The Hungarian administration was hit by new allegations of anti-Semitism, after it failed to respond to claims that a friendly football match Wednesday between its national team and Israel was marred by racist actions by its fans.
The match, designed as a warm-up ahead of qualification for the 2014 World Cup, took a distinctly unfriendly tone, as Hungarian supporters waved Palestinian and Iranian flags and turned their backs on the pitch during the traditional singing of Hatikva, the Israeli national anthem.
The game, which ended with a goal a-piece, was further interrupted by booing throughout, as well as the chanting of anti-Semitic slogans, such as “Palestine, Palestine”, “stinking Jews”, “Buchenwald” and “Heil Benito Mussolini”, in honour of the WWII-era fascist Italian dictator.
Relations between Hungary and Israel have taken a nosedive recently, after a surge of anti-Semitic incidents in the country, prompted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to express his “anxious” concern about the rise of the “dangerous phenomenon” at a meeting with Hungarian President Janos Aler in Jerusalem last month.
The visit by Adler was preceded by drama, when Israeli parliamentary speaker Reuven Rivlin withdrew an initial invitation to his Hungarian counterpart Laslo Kover to attend a Knesset event to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Raoul Wallenberg, after reports emerged that Kover had been present at a ceremony t honour pro-Nazi Hungarian writer Jozsef Nyiro.
Nyiro was a known supporter of Miklos Horthy, WWII Hungarian leader and Nazi colluder and his successor Ferenc Szalasi who assumed power when Horthy subsequently fell out of favour with Nazi Germany. President Ader’s visit to Israel was arranged after Kover’s invitation was revoked in June.
Hungarian authority’s objectivity was further called in to question earlier this month, after prosecutors rejected claims 97 year-old Nazi-suspect Laszlo Csatary was guilty of the deportation of 300 Jews in Ukraine as “groundless”. Csatary was tried after prosecutors began an investigation into his alleged crimes last September as a result of information offered by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which claims he is one of the world’s last surviving Nazis.
Prosecutors eventually rejected the claims on the grounds that they considered he was not sufficiently high ranked or present at the time of the 1941 deportation. They are, however, still investigating allegations of his complicity in the larger-scale deportation of 15,700 Jews from the Kosice Jewish ghetto to a Nazi death camp in 1944.
In June, Holocaust survivor and Nobel peace laureate Elie Wiesel returned Hungary's highest honour, which he had received in 2004, accusing the authorities of "encouraging the whitewashing of tragic and criminal episodes in Hungary's past".
In recent months, parks have been renamed and statues erected in honour of Miklos Horthy, Hungary's wartime leader and an ally of Adolf Hitler, while anti-Semitic writers have been reintroduced into school curriculums.
Following Wednesday’s incident, Israel team coach Eli Guttman admitted there had been “warnings about possible terrorist attacks” in the wake of last month’s attack on Israeli tourists in neighbouring Eastern European state Bulgaria. The team were reportedly escorted from the game by police on motorcycles.
Israeli Football Association head Avi Luzon insisted, however, that such threats would not dissuade Israel from playing abroad. “We have no other country, and we are proud to represent Israel anywhere in the world – particularly in this country, in which many Jews were murdered,” he said.
An estimated 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and about 100,000 of the country's current 10 million-strong population are Jewish.