The New "European Zionism"

And Hungary's role in it

I came across this article in Newsweek, penned by David P Goldman, a perennial favourite of mine. He has been writing for the Asia Times, which even Gore Vidal characterised as an “excellent publication”, for many years now. That such an article was even allowed in Newsweek is a pleasant surprise and quite a shock, but we’ll roll with it.

I’d like to quote David in full as his article is worth examining in detail.

The New "European Zionism" and Viktor Orban's Hungary | Opinion

"Zionism for the nations of Europe," wrote Dutch anti-immigration crusader Geert Wilders in Breitbart this month. "The Europeans should follow the example of the Jewish people and safeguard the sovereignty of their nation-states." Wilders' party took first place in Holland's national elections late last year, a portent of the so-called shift to the Right that propelled nationalist parties to electoral success this year in Germany, France, Austria, and the Czech Republic. But the first European "Zionist" and the inspiration for many European conservatives was Hungary's long-serving Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Hungary is a small nation that is determined to survive the demographic winter that has crept across the industrial nations. It devotes nearly a tenth of its budget to support for families, but even more important than family subsidies is a renewed national spirit and resistance to the European Commission's attempt to homogenize the nations of Europe into a supranational blur.

I have to take issue with the “support for families” part. Yes, the amount spent is accurate, probably more proportionally than what the US spends on its military or the UK on its NHS. However, most of the money goes to young married couples to support them in buying a home, a car, etc… The idea sounds great in principle, but has massively distorted the property market, making Budapest the most unaffordable capital in Europe (compared to incomes), which has been exacerbated by the government’s encouragement of foreign buyers, including golden visa schemes.

"Humans are about to enter a new era of history. Call it 'the age of depopulation. For the first time since the Black Death in the 1300s, the planetary population will decline. But whereas the last implosion was caused by a deadly disease borne by fleas, the coming one will be entirely due to choices made by people," economist Nicholas Eberstadt Oct. 10 in Foreign Affairs.

That's a death sentence for Europe's smaller nations. When Orban came to office in 2010, government demographers gauged the total fertility (number of live births in a lifetime) for Magyar women at just 0.83, then the lowest in the world. Since then, Hungary's TFR has roughly doubled to about 1.6, and a surge in the marriage rate portends further improvement.

I honestly don’t know where Goldman got those numbers from, but they sound wrong. Hungary never had a fertility rate below 1.2 to my knowledge, though it is true that there has been noticeable improvement in the past decade and live births are up somewhat, whilst marriage rates are also seeing a rise due to these policies.

Orban became a figure of controversy in 2016 when he refused to open Hungary's borders to the millions of Middle Eastern migrants fleeing the Syrian civil war and other conflicts, defying migrant quotas assigned by the European Commission. It also put Orban in conflict with the world's wealthiest Hungarian, George Soros, whose Open Society Foundation promotes free migration.

It probably doesn’t help his image either, that he’s known to pal around with autocrats, like Putin, Erdogan, Xi and whoever is currently running the Turkic republics he’s so fond of. From a historian and linguist’s perspective, his pseudo-scientific membership and constant praise of Turkic Council leaders, all of whom are nasty autocrats, is particularly irritating. Being a smart man, Orban cannot honestly believe, that Hungarians are in any way Turkic, this idea was discredited in the 19th century and has no basis in reality. He’s obviously buttering up Turkic leaders for geopolitical reasons, mostly to do with Azeri, Turkmen and Kazakh gas and oil being piped through Turkey, Bulgaria and Serbia, as an alternative to Russian energy exports via Ukraine.

European nationalists look to Israel as a beacon of hope. It's the only high-income country with a fertility rate above the 2.1 breakeven level—so far above breakeven at three children per female that its working-age population will more than double from today's 4.5 million to 11 million by the end of this century, according to UN demographers. The same UN projections show that the working-age population of Turkey and Iran will fall by about half, and by three-quarters in Taiwan and South Korea.

As a member of a scientific advisory board to the Hungarian government, I have had the opportunity to speak to numerous high-ranking officials, and can attest that their admiration for Israel and the Jewish people is sincere, principled and deep. They view Israel as "the exemplar and paragon of a nation," as Franz Rosenzweig put it.

I don’t doubt any of that, though it must be said, that Fidesz had quite a few anti-Semites among its ranks in the nineties, including Orban’s close friend and advisor at the time, Zsolt Bayer. Fidesz’s about-turn from dog-whistle anti-Semitism towards philo-Semitism and an unwavering pro-Israel stance, irritated a lot of its traditional supporters and many flocked to Jobbik, an explicitly anti-Semitic party, which did rather well in national elections. Then, before the last election, Jobbik saw which way the wind was blowing on the European right and abandoned its anti-Semitic stance, for a more mainstream conservative image. Few people think it’s genuine. Perhaps the funniest story preceding this about-turn, was one of their most rabid leaders finding out, that he was actually a Jew and his grandparents were holocaust survivors, which led to a complete crisis of faith and him becoming an orthodox Jew, embracing his heritage. You can read the whole story here:

What happened when an anti-Semite found he was Jewish?

more:

Liberal American Jews cannot wrap their minds around the new philo-semitism among conservative European nationalists. Retired diplomat Alfred Moses writing in Newsweek cited Donald Trump's admiration for Viktor Orban as proof that Trump himself is a fascist. Wrote Moses: "In his stumbling debate performance against Harris, the only leader of a NATO country Trump mentioned was Viktor Orban, Hungary's fascist-leaning leader with antisemitic tendencies. Trump's admiration of Orban tells us as much about Trump as it does about Orban, who frequently condemns Jews in his speeches."

Orban a fascist? He won a fourth term as prime minister by outpolling the opposition 54 percent to 33 percent in free and fair elections in 2022. His political opponents campaign against him unrestrained. Unlike the United States, there's no social media censorship in Hungary, nor is there lawfare directed against political opponents, unlike Biden's America. Not a single opposition politician or journalist is in jail.

Goldman’s right about that, though calling Hungary’s elections fair is a bit of a stretch. Fidesz is not above using dirty tactics and government-connected media oligarchs to besmirch its opponents, though that’s hardly unique to Hungary.

Jewish life flourishes in Hungary, with its Jewish population of 100,000 and large Israeli community. It's safer to walk around Budapest with a kippa than New York City, let alone Paris or Berlin.

Again, Goldman is correct, but anti-Semitism is not absent from Hungarian public life and especially private interactions. Still, it is true that Fidesz is doing whatever it can to combat it and the improvement in that regard since the ugly days of the 1990s and 2000s is remarkable.

Orban defied his European Union peers and refused to permit mass immigration from the Middle East in 2016—the source of appalling violence in other European countries.

Orban banned anti-Israel demonstrations after the October 7 massacre, the only European country to do so. Hungary denounced the ICC arrest warrant against Netanyahu. And it maintains diplomatic representation in Jerusalem through a trade office, again uniquely among European nations.

That he did, though I’m not sure if I agree with that decision. It’s not like there are many supporters of Palestine in Hungary in the first place. Most people don’t care about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, we have bigger things to worry about, like the massive war being waged on our doorstep, in which ethnic Hungarians are dying in noticeable numbers.

French President Emmanuel Macron demanded an arms embargo against Israel, and Spain's Prime Minister Sanchez wants to cancel the European Union's free trade agreement with Jerusalem. Orban defends Israel. Liberals cite Orban's fiery polemics against one particular Jew—not Jews—as putative evidence of his antisemitism. That is George Soros, the world's wealthiest Hungarian and an ultra-liberal political meddler.

Soros has spent an estimated $400 million to push Hungarian politics to the Left; given the relative sizes of the Hungarian and U.S. economies, that's the equivalent of $60 billion in political spending in America. Soros draws the wrath of Hungarian conservatives not because he is a Jew, but because his Open Society Foundation is a gigantic presence in Hungarian politics. To call this antisemitism is perverse.

I think that’s fair, though I would add, that Netanyahu and Orban both hate Soros for political reasons, they see him as a real threat, that could overturn their corrupt regimes.

Viktor Orban's support for Israel stems from deep conviction. The State of Israel is a beacon of hope for European conservatives. The Old World is dying of childlessness, and Israel's unique fertility rate of three children per woman is an inspiration to Europeans who want to preserve their culture.

I don’t doubt that, though I seriously doubt Israel’s example can be replicated in godless Europe. Most of those children being born to Israeli mothers are from ultra-Orthodox families, whose lifestyles and views on women and personal freedoms, for instance, are completely anathema to Western thought and the European Zeitgeist in general.

I have met Viktor Orban and many of his senior aides, and can say without a hint of doubt that their support for Israel and for Jewish life in Hungary stems from genuine admiration for Jewish accomplishment as well as Christian religious conviction.

Partially true, though there is also political expediency behind it. Fidesz started out as a liberal party, it was the party of Young Democrats initially, but Orban’s sharp right turn and perennial alliance with the Christian Democrats changed its character beyond recognition.

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Having analysed the article, what do I actually think about European Zionism?

First off, I think Zionism itself was a pretty bad idea in the first place. Sure, the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland was understandable in the context of constant persecution, but why put it in the British Mandate of Palestine? It’s difficult to imagine an environment more hostile to Jews, both in the political and religious sense, but also in terms of the natural setting. As my Israeli friend, who now lives in cool and rainy Berlin likes to put it, it’s a frigging desert. Jews who live there are also surrounded by enemies and a constant threat of war. This is never going to go away. As a result, we can celebrate the high birth rate in Israel all we want, but the growing emigration rate doesn’t bode well for the future. I’m not sure at all, whether the Zionist project and the state it built can be sustained in the long run. History and geopolitical realities tell us otherwise.

So, how about so-called European Zionism?

I’m not especially enthused by this idea either. Europeans already have a homeland, in fact, they managed to conquer, colonise and populate four of the seven continents and are in the process of doing the same to the fifth one, Antarctica. Asia has a substantial European presence still, since North Asia is controlled by Russia and in the future, Russian North Asia might become the most, or even pretty much the only habitable zone of that continent. Although Africa has no official European presence, post-colonial shenanigans still give various European and European-derived powers quite a lot of influence.

Much is said in right-wing circles about how Europe is losing its identity and is being overrun by migrants from other cultures.

There is some truth to that, though it must be said, this is only really happening in some large cities and particularly certain areas within these cities. If you don’t go to these areas, which are comparatively tiny, in contrast to the vastness of the European continent, you’ll encounter none of it. In other words, you can’t build a caliphate out of the banlieues of Paris, and Tower Hamlets in London. Sure, Europe is getting a high number of immigrants from poorer parts of the world and some from richer regions (Americans, Aussies, Japanese, Koreans, etc…), but the only reason this is even a problem is lack of integration and low birth rates. These are political problems that can be solved with a bit of common sense, they’re hardly existential threats to the people of Europe. Some parts of major Western European cities are now struggling with high migrant crime rates. Not an ideal situation, but they’re still safer than most cities in the Americas, including the USA.

I agree with Wilders and Orban on the need to curb illegal immigration. Nevertheless, legal immigration is still a necessity in Europe and as long as it is done smartly, it can benefit everyone involved. Illegal immigration does the reverse.

But Zionism? A need for a new European Homeland? Where exactly? Antarctica? Mars? Titan?

When it comes to this planet, people of European descent already dominate most of it, despite our share of the global population becoming smaller every year.

I can already hear the rumblings of discontent coming from my readers: “It’s easy for you to say that in the comparative safety of Hungary!”, you might say. I get it, living in a major Western City gives you a different perspective, perhaps a siege mentality as well, but just look at a map or travel around the countryside for a while. Problematic migrant communities, where any European might feel unsafe are such a small area, geographically speaking. Most of Europe is still European and I think the fears, that it will be overrun by Islamic immigrants and eventually turn into a caliphate are somewhat overblown. Not saying it couldn’t happen, but there’s still plenty of time and opportunity to correct course. Recent European elections are showing that change is already happening. Appropriate action will be taken by elected officials, as is already happening in Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden and so on. Sure, the damage in some places had already been done and such a large ship will take a long time to turn around, but I have every confidence, that it will happen.