slogan “You work! They steal.”
Orbán’s spokesman, Zoltán Kovács, says Hungary has no greater issue with graft than the rest of Europe. “We are aware of our own rankings. We are not proud of it. We know that corruption we have to cope with, and the agencies responsible for dealing with it are doing their best.”
In response, Orbán’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has only hardened, with the prime minister portraying himself as his country’s savior, protecting Christian Europe against the Muslim hordes. “Orbán’s rhetoric uses migrant as a negative term,” says András Kováts, president of Menedék, which provides legal aid to refugees in Hungary. “Over the past few years, it is been transformed into something like a swear word.”
Refugees are seen at a gas station as they make their way to Hungarian border with Serbia in Belgrade, Serbia, on October 5, 2016. TALHA OZTURK/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY
The migrant crisis was a turning point for the Hungarian prime minister, both ideologically and strategically, says Lendvai, enabling him to divert attention away from concerns over graft and towards immigration. “The migration issue was...the deciding factor, which helped to turn the tide after Orbán won the second elections. At the beginning of 2015, he was very much down, but he managed to turn it around completely.”
By most accounts, the party’s momentum continued into this year. But on February 25, Fidesz faced a crucial election in Hódmezővásárhely, a southern city near the Romanian and Serbian borders. Ahead of the poll, Fidesz was confident that its anti-migrant, anti-Soros message would resonate in a region once overwhelmed by refugees. So it came as a shock to many across the country when an independent, Péter Márki-Zay, won with 57 percent of the vote. Turnout, which was less than 40 percent during the last election in 2014, was a record high.
Critics began wondering if voters had grown tired of Orbán’s message. The day after the result, Daniel Makonnen, who works at Soros’s Open Society Foundation, says dozens of anti-migrant posters that lined the main road between the Budapest airport and the city center “were taken down overnight.”
Within Hungary, some suggested that economic concerns and corruption were of more concern to voters than fear-mongering over migrants. “On education, on health care, money is really not going…[into] these sectors that are underperforming,” says Zsuzsanna Végh, Budapest-based associate researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Whereas a lot of money is going to building stadiums. People are fed up with that.”
Others are less sure about the public’s frustration. Mariann Őry, who runs foreign news at the conservative Hungarian daily Magyar Hírlap, points out that Fidesz lost in Hódmezővásárhely only because every other party backed Márki-Zay in an unprecedented show of political unity. Nationally, Fidesz is still polling at over 40 percent, with its closest rival, the extreme-right Jobbik, at 19 percent. “There is no consensus among opposition politicians...when it comes to coordination,” says Őry. “It seems to be a theoretical idea only.”
Kovacs, Orbán’s spokesman, also says the party’s loss in Hódmezővásárhely was an anomaly, and that the anti-migrant and anti-Soros rhetoric continues to serve the purpose it always had for Fidesz. “This is how you can get your message understood.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán arrive to attend a joint press conference in Budapest, Hungary, on February 2, 2015. ARPAD KURUCZ/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY
That message, according to Kovács, still resonates in Hungary—and across Europe. While many on the continent balk when Orbán refers to migrants as a poison, Kovács says, “We maintain that it is only through...outspoken language—and sometimes a little bit of overdose of that—you can point out the reality on the ground.”
Today, Orbán is a figurehead for the far right across Europe—and even among some in the U.S. On March 9, before a speech at a rally in France, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told The New York Times that Orbán was a “hero” and “the most significant guy on the scene right now.” The prime minister was the only European leader to endorse Donald Trump in 2016, and the American president has since referred to Hungarian leader as “strong and brave.”
Within Europe, some of Orbán’s early allies have faded. France’s Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders both lost elections in 2017. But his ideology remains potent. In March 2018, Italy’s far-right Five Star Movement became the biggest political party in the country. And the leader of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, Heinz-Christian Strache, is now vice chancellor.
Őry, the Hungarian journalist, says that while it is not exactly fashionable to praise Orbán in liberal, European circles, that does not mean his support isn’t there. “I know it's a non-PC opinion in the West to like Orbán,” she says, “but if you look at the articles about him and jump to the comment section, the readers usually like him a lot more than the journalists.”
Since 2014, when the prime minister infamously outlined his vision of “illiberal democracy” during a speech to ethnic Hungarians in Romania, strongmen—and, with the exception of Le Pen, it does tend to be men—have idealized Orbán. In 2011, Poland’s far-right doyen Jaroslaw Kaczynski said Orbán “gave us an example of how we can win”—and four years later, his Law and Justice Party took power. Other allies include Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and China’s Xi Jinping, who recently abolished China’s two-term limit, effectively meaning he can govern for life.
For a global retinue of leaders and keyboard cheerleaders, Orbán has served as a paragon of what can be done with the right cocktail of rhetoric, circumstance and an unfettered will to power. But for Lendvai, a Jewish Hungarian who lived through both fascism and communism, Orbán’s apparent impenetrability raises the specter of that most typical of the afflictions of power: hubris.
“Power can blind you,” says Lendvai. “The odds are still in favor of a Fidesz victory, but it is unlikely to be a triumph, and everything that weakens Orbán and his regime is a victory for democratic forces.”
March 21, 2018 | A former head of the Mossad, Tamir Pardo, says he has recruited over 30 hackers from Israel’s security and intel services for his cybersecurity firm 
