Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation opened his speech at this year’s National Conservatism (NatCon) conference in Jerusalem by hailing Yoram Hazony, whom he called “great friend,” as “the most important conservative intellectual in the world [sic] today.”
To many Americans, that title will come as a surprise. Most have never even heard of Roberts, to say nothing of Hazony. Yet the two men are close personal friends; the latter currently sitting on the board of trustees at The Heritage Foundation.
Roberts continued his speech by noting that Heritage was the “first and only organization on the political right to convene a national antisemitism task force.” Right after this, and without skipping a beat, he championed Project Esther, which he described as a “blueprint to counter anti-semitism in the United States.” Doubtless, the initiative will be expanded to study and combat the same “anti-semitism” on the political right. These are strange remarks to hear from the president of the most prominent and influential organ within American conservatism, a movement dedicated to upholding free speech as an ideal.
Aside from Roberts, this year’s NatCon event featured other prominent American conservative leaders, including Dr. Sebastian Gorka, senior White House official; Rod Dreher, author and editor; Jeremy Boreing, former CEO of The Daily Wire; Andrew Doran, intelligence official and founder of the Coalition of Catholics Against Antisemitism; and Jonathan Keeperman, founder of Passage Publishing.
These and others, including Israel’s Minister of Finance and Religious Zionism party leader Bezalel Smotrich, delivered lectures at the three-day event from October 7-9. The gathering’s schedule is, of course, available online in both English and Hebrew.
What is the “New Right”?
After Donald Trump’s historic presidential victory in 2016, a new paradigm emerged on the American right, which in recent years has come to be known as the “New Right.” The term broadly applies to the political movements and factions that emanate from, or were motivated by, the “Trump Revolution,” whether implicitly or explicitly. The most recognizable manifestation of this was the MAGA movement and its variants such as the Make America Healthy Again initiative, National Conservatism, and Post-Liberalism, followed by America First, NeoReaction (NRx), the Alt Right, and White Nationalist groups.
In his first term, most especially on the campaign trail in 2015, Trump was the leader of the New Right coalition, which was seen as an existential threat to the existing political order and treated as such. Despite his myriad faults and his now painfully underwhelming record, Trump understood, whether sincerely or not, that the “middle American radicals,” as Patrick Buchanan once called them, needed a voice. He spoke for anxious White Americans realizing they were on the precipice of becoming a demographic minority in their own country. He also gave voice to Americans who were skeptical of unbridled capitalism, many of whom supported Bill Clinton in the 1990s and even Barack Obama during his first term. Finally, he spoke to a working class that was tired of both the free-trade consensus and the stifling atmosphere of “political correctness” enforced from above.
Against this backdrop, one finds the organization and aims of National Conservatism.
Hazony’s case for Jewish nationalism
Yoram Hazony’s remarks at this year’s NatCon conference may be appealing to the uninitiated. At one point during his speech, he lamented how it has become a common “view that Whites and Jews and maybe Asians are abusing the rest of the population.” He said that this was unfortunately “becoming the mainstream in the Democratic Party and other left-of-center parties”
Hazony’s rhetoric sounds on point, at least superficially. White people have been made into an enemy of the political left. However, lumping Jews and Asians into the equation isn’t really fair as both groups have not been kept out of or routinely vilified by mainstream media, Hollywood, the academy, or governmental institutions to either the degree or frequency of White people.
Born in Rehovot, Israel, Hazony is a dual-citizen Israeli Jew who serves as president of the Herzl Institute, which takes its name from the father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl. The Shalem Center is also Hazony’s brainchild. Founded in 1994, the Center is a think-tank based in Jerusalem whose purpose is to end the “identity crisis” experienced by modern Jews. It seeks to remedy this by way of instruction in Jewish and Zionist history, the Bible, and the Talmud, among other disciplines.
Yazony began overtly influencing the American right in 2018, authoring The Virtue of Nationalism the same year. Four years later, he released Conservatism: A Rediscovery, outlining a new and improved vision of American conservatism, one ostensibly purged of neoconservatives and libertarians. Hazony’s agenda, unsurprisingly, is to promote a robust Jewish nationalism rooted in Jewish identity tethered to a particular people (blood) and particular geography (soil). In his many speeches, he invokes nationalist and illiberal-sounding language to court the American public and the conservative intelligentsia, especially donors.
Jewish conservative John Podheretz confirmed Hazony’s true intentions during a recent podcast which has been circulating on X. He revealed that Hazony personally told him in the mid 1990s that he was engaging in this “Straussian plan” in order to expand the borders of Israel. His words:
What [Hazony] wants is to secure intellectual support in America and the West for the annexation of the West Bank and the creation of, what people call, ‘Greater Israel.’ But that’s not what he says he’s doing, what he says he’s doing is understanding nationalism and trying to make a bond between Israel and the rest of the conservative world by saying ‘We’re nationalists and you’re nationalists … We’re all the same.’
The Dispatch
This project is confirmed by Hazony himself in his 2003 essay “On the National State, Part 2: The Guardian of the Jews.” After invoking Herzl for the definition of the Judenstaat (or “Jewish state”), Hazony approving relayed that its purpose was that the “laws, institutions, and policies would be directed towards the advancement of the interests and aspirations of the Jews as a people” (emphasis added). 1
Hazony further developed this line of thinking in the essay, casting suspicion on a “state whose overriding purpose is the pursuit of political liberty,” while endorsing “a state whose purpose is to be the guardian of the Jews.” 2 Again, his explicit purpose is “to pursue, with constancy and vigor, the well-being and interest of the Jewish people” (emphasis added). 3
Stand with Christ the King: Donate to Integrity today!
Hazony has admitted his sympathies for a Greater Israel project that is exclusively Jewish and hegemonic over the Holy Land and Middle East elsewhere. In 1996, he wrote an essay reflecting on the Oslo Accords, a very limited agreement between Israel and Palestinians that he dramatically described as representing “the near total collapse of the Jewish nationalist ideology which built the [Israeli] state.” Unsurprisingly, the subtitle of the essay reads: “The ideology that built the State of Israel has given way to a Post-Zionism that sanctifies Jewish disempowerment.”
In May 2025, while responding to the United Kingdom’s plan to recognize Palestinian statehood, Hazony chided on X that “there is no Palestinian state. The UK doesn’t really get to decide these things.” In February of the same year, Hazony confidently boasted: “There never was going to be a ‘Palestinian state’ living in peace with Israel.”
Real nationalism for me, but not for thee
As if it were not peculiar enough that a dual-citizen Jewish Israeli was leading a movement called “National Conservatism,” Hazony no less opposes all forms of real nationalism within Western countries, especially when related to White identity.
At the first inaugural NatCon conference in July 2019, which was organized by Hazony and was held in Washington D.C., conservatives associated with more racial or traditional nationalists views on the American right were prohibited. Peter Brimelow, founder of the anti-immigration media outlet VDARE, recently confirmed how Hazony sent an email invitation to him as a guest, but shortly thereafter rescinded the invitation. Jared Taylor, the founder of the pro-White identity organizations American Renaissance and the New Century Foundation, was also banned from attending the conference, again not as a speaker but merely as a guest seeking a “press pass.”
Yet speakers of Jewish extraction were and are able to promote their nationalism at NatCon and apparently face no repercussions. The aforementioned 2026 NatCon speaker Bezalel Smotrich said a 2017 essay titled “Israel’s Decisive Plan” championed that, “Within this complex and unprecedented tangle, the State of Israel must continue to exist as the national home of the Jewish People.” Later, he discussed a “variety of measures intended to improve the demographic balance” and noted that a stronger Israel will “increase Jewish demographic growth, and encourage part of the Arab population to emigrate to other countries.”
On the NatCon official event page, Smotrich is listed as a “Featured Speaker,” presumably at the selection of Hazony. But change Jewish to White and those declarations sound like something out of the pages of VDARE or American Renaissance — both of whose official spokesman are unwelcome at NatCon events. For instance, imagine if a White NatCon speaker said the following:
Within this complex and unprecedented tangle, the United States of America must continue to exist as the national home of White People. A stronger America will increase White demographic growth, and encourage part of the non-White population to emigrate to other countries.
Such remarks would simply never be allowed. As 2026 speaker Rod Dreher, while mentioning “decent nationalism,” explicitly remarked that “national conservatism promotes national identity, not racial or ethnic identity.”
True, both Brimelow and Taylor can be criticized for maintaining a materialistic and even excessively racialist view. Indeed, as 20th century German Bishop of Linz Johannes Gföllner noted, “the Church also fully recognizes and approves of this correctly understood nationalism.” And just what is this rightly understood nationalism? Catholic neo-scholastic philosopher Rev. Henri Grenier said it best when he explained that it is “a large community of men who, because of their descent from a common stock, are in certain physical characteristics and intellectual and moral qualities to some extent distinct from all other men.”
One therefore must ask whether this glaring double-standard employed by Hazony can be explained by anything other than Jewish superiority and privilege that seeks “blood and soil” nationalism for Israelis but denies it for all others.
