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In Orban’s rule, Israelis saw a model for their own country. Will he also be one in defeat?
(JTA) — For years, critics and supporters of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alike have seen Hungary’s Viktor Orban as a model for his politics.
Netanyahu long called Orban a “true friend” who consistently backed Israel against criticism in Europe, and his allies said Orban’s policies kept Hungarian Jews safe amid increasing danger. His critics say he followed Orban down a dangerous path of democratic backsliding.
Now, in the wake of Orban’s spectacular defeat in Hungary’s election earlier this month, the comparison has taken on a different cast.
“Israel, soon,” Gilad Kariv, a Reform rabbi and member of Knesset from the liberal Democrats party wrote as he published a photo on his social media page of vast crowds gathering in Budapest to celebrate Orban’s defeat.
The election in Hungary comes as Israel looks ahead to an election in the next six months, with polls showing Netanyahu facing an uphill battle to retain power. For his many critics, the results are fueling optimism for an Orban-like upset in Israel.
“Congrats Hungary. A new chapter is on the horizon for Israel too. It’s time for everyone who believes in a Jewish and democratic Israel to stand together and commit to that shared vision,” wrote UnXeptable, the Israeli opposition movement that launched in response to Netanyahu’s efforts to weaken the judiciary’s independence. “A brighter future is possible.”
On the right, too, the comparison was clear. In the hours after Orban’s defeat, one of the anti-Netanyahu protest movement’s most recognizable slogans, “Israel will not become Hungary,” was repurposed, ironically, by voices on the right as reassurance that Israel would not follow Hungary’s political trajectory.
Olga Deutsch, vice president of pro-Israel watchdog NGO Monitor and a researcher at the right-leaning Misgav Institute, said the discussion in Israel has been overwhelmingly inward-looking.
Israelis “view news from abroad through very local lenses,” she said. “There is much less debate on whether Orban had an amazing human rights track record inside of Hungary, or even about the Russia versus Ukraine discourse in the context of the EU. Rather, they debate his loss in the context of what that will mean for Israel.”
One strain of implications revolves around whether Magyar will be as supportive of Israel and its leader as Orban was. Early indications suggest that the answer is no. After Netanyahu suggested that Magyar had invited him back to Hungary this fall, Magyar announced that he would abide by the compact creating the International Criminal Court, meaning that Netanyahu cannot visit without facing arrest.
Tom Gross, a journalist with expertise on Middle East issues, said in an interview that he believed Israel was functioning as an “easy sacrificial lamb” for Magyar as the new Hungarian government seeks to unlock frozen EU funds.
“Even though Magyar may not personally have animosity towards the State of Israel, Israel — and in particular Bibi — will be the easiest sacrificial lamb to offer up to win over Brussels on other issues,” Gross said.
Yonatan Levi, a researcher at the London School of Economics and a fellow at Molad-The Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy, a Jerusalem-based policy group focused on democratic institutions, said the “intense public attention” to the Hungarian vote among Israelis was unusual for reasons going well beyond the Hungary-Israel relationship.
“I don’t remember any elections in a foreign country in recent years, except for the United States, that Israelis followed as closely as the Hungarian elections,” he said.
He attributed that focus to the widespread perception that Hungary has seemed like a blueprint for Netanyahu and his partners.
“Many of the laws and reforms that allowed Viktor Orban to take control of the courts, eliminate the free media, and completely politicize the public service have also been promoted in Israel in recent years,” Levi said. “So until now, Israelis have looked at Hungary to understand what might happen in Israel if it continues on its current path of democratic retreat.”
Suddenly, they have been given a glimpse of a different future, he said.
“Now, thanks to the dramatic developments of recent weeks, Israelis are examining Hungary closely precisely to understand how populist leaders such as Netanyahu and Orban, who are gradually eroding democracy in their own countries, can be defeated,” Levi said. “From a threatening model from which to learn what to be wary of, Hungary has become a source of hope.”
Exactly how Israel might replicate Hungary’s results is less clear. The two countries have different electoral systems, such that Orban and the man who defeated him, Peter Magyar, together garnered about 85% of the vote, with Magyar’s Tisza party drawing an absolute majority.
In Israel, there are 18 political parties, with most polls showing 11 currently polling at the level that they would achieve seats in parliament if the election were held today. No party comes close to a majority and while polling currently shows the opposition bloc likely to be able to form a majority coalition, it would do so only narrowly. The pool includes not just right, center and left but religious Jewish parties and an Arab party — a much wider span than in Hungary.
Various opposition leaders have taken the opportunity to suggest that they are Israel’s version of Magyar, a conservative who came up in Orban’s Fidesz party and broke with him only in recent years.
“I see that all the trumpeters and conspiracy enthusiasts are now explaining that Orbán lost in Hungary because of the ‘global left.’ They missed the fact that the election winner, Péter Magyar, is far from left-wing,” tweeted Yair Lapid, the head of the Yesh Atid party who was briefly prime minister after negotiating a deal to seize power from Netanyahu’s Likud party in 2021.
Lapid went on: “The man grew up in Orbán’s party and defines himself as a ‘conservative liberal’—which is the Hungarian version of center on democratic issues and economic right-wing (yes, like Yesh Atid).”
Yair Golan, who leads the liberal Democrats, which is heading toward its first election, said he, too, saw hope in Hungary.
“Orbán tried everything: he took over the media, weakened the judicial system, and tried to create a reality in which he couldn’t be replaced. But in the end, the Hungarian people had their say at the ballot box. The citizens proved that no poison machine and no cheap populism can defeat the simple human desire to live in a free society, clean of corruption and functioning,” he tweeted. “For us, this is a living reminder of what’s about to happen right here.”
For some Israeli observers, the lesson from Hungary is that Netanyahu’s opponents should look to his own camp for a candidate to unseat him. Gross said that when it comes to Orbán, Magyar “shares his political outlook and comes from inside the Fidesz party establishment.”
That, he said, points to a similar dynamic in Israel. Israelis may be tired of Netanyahu because of the longevity of his time in office, Gross said, but he has already “won the battle of ideas in the sense that the only likely successor to Netanyahu would be somebody who shares those ideas.”
For the opposition, he said, “their best bet of unseating Netanyahu is finding someone else such as Naftali Bennett and rallying around him,” rather than trying to challenge those ideas directly.
Perhaps the closest cognate to Magyar in Israel, Bennett was the other half of the power-sharing arrangement that briefly knocked Netanyahu out of power, but unlike Lapid, he started his career in politics in Netanyahu’s party — and while he left it sooner than Magyar left Fidesz, he remained in Netanyahu’s coalition until 2021.
Bennett is a center-right politician who aligns with Netanyahu’s outlook on some major policy issues but distances himself from Netanyahu’s politics, which he says are filled with “poison” and cronyism. He has been hiring technocrats who say they can build a government without the corruption that Netanyahu has been accused of fostering. And like Magyar, he has been stumping across his tiny country, working determinedly to build support for an election in which he is rising in the polls.
Bennett did not publicly comment on Orbán’s loss — but he sent a powerful signal the same day when he announced the recruitment of two prominent women who previously served as government ministry director-generals, Keren Terner and Liran Avisar Ben Horin, to his party.
The comparison has limits. Bennett has already served a term as prime minister, giving him a track record and public perception far more fixed than Magyar’s. Unlike with Magyar, Bennett’s break with his political mentor required allying himself with ideological enemies, making it far less likely that he can peel off votes from Netanyahu.
“Right now it seems like Bennett is able to take a lot of votes from the center left but not necessarily a lot from the right wing,” Ofir Gutzelson, a founder of UnXeptable, said during the group’s webinar last week unpacking the election results.
The Israeli journalist Yair Navot said on the webinar that Bennett could take a page from Magyar and negotiate with other parties to form an informal coalition ahead of the election, which is not yet scheduled but must take place before the end of October.
That way, Israelis would be able to vote for their own preferred parties, rather than have to compromise on their beliefs, even as it would be clear going into the election that Bennett would be the prime minister if the coalition prevailed. But he said he understood that such an arrangement would be challenging in Israel, with such a wide range of ideologies at play.
Navot offered the example of Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief whose son was killed in Gaza, as another figure who could potentially play the same role — without the added baggage of a previous term.
But Navot said he thought Israelis should be focused on tactics as much as who is running. “If there is one important lesson to learn from Hungary for Israelis, for Israel, it is first of all the importance of the turnout,” he said.
Hungary’s turnout was historically high, near 80%. Turnout in Israel’s 2022 election, the most recent, was about 70%. Since then, emigration has spiked, particularly among young families and more liberal Israelis who have felt alienated by years of war and the country’s internal political fights. Unlike Hungary, Israel does not allow absentee voting, so those voters will need to fly back to Israel — buying historically expensive tickets in the process — if they want to participate in the coming election.
But some who want to see Israel pull a Hungary say there’s no need for left-wing voters to get involved.
In the Facebook group Right-Wing People Against the Conduct of this Government, the psychologist Chen Herman drew approval with a video in which she proclaimed that the Hungarian election results were “a celebration, not in a mystical sense but in the most practical sense.”
She said Hungarians had not gotten carried away in their vision for what the election could accomplish — and in doing so had been able to deflect the same criticism that anti-Netanyahu Israelis tend to face from his party acolytes.
“The voters in Hungary chose between right and right. They understood that to beat the system, they needed to step outside themselves and vote strategically. What were people trying to say about them? That they’re traitors to security? That they’re ungrateful? That their leader is Trump’s best buddy? … Sound familiar?” Herman said.
“But they decided to choose a government that isn’t corrupt, and that’s why it worked. They didn’t get scattered. They didn’t ask for too much. Simple,” she went on. “So if there’s anything to learn from the Hungarians, it’s to get grounded, to understand reality. If there’s a majority here holding right-wing views, and it might affect the elections, you just need to choose: corrupt right-wing or non-corrupt right wing.”
With at most six months to go before Israel’s election, it’s not clear how shaken Netanyahu himself is. He waited hours before congratulating Magyar, but some of his ministers embraced Magyar sooner.
“Netanyahu’s worst nightmare is not losing a friend in Budapest,” Jonathan Meta wrote on Substack. “It is watching Hungarian voters do something he has devoted considerable energy to making sure Israeli voters never quite manage to do themselves.”
Netanyahu and Orbán were more than just leading avatars of the global right, along with Trump. They also share staffers and even a pollster, the conservative American John McLaughlin.
The night before the election, the Israeli journalist Amit Segal, who is seen as close and friendly to Netanyahu, invoked past Israeli elections in which media polling — long criticized for being out of sync with voter behavior — failed spectacularly in capturing the final result.
He noted that McLaughlin had defied the consensus of mainstream Hungarian media by projecting a victory for Orbán’s Fidesz party. “Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” Segal said during a broadcast in which he indicated both that he believed Orbán could prevail but that if the Hungarian leader did not, it could bode poorly for Netanyahu this fall.
As it became clear that McLaughlin had indeed misjudged, the clip circulated widely in Israel, with comments piling up. A typical one: “If it can happen there, it can happen here.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In Orban’s rule, Israelis saw a model for their own country. Will he also be one in defeat? appeared first on The Forward.
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In Congress, a measure to tighten U.S.-Israel military ties sparks backlash on both sides of the aisle
Next year’s National Defense Authorization Act has made its way to the House floor, and has some Democrats and conservatives alike rallying against a provision that critics in Congress say would embroil the U.S. in unprecedented levels of military integration with Israel.
The measure, Section 224 of the House Armed Services Committee’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act, was advanced by Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and ranking member Adam Smith, D-Wash., as part of the committee’s annual defense bill. If enacted, it would establish a framework for expanded U.S.-Israel defense cooperation. An official designated by the Pentagon would be responsible for coordinating collaboration with Israel on technologies ranging from missile defense and drones to artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and biotechnology. The provision also encourages joint research projects, shared manufacturing arrangements, military training exercises, and closer cooperation between American and Israeli defense companies.
While the proposal has generated controversy in its own right, it is also fueling a broader conversation about what the U.S.-Israel defense relationship should look like after 2028, when the current 10-year memorandum of understanding governing American military assistance to Israel expires.
The United States has provided military assistance to Israel since 1960, but since 1998, the bulk of that aid has been directed by a series of such memoranda negotiated between the two countries. Congress must still approve the funds annually, but lawmakers have historically funded the agreements as negotiated.
But in recent months, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear that he does not wish to renew the 2016 MOU to its full extent, stating that he hopes to “taper off” U.S. aid over the next decade and wishes to focus instead on a more collaborative defense relationship.
His comments come as public support for Israel has declined in the United States and military aid has come under increasing political scrutiny, with many Democrats and some Republicans calling to reduce or cut off assistance. An April Pew Research Center survey found that 60% of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53% a year earlier. Negative views have risen among both Democrats and Republicans, particularly among younger generations. Today, 57% of Republicans and 84% of Democrats ages 18 to 49 have an unfavorable view according to the Pew survey.
Rachel Brandenburg, managing director and senior policy analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, said Israeli leaders are likely aware that future aid packages could face greater scrutiny from both Democrats and an increasingly isolationist wing of the Republican Party, a factor that helps explain the Israeli interest in reducing its reliance on U.S. aid. At the same time, she said, Israel’s increasingly sophisticated defense industry and strong economy have made it less reliant on American financing than in the past.
Against that backdrop, supporters of Section 224 argue that deeper cooperation could help lay the groundwork for a future relationship based on mutual benefits.
“The United States has more to gain by harnessing Israel’s defense tech ecosystem, their innovative capabilities,” Brandenburg said. “Their economy is strong, so there’s quite a bit that they could be buying with their own dollars.”
Michael O’Hanlon, the Chair in Defense and Strategy and director of research in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, told the Forward he believes the concerns that Section 224 would integrate the U.S.-Israel defense relationship to unprecedented levels are overblown. “My overall sense is that this would move the US-Israel relationship in the direction of AUKUS,” he said, referring to an existing trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
“In theory, it shouldn’t really be needed because collaboration is already close,” he explained. “In practice, this kind of provision might help cut through bureaucratic red tape and speed up collaborations. But on balance, I don’t expect huge change because the partnership is already very tight.”
Critics, however, see the proposal very differently.
Its opponents worry that if the U.S. and Israel move away from a military-aid relationship and toward a more collaborative partnership, large parts of the U.S.-Israel defense relationship will be harder to scrutinize or limit. Instead of debating aid packages, lawmakers could find themselves dealing with defense projects that are already built into Pentagon programs and contracts.
“It’s taking one program that’s become unpopular and turning it into another program that those who would disapprove of an intensified U.S.-Israeli defense relationship won’t really know about,” said Steven Simon, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute.
If combined with Israel’s stated desire to reduce its reliance on aid and other efforts to deepen defense cooperation, Simon says Section 224 could produce a relationship that is “much more integrated, immutable, and immune to political pressures than has ever existed.”
Similar concerns have been raised by lawmakers on the left.
Sen. Bernie Sanders announced Monday that he intends to “strongly oppose” the provision, arguing that “Netanyahu is lobbying for Section 224 in the national defense bill, a provision that quietly expands U.S.-Israel military cooperation and weapons development with almost zero oversight.”
Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, also opposes the provision and introduced an amendment to strike Section 224 during committee markup, stating, “The American people are tired of the arrogance and insolence of Prime Minister Netanyahu telling America what we should do.”
On the right, political figures and commentators have framed the measure as a threat to American sovereignty.
Former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tied the provision to the recent reports of Israeli espionage against the U.S., stating on X, “The Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on the U.S. to the highest level and AIPAC is openly cheering Republicans for section 224 in the NDAA that merges our military with Israel’s military.” Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie — who this week held a hearing premised on the conspiracy theory that Israel intentionally killed U.S. soldiers on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War — pledged to offer a floor amendment to strike the section.
The debate has also been picked up by far-right commentators, including podcaster Alex Jones, who stated: “This is beyond treason. This is absolutely a foreign government merging with us. Israel is now the main threat to the existence of this country.”
Brandenburg pushed back on concerns that the proposal would weaken oversight. Rather than moving cooperation further from public view, the legislation calls for additional reporting to Congress and public disclosure of some forms of existing coordination between the two countries, Brandenburg noted.
“That’s new,” she said, “in the sense of adding the accountability and transparency to these elements of the relationship in ways that didn’t exist previously.”
She also asserts many critics have overstated the significance of Section 224, noting that many of the forms of cooperation described in the legislation — including collaboration on missile defense, cyber security and counter-drone technology — are already taking place.
“Those who want to counter the idea that Israel and the United States should be working together have exaggerated what this legislation is actually saying,” she said. “They are accusing it of things like integrating the U.S. and Israeli militaries, or subjugating the U.S. military to the Israeli military. None of that is actually called for in here.”
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Israel names a street after renowned Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever
The Israeli city of Netanya has renamed one of its streets Rechov Avrom Sutzkever (Abraham Sutzkever Street), after the renowned Yiddish poet and Vilna partisan.
The event on June 10 marked an important cultural moment, recognizing the legacy of a poet who devoted his life to Yiddish language and Jewish culture. During his lifetime, Sutzkever was celebrated not only for his poetry, but also for editing the storied Yiddish literary magazine Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) for 46 years. His work remains a fixture in the field of Yiddish literature today.
Sutzkever was born in 1913 in the shtetl of Smorgon, in what is now Belarus. During World War I, his family moved to Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. In 1921, his mother Rayne moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder.
Sutzkever survived the Vilna Ghetto. He was a leader of the “Paper Brigade” that rescued Jewish cultural treasures from the Nazis and later became the only Jewish witness called by the Soviets to testify at the Nuremberg Trials.
His poetry chronicled his childhood in Siberia, his life in the Vilna ghetto and his escape to join the Jewish partisans. In 1947 he settled in Palestine, later Israel.
In Israel, he continued to create, publish and preserve Yiddish culture for decades. Yet, despite his immense influence around the world, he remained less known in Israel because he chose to write and fight for the Yiddish language rather than switch to Hebrew.
This is the first time a street in Israel has been named after him. Even Tel Aviv never did so, despite the fact that Sutzkever lived there for many years and the city was once a hotbed of Yiddish cultural activity, due to the influx of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who settled there after the Holocaust.
The street-naming ceremony was attended by the Mayor of Netanya, Avi Slama; representatives of the Lithuanian Embassy; public figures, artists, and members of the family, including Sutzkever’s granddaughter, Hadas Kalderon.
In the past decade, Kalderon has been instrumental in keeping Abraham Sutzkever’s memory alive, most notably through two documentary films: Ver Vet Blaybn? (Who Will Remain?) in 2021, and Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever in 2018.
Kalderon told me that she was very moved by Netanya’s decision to name the street after her grandfather, in a garden overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. “It was not only a tribute to Sutzkever himself, but also a powerful moment of recognition for Yiddish language and culture within the State of Israel,” she said.
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At the dawn of the World Cup, the story of the Jews who helped bring soccer to America
When the North American FIFA World Cup starts in Mexico City on June 11, the story will largely be told through the familiar lenses of Lionel Messi, the geography of the 48 participants and three hosts, and — because 75% of the games will be played there — the continuing rise of soccer in the United States. But there is another, less familiar story woven through the tournament: the long, strange and often overlooked history of Jews in North American soccer.
Mostly that’s been in the United States where players and owners have included a larger proportion of Jews than in Canada and Mexico. By my count, no Jewish players have represented Mexico, and only two Jewish men have represented Canada at senior international level and one of them, Tomer Chencinski, only did so once, in a friendly game where Canada lost 2-0 to Belarus in Doha. (Daniel Haber played 5 international games in his career).
For whatever reason, whether more closely linked to Europe, denied entry to other sports, or just arbiters of excellent taste, Jewish Americans have been at the forefront of soccer in the United States for over a century. The first American to play for a major European team was Eddy Hamel for Ajax Amsterdam in 1922. Hamel was a New York-born winger who became a star for Ajax in Amsterdam during the 1920s. An injury forced his retirement in the 1930s and, after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he was deported and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. His story remains one of the most tragic intersections of Jewish history and world football.
Jews also comprised the largest soccer crowd in America when 46,000 New Yorkers watched Hakoach Vienna play New York All Stars in 1926. That record stood for over 50 years but it also encouraged a number of members of the Hakoach team to emigrate to the US and start a New York team that was a crucial part of the American Soccer League of the era.
Later, in the 1970s, the National American Soccer League — the glitzy NASL — became a success thanks to the glamorous New York Cosmos. As head of Warner Communications, their CEO Steve Ross, born Rechnitz, was the person who brought Pele over and made the league the star-studded affair it became. After Herman Sarkowsky co-founded the Seattle Sounders, the continent was almost ready for football.
When the NASL faded and folded, soccer dwindled as a major sport in the United States. Alan Rothenberg saw an opportunity to revive the sport by hosting the 1994 World Cup and founding the MLS as a reset. As president of the U.S. Soccer Federation and the chief executive of the World Cup USA 1994 organizing committee, he made both of those happen and laid the foundations for the current shape of U.S. soccer.
The success of the MLS was not a foregone conclusion, though; indeed, it barely survived to the millennium. It was founded in 1993 but only started playing in 1996 — losing an estimated $350 million between its founding and 2004. The league initially turned to Don Garber, a former NFL executive, in August 1999 but even he couldn’t turn it around. By late 2001, it looked like the league would fold like its predecessors but it was able to secure new financing from owners Lamar Hunt, Philip Anschutz, and the Kraft family to take on more teams. Over the past 20 years, it has become robust, enjoying the general boom of all things soccer, riding the coattails of the English Premier League.
Without Robert Kraft and Anschutz, Major League Soccer might not exist today. During the league’s precarious early years, the two billionaire owners absorbed enormous losses to keep the fledgling competition alive. Kraft, the owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots, was also a central figure in bringing the 2026 World Cup to North America. As chairman of the United Bid Committee, he played a crucial role in securing the tournament for the United States, Canada and Mexico.
If Kraft represents one side of the Jewish soccer story, Chuck Blazer represents another.
The larger-than-life American soccer executive helped expose corruption inside FIFA, serving as a key witness in the investigations that ultimately toppled some of the most powerful figures in world football. Yet Blazer was a product of the very system he later helped unravel. His spectacular rise and fall remains one of the strangest chapters in soccer history, a tale of luxury apartments, exotic pets and global corruption.
Unlike baseball, basketball or boxing, soccer never became known as a major arena of Jewish achievement in the United States. Perhaps that has been due to the historic lack of status for soccer in the country. Despite the excellence of Yael Averbuch West for the USWNT and a number of Jewish players for the USMNT including Jonathan Bornstein, Benny Feilhaber, Dan Calichman, DeAndre Yedlin, Kyle Beckerman and the maverick Yari Alnutt there have been no soccer equivalents of Sandy Koufax or Hank Greenberg.
The stalwart defender Jeff “Goose” Agoos came closest with 134 international appearances and six more for the U.S. soccer Olympic team. But playing with a mediocre USMNT, he enjoyed few legendary moments. In fact, arguably no professional moments outshone the bizarre story of his 1989 NCAA championship ring in his junior year, the season that he played in the Maccabiah. On Dec. 3 of that year, his Virginia Cavalier team (playing for future USMNT coach Bruce Arena) met the top ranked, undefeated Santa Clara team in a freezing cold stadium in Piscataway, N.J. The teams were still tied 1-1 after FOUR overtimes and, with no penalties on the books, they shared the spoils. It was the third time that two teams shared the championship and has never happened again.
This year’s USMNT squad does include the only Jewish player at this summer’s tournament — reserve goalkeeper Matt Turner. If, as coach Mauricio Pochettino plans, Turner exclusively warms the bench, he will take his place alongside many of America’s notable Jewish soccer figures who have furthered the game, even if not on the field.
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