For 16 years, Viktor Orban was on speed dial in Jerusalem. Israel could rely on him in the heart of the European Union. Whether blocking critical resolutions in Brussels or putting aside anti-Israeli decisions, the Hungarian prime minister was more than an ally; he was a strategic insurance policy.
With Orban’s departure from power following the recent elections, Israel is waking up to a starkly different European landscape. The “automatic veto” that Jerusalem enjoyed for over a decade has evaporated overnight.
“We need to be clear about what happened here,” Alon Ushpiz, former director general of Israel’s foreign office and head of Alon international bridgewyas, Moonshot-Spece international strategy and governmental affairs, said.
“Israel just lost a major asset. This was a commodity that disappeared yesterday; it simply no longer exists.”
Israel's pseudo-UN Security Council
For years, Hungary served as a “veto-lite” for Israel, functioning in the EU much like the United States does in the UN Security Council. Whenever the EU moved to sanction Israel, label settlement products, or issue scathing condemnations of military operations, Budapest was there to break the consensus.
“Sometimes, they didn’t even wait for us to call,” Yaakov Hadas, the former Israeli ambassador to Hungary, said. “They understood on their own what needed to be done. If we asked for something, we almost always got it.”
“It wasn’t always automatic, but it was the closest thing to it,” Ushpiz explained. “When we needed them, they were there. We knew they would be there. Now, we are in a completely different situation regarding probabilities. We are now far more dependent on goodwill – and the power of persuasion we have with other actors.”
The bond between Orban and Netanyahu was not merely political; it was conceptual.
Hadas recalled that Orban viewed Netanyahu not just as a colleague, but as a mentor.
“I saw it during COVID-19,” he said. “Orban worked exactly like Netanyahu. He was the first in Europe to grasp Netanyahu’s concept that the vaccine was the only way out. He was literally speaking Netanyahu’s words from two days prior on Hungarian television. He saw the world through the same lens.”
Hadas noted that the Hungarian affinity for Israel runs deeper than just one leader. “The Hungarians feel alone, ethnically and linguistically,” he explained. “They see parallels in our challenges, especially migration. When they built their 150-kilometer border fence, they looked at our ‘smart fences’ as a model. They didn’t see a difference between our fight against terror and their fight to keep migrants out. In their view, it’s the same struggle for national survival.”
One of the reasons the Israel-Hungary alliance was so effective – and so polarizing – was Orban’s willingness to irritate the EU’s “old guard” in Germany and France. Hadas used a stinging metaphor to describe the power dynamics in Brussels.
“There is an old English saying: ‘Children must not speak unless spoken to,’” he said. “In the EU, Hungary was the newborn child. The big powers – the ‘parents’ – expected them to follow the rules and keep quiet. But Orban refused. He played a game that was in a different league entirely from Hungary’s actual size.”
By forming the Visegrád Group (V4) with Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, Orban created a power bloc that the “old EU” couldn’t ignore. “They hated him for it,” Hadas added.
“Even if you were the nicest person in the world and didn’t look like an ‘antisemite,’ they would still crucify you if you were Hungarian because you were interfering with the order. Ordnung muss sein. (‘There must be order’) Orban broke that order, and Israel was the beneficiary.”
However, that defiance came with a price. Ushpiz points out that Israel’s total identification with the Trump wing of American politics, which Orban also championed, has left Jerusalem vulnerable in a post-Orban, post-Trump European context.
“Israel is identified in the EU as being completely aligned with Trump,” Ushpiz noted. “In the European Union, Trump is seen as a very big problem. When you combine that with the current context– Jewish terror in the West Bank, the lack of progress on the Palestinian issue – you have a recipe for disaster.”
Ushpiz is particularly concerned that the EU will now move to target Israel’s participation in critical civilian projects. “If there is a hit to the Open Skies agreement or the Horizon research programs, Israel is in deep trouble,” he warned. “We cannot treat Europe as a tactical problem where we just run from one small fire to another. These are strategic interests.”
The question remains whether Netanyahu’s decision to put so many eggs into the Orban basket was a mistake. During the Hungarian election campaign, Netanyahu was vocal in his support for his Hungarian counterpart, even as polls suggested Orban’s grip on power was slipping.
“By the ‘test of results,’ it was clearly a mistake,” Ushpiz said bluntly. “If Orban had won, I would tell you it wasn’t a mistake. But in diplomacy, you are judged by the outcome. We bet on a horse that lost, and now we have to deal with the new reality.”
Ushpiz is also critical of what he sees as a lack of a coherent Israeli strategy for Europe. “I’m not sure there is an organized Israeli strategy toward Europe at all,” he said.
“We’ve been too busy with other things, and we’ve treated Europe as a ‘defense’ game. You can’t manage a relationship with a continent through tactical firefighting by the prime minister.”
Ushpiz warned that the loss of this diplomatic shield comes at the worst possible time. Since the October 7 massacre and the Israel-Hamas War that followed, relations with the EU have been on a downward trajectory for three years, exacerbated by tensions over the West Bank and Israel’s identification with the Trump administration. “The challenges are piling up,” he said.
“And now, the tool we had in our kit to manage those challenges [Orban] is gone.”