What wasn’t on offer, encapsulating the strangely alienated atmosphere, was almost any mention of what is actually roiling the host country right now: the third anniversary of October 7, the election in less than three weeks, and – despite him ticking many of the NatCon boxes – the populist theocrat-friendly prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

It was certainly disorienting to hear the mildly-spoken but still chest-thumping nationalists delivering paeans to borders, sovereignty and national security, and the serial references to immigrant “invasions,” just one day before the country marked three years since Hamas invaded the border into sovereign Israel while its government and security forces failed to prevent the massacre of inhabitants of Israel’s south, and its prime minister, refusing any accountability, seeks another term. It’s as if the responsibilities that come with actual war are a distraction to the speeches of the culture warriors.

Israeli-American political philosopher Yoram Hazony in 2020. Credit: Ilya Melnikov

For Yoram Hazony, the Israeli-American political theorist leading the NatCon movement’s flagship U.S.-based Edmund Burke Foundation and its globetrotting confabs, it is an inauspicious time to produce a conference in Jerusalem. The U.S. right-wing ecosphere is being challenged by an isolationist and increasingly antisemitic wing; Republican voters – even young Evangelicals – are falling out of love with Israel; and U.S. President Donald Trump lavishes praise on Turkey’s Erdogan while not finding time to meet Netanyahu in New York.

Even the flowery comments by Kevin Roberts, head of the once all-powerful Heritage Foundation, describing Israel as a “model of nationalist vigor” and claiming that “Jerusalem links [our] world to the kingdom of heaven,” couldn’t shake off the reality that the conservative ground in America is already shifting irrevocably.

It didn’t seem as if the NatCon discourse has really settled in Israeli hearts either: For the opening sessions, the hall was barely two-thirds full, the audience overwhelmingly male, white, middle-aged, English-speaking immigrant and religious, interspersed with isolated clumps of better-dressed European nationalists. Despite Hazony’s announcement that 900 people had registered, by the afternoon, there were barely 100 people in the room.

Far-right Finance Minister compared Palestinian self-determination to undocumented immigration in the West during his NatCon address on Wednesday in Jerusalem. Credit: Itay Cohen

Color, oops, culture

Over decades, Hazony has tried to build an intellectual-political alliance between U.S. and Israeli nationalists. But despite the applause for Muslim-bashing, there was something hollow in the efforts to shoe-horn Israel into the key American and European right-wing obsession, referenced in almost every speech: immigration.

Speaker after speaker decried immigration, both legal and illegal, as a concerted globalist plot to destroy Western civilization and re-engineer voter demographics to favor the left. This, of course, is the classic reiteration of the far-right (and usually antisemitic) great replacement theory, helpfully signaled by a panel entitled “Immigration and cultural replacement.”

But don’t fall for calling it a conspiracy theory, enjoined Nathan Pinkoski, senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America and translator of “The Suicide of the French,” written by far-right French politician, Petain-apologist and “re-migration” fan Eric Zemmour. Certainly he was in sync with Trump who, later in the day, posted a denunciation of “out of control migration” and accused Islam of wanting to take over France.

After talking about the need for Jews and Christians to work together against the “tangible” threat of Islamification, Hazony declared that there was a “limit to how many foreigners” can be let in, and made one of those inevitable on-the-right Freudian slips. He said potential immigrants should know that they’re not welcome “because you’re the wrong color, sorry – I meant, wrong culture.” The NatCon manifesto declares itself to be in “stark opposition to political theories grounded in race.”

Western civilization is incompatible with either Marxism or sharia law, said Roberts, who also offered the charming phrase of “sickles and scimitars” to describe the red-green alliance. They are combining forces to “destroy us from within: our faith, family and nation,” he added, including among their tactics “transgender ideology” and their targets the institution of the U.S. presidency, Supreme Court and Congress, Judaism and Christianity.

Instead of averring the antisemitic foundations of replacement theory – that Jews are the hidden hand pushing non-white immigration to “replace” white Western populations, a theory that has triggered deadly terror attacks against Jewish and Black communities – there was a call to weaponize the accusation of culpability against left-wing Jews. “We Jews in Israel have a great problem with progressive Jews abroad promoting immigration, and we should call them out,” proclaimed pro-Netanyahu pundit Gadi Taub, adding that “progressive Jews who grovel at the feet of antisemites are no longer our friends and we should be clear about it.”

Policing “true” Israeli and Jewish identity is a familiar trope on both the hard left and right, as evidenced most recently by Netanyahu government calls to revoke the citizenship of “NAZA” directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, and the U.K. Green Party vote to equate Zionism with racism. But publicly legitimizing a conspiracy theory that has killed Jews is still a dark milestone, as was its enthusiastic welcome by far-right nativists online.

It might seem improbable that Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich could adapt his doctrine of ethnic cleansing to the great replacement theory, but that is what he did. At least he spared the audience the trauma of speaking to them in English.

Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich at NatCon in Jerusalem on Wednesday. Credit: Itay Cohen

Non-racist nationalism?

Smotrich asked the audience to imagine a scenario where a group of immigrants in the United States or United Kingdom demanded self-determination in that country. That was his segue to arguing that Palestinians are the “immigrants” in that scenario, threatening to replace Israeli Jews by declaring they have the right to self-determination, despite their national identity being a “complete fiction.”

Having established, in his eyes, that Palestinians are the analogous migrant invaders, Smotrich announced his solution, in NatCon language: re-migration and sovereignty. He called for Israel to annex the West Bank and all the areas of Gaza it currently occupies, while Palestinians should “voluntarily” leave Gaza for Arab Muslim states, their “natural destination.”

The moral repulsiveness, illegality and historical illiteracy aside, this is a nonsensical extrapolation of the NatCon discourse on immigration; it would have been easier for Smotrich to have just been honest and tell the crowd that he is a true Bible-thumping ethnonationalist who wants to expel Palestinians from Greater Israel.

But Smotrich’s speech at least provided an example of the central contradiction of the NatCon project: Hazony created space in the public square for what he framed as God-inflected non-racist nationalisms, which ethnonationalists marched right through. It’s true for Smotrich and much of the Netanyahu government, and it’s true back in the U.S.A. too.

That was a rare moment of soul-searching, and it was far more authentic than Heritage’s Roberts, who dismissed “those podcasters” as purveyors of “idiotic and absurd” conspiracy theories irrelevant to the U.S. conservative coalition, and said the best policy was silence: “When a toddler misbehaves, you just ignore them.” Strangely, it was advice he himself failed to follow last year, when he very publicly defended Carlson’s decision to host neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

To the accusation that he opened the door to them, Hazony’s defense at the conference was: “I never said there wouldn’t be nationalist antisemites.” But that’s exactly the contradiction at the heart of it all: the idea that nationalisms can and should form coalitions, even when by definition, nationalists will always prioritize their own national, or ethnonationalist, interests.

That is what is fueling not only antisemitism on the U.S. right but also the growing alienation from Israel. Even though Smotrich, too, tried to make light of the divergences between the two countries, saying that each makes decisions the other doesn’t like but such disagreements “strengthen” their relationship, conservative columnist and Viktor Orbán-enthusiast Rod Dreher issued a sharper alert.

Antisemitism has returned big-time, Dreher said. At the same time, most Americans “no longer understand” why they should support Israel; the future of U.S.-Israel relations will change post-Trump, and what Israel does now matters, to prevent a future collapse of the relationship. His warning, which will fall on deaf ears: “You can and should crack down” on “radical settlers abusing Palestinians.”

It was easy for NatCon Jerusalem speakers to praise Israel for its fecundity, religiosity and “fight back” mentality, and to wallow in shared opposition for the demonic Marxist left and its jihadist mates. But all the self-congratulatory, October 7-blind valorization of a muscular, expansionist Israel still can’t make the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or Israel’s pariah status, disappear, and it won’t resolve American isolationism or right-wing antisemitism.

If the imminent elections do indeed mark the end of the Netanyahu era, then at least the ex-premier could take comfort from the out-of-office Polish and Hungarian politicians wandering the halls: There’ll always be a place for him on the conservative conference circuit.