Netanyahu arrives in Hungary, finding a rare welcome in Europe

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel began a visit to Hungary on Thursday, confiding that the self -proclaimed bastion of “illiberal democracy” would ignore an arrest warrant against him in November by the International Criminal Court.

The visit is the first of Mr. Netanyahu to a country which recognized the jurisdiction of the court, raising the possibility, at least in theory, that it could be stopped. He went to Washington to discuss the future of Gaza with President Trump in February, but the United States, like Israel, never recognized the International Court.

In Hungary, the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban clearly indicated that he would ignore his obligations as a party to a 1998 treaty which established the court.

Mr. Orban invited Mr. Netanyahu to visit a short time after the court issued his arrest warrant, assuring him that “the judgment of the ICC will have no effect in Hungary and that we will not follow his conditions.”

The vast propaganda machine in Hungary has tilted into anti -Semitic tropes in its non -stop broadcast by George Soros, an American financier and philanthropist of Hungarian origin who is Jewish. He threw it as a sinister puppeteer in a vast world conspiracy supported by high finances and hidden cosmopolitan forces.

But Mr. Orban, a fervent supporter of Israel, adopted the country’s right -wing prime minister as a spirit related in tune to his own ethnontalist opinions and this reverence for national sovereignty without foreign interference.