This week Israel’s Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, visited Budapest. Greeting him, Hungary’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto commented on something which strikes any visitor from the West who spends a weekend in Budapest – the absence of the antisemitic protests that have plagued cities and campuses across Europe, the US and Australia since 7 October.

‘In Hungary, anti-Semitic and anti-Israel scenes, demonstrations, and university riots such as those that can be seen in Western European countries or even in the United States are unthinkable,’ Szijjarto said. Hungary’s government can take credit for ‘absolutely guaranteeing the opportunity of peaceful and safe coexistence for the Jewish community and for our fellow Jews’ as Szijjarto said.

More important, however, is Hungary’s immigration policy. Szijjarto blames the shocking rise in antisemitism in the West squarely on Europe’s ‘absolutely irresponsible migration policy under which a vociferous minority can often override the will of the more quiet majority’ adding that it is ‘infuriating’ that Hungary should be accused of antisemitism by countries that ‘should at the very least remain silent’. As Szijjarto pointed out, the Israeli national football team has chosen Hungary as its home base in Europe.

Yet Hungary is literally, as well as metaphorically, paying a high price for its staunch protection of its – and Europe’s – borders and its refusal to accept large numbers of those it has deemed to be illegal migrants coming from countries in the Middle East where antisemitism is endemic. On 13 June the European Court of Justice ruled that it would fine Hungary 200 million euros ($AUD322 million) for breaking EU asylum rules and 1 million euro ($AUD1.61 million) every day until it stops breaking EU law and takes in more migrants/asylum seekers.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán blasted the ruling this week tweeting, ‘It seems that illegal migrants are more important to the Brussels bureaucrats than their own European citizens’. Quite. Hungary has been demonised ever since, during the great migrant crisis of 2015, it fenced its southern borders with Serbia and Croatia with razor wire to keep out people hoping to reach the EU and created a pair of transit zones for holding asylum seekers on its border which have long since closed.

Yet who has really paid the highest price for uncontrolled immigration? In Britain, the Conservative government first under Boris Johnson in April 2022 and now under Rishi Sunak has tried to implement its Rwanda Asylum Seeker plan, loosely based on Australia’s offshore processing which was a critical element in stopping unauthorised migration to Australia. One of the great promises that Brexiteers made was that Britain would regain control of its borders.

Ironically, Hungary, which supported Britain’s plan although it suggested that it should have chosen somewhere closer to the UK and with a colder climate, has maintained greater control of its borders than Britain. Despite leaving the EU, the British government’s plan was thwarted by a ruling of the European Court of Human Rights. Now Britain’s Conservative government faces a rout of historic proportions for failing to make good on its promise to the British people and Britons are facing the enormous social and economic costs of uncontrolled migration from a shocking rise in knife crime, rape gangs, and antisemitism, to ever more strain on the National Health Service and hotels throughout the country being occupied by unauthorised immigrants. Many in Conservative ranks wish either Johnson or Sunak had shown the backbone of Orbán, indeed, the joke goes that if political trends continue in their current direction Nigel Farage will campaign to take Britain back into the EU.

For those who imagined that the rise of the right and the fall of the Greens in the European parliament might make a difference to the running of the EU, the negotiations for the top EU jobs post the parliamentary election has been instructive. The dominant centre-right European People’s party has once again entered into a coalition with the Socialists and the Liberals and they are squabbling over the positions of real power in the EU –the president of the European Commission, the European Council President, and the Foreign Policy Chief. The socialists are demanding that no deals be done with the parties on the right. Former socialist prime minister of Portugal, António Costa, is still in the running despite having stood down as PM last November because of investigations into allegations of corruption in green energy deals. As Orbán observed this week, ‘the will of the European people’ has been ignored.

Yet as chance would have it, the President of the Council of Europe (not to be confused with the European Council President) which rotates every six months will be held by Hungary from July. That’s great news for Israel as Katz said this week and will make a welcome change after the presidencies of Spain and Belgium last year whose leftist governments backed trumped-up accusations made against Israel of committing genocide.

‘The period of the Hungarian Presidency is an unprecedented opportunity to improve Israel’s position in the European Union,’ Katz said, despite the ‘plots’ of the current foreign policy chief, Catalan socialist Josep Borrell. Borrell wants to remove the EU requirement that foreign policy receive unanimous backing from all 27 leaders because Hungary has blocked or delayed key anti-Israel initiatives including sanctions on Israeli settlers and a joint communique calling on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu not to invade Rafah.

Hungary’s minister for EU affairs said this week that it plans to use its presidency to introduce a new competitive, ‘farmer-centred’ agricultural deal and ‘more efficient protection of the external borders, to manage root causes of migration – and to improve a more efficient policy of return’.

Hungary’s role as Israel’s friend is part of a trend among some right-wing parties who are open supporters of the Jewish community and Israel such as Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom. But there is another connection to Israel. Theodore Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism was born in Budapest. His home, next door to the Dohanyi Synagogue, the largest and one of the most beautiful in Europe, is now the site of the Jewish Museum. In 1944, only a block away, and only 80 years ago this year, Adolf Eichmann moved into the Hotel Astoria, one of the grandest in Budapest, to personally supervise the Hungarian holocaust. No doubt he chose it not just because of the comfort it afforded but because of its proximity to the Jewish quarter. To imagine Jewish Hungarians living there when Eichmann moved in gives a precise meaning to the geography of terror. The hotel has a dark, brooding feeling and a door from the small mezzanine in the lobby which leads to the main stairwell opens automatically and makes the place feel haunted. The short distance from the Astoria to the synagogue encompasses both the glories and horrors of the past and a bridge to the future. It is to Hungary’s great credit that it has embraced the role of defending Israel as the dark wave of antisemitism washes over Europe once again.