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Winds of change are in the air in Hungary and at the Vatican. Will they reach as far as Israel?
For the past few days, the world’s oldest and youngest transnational institutions have been riding high. In fact, these institutions — the Roman Catholic Church and the European Union — seem to be riding the winds of a Zeitgeist, or “world spirit,” one that promises better days ahead for our battered and embattled ideals of liberal democracy, common decency and shared humanity. Suddenly, it appears there is reason for hope.
But the hope, held by some on the political center and left in Israel, that this mighty wind will gust as far as Israel may well be a hope misplaced.
Let us first take the youngest transnational institution. On Sunday, an event of seismic proportions rocked the European continent. The prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, who gave to the world the model of illiberal democracy and gave to Hungarians deepening immiseration over the past 16 years, was voted out of office.
It was not close: The opposition party Tisza, led by Peter Magyar, won 138 parliamentary seats while Orban’s party, Fidesz, managed to claim only 55. This assures the new government of the 2/3 majority required to change the laws passed under Orban that hobbled the EU, disabled the nation’s political institutions, and enabled him and his cronies to line their pockets. In his victory speech, given by the right bank of the Danube in front of the Parliament building, Magyar declared to a wildly cheering crowd that Hungary is back not only as a European nation, but back fully as a EU member. Hungary, he announced, “will be a solid ally of the European Union.”
On Palm Sunday, a different crowd — holding aloft not the flag of the European Union, but instead olive branches — welcomed Pope Leo XIV at St Peter’s Square. In his homily, he took aim at the moral corruption of the American government, one that launched a reckless military campaign against Iran (as well as a foolish political campaign in Hungary on behalf of Orban). Responding to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s repeated invocations of Jesus Christ to justify his blood lust, Leo cited Isaiah: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: Your hands are full of blood.” He returned to this subject during a peace vigil, praying for a kingdom of “dignity, understanding and forgiveness” to stand as a “bulwark against the delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us and is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive.”
These remarks did not sit well with Donald Trump, who unleashed a series of bizarre accusations on Truth Social, declaring that “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime,” “terrible for Foreign Policy,” and “WEAK on nuclear weapons.” Leo should “get his act together as Pope,” Trump said, “and stop catering to the Radical Left.” A few days later, after Leo failed to get his act together and instead decried Trump’s threat of carrying out a genocide against the Iranian people, the president declared that “he was not a big fan” of the Pope. When asked about these remarks, Leo replied, “I have no fear of the Trump administration, or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do.”
The Israeli government, one imagines, is not a big fan of the Pope, either. In a recent Sunday Mass, he addressed Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah, lamenting the deaths of more than 2,000 Lebanese, including 165 children and 250 women. Political and military leaders, he declared, have the “moral obligation to protect the civilian population from the horrific effects of war.” Nevertheless, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to rule out a cease-fire even as negotiations between Israel and Lebanon are set to begin.
No less predictably, opposition leaders in Israel have embraced the results of the election in Hungary. Writing in Hungarian — the language of his father’s family — Yair Lapid rushed to congratulate Peter Magyar on his victory, while the former defense minister Benny Gantz, also of Hungarian descent, expressed his hope that Hungary will be a “beacon of western values and moral clarity within the European community.”
Gantz’s words lacked the necessary clarity for Yair Golan, the leader of the Democratic Party, who cut to the chase: The election revealed that the “Hungarian public is fed up with corruption, incitement and the shattering of democracy.” Israel, he predicted, will “soon” experience a similar turnabout.
But there’s a rub. If the current zeitgeist does embody a renewal of a democratic and humanistic spirit, how one can insist on the importance of “moral clarity,” as Gantz does, while supporting the military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon? With the notable exception of Golan, most other opposition figures in Israel have expressed few reservations over the criminally inhumane razing of Gaza. As the columnist Iris Leal recently observed, “there is no war that a Zionist politician from the center-left would not support.”
While a majority of the Israeli public is as fed up as Hungarians with their own government’s corruption and shattering of democracy, they nevertheless support the various wars undertaken by that same government. In a recent poll taken by the Viterbi Family Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research at the Israel Democracy Institute, more than 90% of respondents support the war against Iran. As for the future of Gaza, a poll published last year by Haaretz revealed that 56% of Israelis support the forcible expulsion of Gaza’s population to other countries, and 54% think this expulsion should extend to the Arab citizens of Israel.
Only a fool would deny that Iran and its Hamas and Hezbollah clients pose serious threats to Israel’s security. But it also takes a fool to declare that never-ending war and military occupation will alone win lasting peace for Israel. The mighty wind of democracy and decency has swept Viktor Orban from office and carried the words of Leo across the world. But it remains to be seen if this same wind, at the moment when Israelis find themselves at a crossroads between fully becoming a Jewish state or a democratic state, is strong enough to lead them to take the right path.
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Ukraine reburies Nazi collaborator with state honors, drawing Israeli condemnation
(JTA) — Israel criticized Ukraine Monday after President Volodymyr Zelensky gave full state honors to a Ukrainian nationalist leader who was part of a movement that collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
During a reburial ceremony on Sunday, Zelensky described Andriy Melnyk and his wife, Sofia Fedak-Melnyk, as “iconic Ukrainians of the 20th century who are deeply respected,” according to The New York Times.
Melnyk led one of the factions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists during its collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II. Though the Ukrainian organization shared a mutual opposition to Soviet rule with the Nazis, it also promoted antisemitic rhetoric and some of its members participated in the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust. Melnyk initially sought cooperation with Nazi Germany but was later detained by the Nazis as relations with Ukrainian nationalist groups deteriorated.
The ceremony marked the latest flashpoint in a longstanding dispute over Ukraine’s commemoration of World War II-era nationalist figures linked to Nazi collaboration. In 2018, the country designated the birthday of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera as a holiday, and in 2017, a statue was unveiled honoring a nationalist leader whose regime killed tens of thousands of Jews in pogroms during the Russian Revolution.
The remains of Melnyk and his wife were exhumed from Luxembourg last week and then transported to Ukraine for reburial at Kyiv’s National Military Memorial, which opened last year for soldiers killed in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Glory to every Ukrainian hero! Glory to all our Ukrainian warriors! Glory to our people!,” Zelensky, who is Jewish, wrote in a post on X marking the ceremony, adding that he was “grateful to everyone who has worked to make such returns of great Ukrainian figures possible and to give the Ukrainian People their own pantheon of heroes.”
The reburial was quickly decried by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, which wrote in a post on X that it was “deeply troubled by such national commemorations, which come at the expense of historical truth and the memory of Holocaust victims.”
“Honoring the leader of a movement that supported and collaborated with Nazi Germany during the persecution and murder of millions of Jews undermines the moral integrity essential to Holocaust remembrance,” the post read.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry wrote on X that there is “no place for ignoring historical truth and the memory of the victims murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.”
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Trump administration again sues UCLA over antisemitism, alleging ‘hostile educational environment’
(JTA) — The U.S. Department of Justice sued the University of California for the second time this year over allegations of an antisemitic campus environment at UCLA, claiming the school “was deliberately indifferent to the suffering of its Jewish and Israeli students” after Oct. 7.
The federal lawsuit, filed Tuesday, claims UCLA violated the students’ civil rights by failing to intervene during pro-Palestinian encampment activity in early 2024. It follows an earlier suit that focused on the university’s treatment of its Jewish and Israeli employees, and comes 10 days after the university unveiled its own “Initiative to Combat Antisemitism.”
“Earlier this year, we sued UCLA for subjecting its Jewish and Israeli employees to an antisemitic hostile work environment,” assistant U.S. attorney general Harmeet Dhillon said in a press release. “Now, the Department of Justice calls UCLA to account for its toleration of the equally appalling hostile educational environment against its Jewish and Israeli students.”
Requests for comment to the Justice Department and UCLA were not immediately returned.
The new suit draws on widely reported accounts of UCLA’s campus environment in spring 2024, when protesters in pro-Palestinian encampments clashed with pro-Israel counter-protesters, sparking violence and turmoil. The failure to protect Jewish students violated their Title VI civil rights, attorneys said.
Citing the report of UCLA’s own task force on antisemitism, published in response to the 2024 campus upheaval, the suit states, “UCLA’s leadership apparently preferred a do-nothing ‘de-escalation strategy’ to protecting their Jewish and Israeli students from an angry mob organized by peers armed with tasers, lumber, and a sword.”
The Justice Department is seeking several redress measures, including the return of all federal grants made to UCLA “during the time of UCLA’s noncompliance with Title VI.” The school had previously resolved several Title VI antisemitism cases under the Biden administration, and also reached a $6.13 million settlement with Jewish groups in a private suit related to the spring 2024 incidents on campus — a case cited in DOJ’s new lawsuit.
The Trump administration has sought to make a particular example of UCLA in its aggressive approach to campus antisemitism. Officials had sought to levy fines in excess of $1 billion against the public university for its alleged failure to protect Jewish and Israeli students, until a federal judge intervened. Several DOJ lawyers have left the department over its UCLA investigation, telling reporters the case was “fraudulent,” a “sham” and driven by pressure to “find” evidence to support further legal action against UCLA.
In addition, some of the most violent clashes on the campuses included perpetrators on both sides of the conflict, leading some members of the UCLA Jewish community to complain that pro-Israel counter-protesters ultimately undercut the Jewish students’ legitimate grievances regarding the harassment they had been facing inside the campus gates.
And the campus environment for Jews remains tense. Last month, the UCLA student senate condemned a campus visit by a freed Israeli hostage, drawing blowback from a university regent.
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Jewish leaders say Belgium’s prosecution of circumcision is antisemitic
(JTA) — Dozens of European Jewish leaders, joined by Israeli and American diplomats, decried Antwerp prosecutors who plan to charge two Jewish men with performing illegal circumcisions.
In an open letter on Tuesday to European and Belgian officials, 45 communal and religious Jewish leaders accused the Antwerp Public Prosecutor’s Office of “effectively criminalizing the act of circumcision” and infringing on religious freedom.
Earlier this month, Belgian prosecutors announced their recommendation to refer two mohels, or ritual circumcisers, to the criminal court following investigations into alleged illegal circumcisions.
In Belgium, the law requires all circumcisions to be performed by licensed medical professionals. The two men would be charged with intentional assault or battery against minors and the unlawful practice of medicine.
The European Jewish leaders responded that prosecuting mohels was “antisemitic in nature, reminiscent of efforts taken in Europe against Jewish practice prior to the Second World War.”
They said the potential prosecutions sent a message that “Jews are no longer welcome in Belgium” and “Belgian Jews are now second class citizens with limited rights.” Their appeal was led by the chairman of the European Jewish Association, Rabbi Menachem Margolin.
Israeli and U.S. officials have also accused Belgium of targeting Jews for practicing their faith.
Gideon Saar, Israel’s minister of foreign affairs, called the prosecutors’ decision a “scarlet letter on Belgian society.” He was joined by the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Bill White, who said on X that Belgium “will be thought of now as anti Semitic by world.”
Belgium’s foreign minister fired back that it was “inappropriate to publicly criticize a country and tarnish its image simply because you disagree with judicial proceedings.”
“I recall that the proceedings in question were initiated by representatives of the Jewish community themselves,” said Maxime Prévot. “To portray those as a country’s desire to undermine the religious freedom of Jews is defamatory.”
The mohels were first investigated after complaints lodged by Moshe Aryeh Friedman, an Antwerp rabbi. He alleged in 2023 that six local mohels practiced metzitzah b’peh, in which the circumciser cleans the circumcision wound with oral suction. Over the past two decades, several infants in New York City were infected with herpes as a result of the practice.
The letter from European Jewish leaders did not address Friedman’s claims.
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