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The visit comes as the Israeli prime minister faces an arrest warrant against him by the International Criminal Court.
April 2, 2025
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Thursday began a visit to Hungary, confident that Europe’s self-declared bastion of “illiberal democracy” would ignore an arrest warrant issued against him in November by the International Criminal Court.
The visit is Mr. Netanyahu’s first to a country that has recognized the jurisdiction of the court, raising the possibility, at least in theory, that he could be arrested. He visited Washington to discuss the future of Gaza with President Trump in February but the United States, like Israel, has never recognized the international court.
In Hungary, the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has made clear that it will ignore its obligations as a party to a 1998 treaty that established the court.
Mr. Orban invited Mr. Netanyahu to visit shortly after the court issued its arrest warrant, assuring him that “the judgment of the I.C.C. will have no effect in Hungary and that we will not follow its terms.”
Hungary’s expansive propaganda machine has embraced antisemitic tropes in its nonstop vilification of George Soros, a Hungarian-born American financier and philanthropist who is Jewish. It has cast him as the sinister puppeteer in a vast global conspiracy backed by high finance and hidden, cosmopolitan forces.
But Mr. Orban, a strong supporter of Israel, has embraced the country’s right-wing prime minister as a kindred spirit in tune with his own ethnonationalist views and reverence for national sovereignty free of foreign interference.
