"In his speech delivered at a gala dinner on October 10 [...]
the President wished to point out the current economic boom in
Israel; naturally, he did not mean to encourage anyone to interfere
in the internal affairs of other nations," the statement said.
The statement called relations between Hungary and Israel
valuable and expressed Israel’s hope that "nobody was interested in
destroying those ties because of an unfortunately worded sentence".
On October 24, members of far-right groups staged a small
protest in Budapest against "Israel’s gaining ground," after Peres’
speech was reported in the right-wing press.
