US, Israeli and European far-right figures to gather for conference in Israel

Delegates at the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels, on 16 April 2024. Photograph: Simon Wohlfahrt/AFP/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenDelegates at the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels, on 16 April 2024. Photograph: Simon Wohlfahrt/AFP/Getty ImagesUS, Israeli and European far-right figures to gather for conference in IsraelTrump’s counter-terrorism ‘czar’, Sebastian Gorka, was scheduled to speak at conference but White House says he will no longer attend

A National Conservatism (NatCon) conference beginning today in Jerusalem advertises a talk from the Trump administration’s anti-terrorism czar alongside speeches from far-right Israeli politicians, European figures who have faced disciplinary action over alleged antisemitism, and Christian nationalist and far-right figures from the United States.

The Jerusalem event is perhaps the most significant recent gathering to feature large contingents of Israeli nationalists alongside Christian nationalists and far-right European nationalists from a milieu sometimes shadowed by accusations of antisemitism.

Sebastian Gorka, a senior White House official whose May anti-terrorism strategy promised to target and neutralise groups “whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist”, was scheduled to speak at the Jerusalem event, and his presence is still advertised on the website.

But when the Guardian contacted the White House for comment on Gorka’s attendance at the conference, a spokesperson advised that he would no longer be attending due to a scheduling conflict, and that he had condemned Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel.

View image in fullscreenSebastian Gorka at the AmericaFest 2024 conference, sponsored by conservative group Turning Point in Phoenix, Arizona, on 20 December 2024. Photograph: Cheney Orr/ReutersFrom Israel, the program lists Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, self-declared “fascist homophobe” and internationally sanctioned extremist, and Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, who in 2023 called for an atom bomb to be dropped on Gaza and was earlier ordered to face disciplinary proceedings for racist incitement against Palestinians.

The Guardian contacted both men for comment.

From Europe come Hans-Georg Maaßen, who once led Germany’s domestic intelligence agency but in 2023 faced an expulsion attempt by his then party, the CDU, for “statements in the language of the milieu of antisemites and conspiracy ideologues”, and Austria’s Harald Vilimsky, whose far-right Freedom party has been subject to a policy of non-engagement by Israel’s own government.

According to Israeli media reports, Vilimsky has played a key role in building a rapprochement between the Freedom party – whose first two leaders after its founding in 1956 were former SS officers – and Tel Aviv. He has visited the country repeatedly and in January reportedly led a European delegation to the country that was received by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, despite criticism from Austria’s own Jewish community.

In a statement, Maaßen wrote: “I firmly reject the claim that I made ‘statements in the language of the milieu of antisemites and conspiracy ideologues’. This deliberately vague wording was never a concrete accusation but a politically motivated label, designed to damage my reputation and to discredit critics of the political mainstream of the time,” Vilimsky was also contacted for comment.

View image in fullscreenHans-Georg Maaßen, former head of the Germany domestic intelligence service takes part in a constituency meeting of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) district associations in Suhl, eastern Germany, on 30 April 2021. Photograph: Jens Schlueter/AFP/Getty ImagesThe American contingent includes William Wolfe, a self-described Christian nationalist who has called for “mass deportations, denaturalizations, and remigration” to preserve a white Christian majority, and Jonathan Keeperman, the publisher unmasked by the Guardian in 2024 as the man behind the far-right internet persona “L0m3z”.

Keeperman did not address questions sent to him when asked for comment. Wolfe did not respond directly to questions on his attendance at NatCon, instead sending personal insults.

Dr Brendan McGeever, co-director of Birkbeck University’s Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, said: “Many attendees at NatCon view Israel not just as an ally but as an embodiment of the exclusionary ethnostate they wish to establish. National Conservatism sees in Israel a blueprint for the realization of a white, Christian nation built on racialized exclusion, while far-right Israeli attenders at NatCon often argue that partnering with white Christian nationalists is the best way to protect Israel. It is racism that binds these forces together.”

Attenders will also share a stage with high-profile conservatives including Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, and former deputy national security adviser Victoria Coates, who is now vice-president at Heritage’s Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy.

The Guardian contacted Heritage with questions about their attendance at NatCon.

Last October Roberts defended Tucker Carlson after the broadcaster gave a friendly interview to the white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, saying in a video that “the venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division”. He later called the phrase “a terrible choice of words”, and said he and Heritage would speak out against antisemitism. In July a Heritage spokesperson said the thinktank’s “record opposing antisemitism is long, consistent and public”. In May, Heritage elected Yoram Hazony to its board.

View image in fullscreenHeritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts introduces former vice-president Mike Pence during an event to promote his new book at the conservative thinktank on 19 October 2022 in Washington. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesRoberts and Wolfe are among the NatCon Jerusalem attenders singled out last month by the evangelical conservative commentator Erick Erickson, in a broadside against “a group of white guys” who “have subtly inserted themselves into conservative institutions and church organizations” and who “to varying degrees … embrace white nationalism, antisemitism”.

Erickson’s principal target was the shampoo tycoon and would-be “warlord” Charles Haywood, the subject of extensive previous reporting in the Guardian, but he also singled out Heritage fellow Scott Yenor, another Jerusalem speaker. He was supported in his efforts by other NatCon attenders, including the writer Rod Dreher.

The Guardian contacted Haywood and Erickson for comment.

Matthew Taylor, a senior visiting fellow at the Georgetown Center for Faith and Justice and author of the new book Defying Tyrants, said: “I think they were trying to find a way to kind of carve out a version of Christian nationalism that could synchronize with kind of European and Israeli politics … and I think what they’re discovering is kind of the impossibility of that.”

He added: “[Hazony is] running up against the limits of that project because the reality is that you can’t simply stir up abstract Christian nationalism. One side of the Christian nationalist coalition is very aligned with Israel, is very Christian Zionist, the other side is leaning hard into this antisemitic impulse.”

The gathering is the latest in a series of NatCon conferences held in the United States and abroad since 2019 by the Edmund Burke Foundation, whose founder is the Israeli nationalist and rightwing intellectual Yoram Hazony.

The conferences are high-profile gatherings of the international national conservative movement, which scholars describe as the most influential strand of an anti-liberal “New Right”.

Past NatCons have featured JD Vance, Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni and Nigel Farage, and have drawn accusations of racism and extremism since a speaker at the first Washington conference argued for an immigration policy of “more whites and fewer nonwhites”. Conference organizer Hazony, reportedly said at that time that the speaker’s views were “legitimate and should be heard and debated”. In 2024 a Brussels mayor ordered police to shut the event down before a court overturned him.

The Guardian contacted Hazony for comment.

Gorka is listed for a 7 October plenary titled “The Meaning of October 7”, alongside Israel’s diaspora affairs minister, Amichai Chikli, and the former Polish president Andrzej Duda. The Guardian previously reported on a video in which Gorka offered Israeli leaders advice on Hamas: “Kill every single one of them. God bless Israel. God bless Judeo-Christian civilisation.”

In August 2024 Smotrich said of Gaza: “Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned.” Britain sanctioned him on 10 June 2025, acting with Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway. It held him responsible for “inciting, promoting and/or supporting” abuses, “in particular acts of aggression and violence against Palestinian individuals in the West Bank”.

Rabbi Eliyahu, who for decades has served as chief rabbi of Safed, a public office in Israel, remarked of Palestinians in Gaza in a lecture his office posted to YouTube in November 2023, “Drop an atom [bomb] on them? It’s an option,” he said. The disciplinary hearing Israel’s high court ordered in 2020 was reportedly not held until June 2024, and its outcome kept from the public.

The conference’s co-sponsors include the Sovereignty Movement and Regavim, the organisation Smotrich founded. The ultranationalist Israeli television news outlet Channel 14 says it is producing the event with Hazony’s foundation and his Herzl Institute. The conference website does not currently list the channel as a partner.

The Guardian contacted Channel 14 for comment.

One panel is titled “Immigration and Cultural Replacement”. Maaßen’s talk is billed as “Why Elites Embrace Mass Migration as a Tool of Cultural, Racial, and Political Transformation”. A fellow panelist, Nathan Pinkoski of the Center for Renewing America, wrote the introduction to a 2025 edition of The Camp of the Saints, a novel Dreher at one time called “racist”. Dreher appears to have since softened that view.

The Guardian contacted Pinkoski for comment.

Vilimsky reportedly told a Budapest conference in April 2024: “We do not want Mohammed to become the most common name in our countries.” He is listed for a NatCon plenary on 7 October.

Gideon Sa’ar, the foreign minister, who last month welcomed a speech by the FPÖ leader, Herbert Kickl, at a Strasbourg event Vilimsky organised with Likud, as making possible “a substantive, open and sincere dialogue” despite the ongoing disengagement, is listed for the conference dinner on 6 October.

Wolfe told a Texas audience in February: “My boys all look like me. And I want my children to grow up in a country where they’re not minorities.” He has called Erickson’s essay “a call for the assassination of a group of conservative Christians”. His conference bio says he served at the state department and the Pentagon in the first Trump administration.

As previously reported in the Guardian Haywood’s private foundation gave the Edmund Burke Foundation, which organizes the NatCon conferences, $25,000 for “general operations” in the year to June 2023, its tax filing shows.

Hazony’s former communications director was among the Jewish conservatives who criticised him in January, after he blamed an “antisemitism-industrial complex” for failing to make the case against Tucker Carlson. He has since refused Carlson a speaking slot in Jerusalem, and on 28 September called the broadcaster’s show “the leading clearinghouse for antisemitism on the political Right in America”.

Taylor, the religion scholar, said: “[Hazony is] still trying to play an older game of drawing boundary lines and saying, oh, there is an antisemitic far right that is the fringe that we have to cut off … But Tucker Carlson is not [fringe]. Tucker Carlson is about as mainstream today in rightwing politics as you can get.”

The Guardian contacted the Carlson Network’s press office for comment.

McGeever, the antisemitism scholar, wrote: “Yoram Hazony may express bewilderment about this surge of antisemitism, but it is baked into the very political alliances he has forged. His allies have repeatedly promoted ideas about ‘globalist elites’ and ‘secret cabals’ which utilize the same structural logic of antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

The conference runs from 6 to 8 October at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center.