White House says Gorka will not attend despite website listing
The Guardian described the Jerusalem event as “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.”
The conference runs from 6 to 8 October at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center. It is organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation, whose founder, Yoram Hazony, the Guardian describes as an Israeli nationalist and rightwing intellectual. 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 NatCon conferences have featured Vice President JD Vance, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Italian Prime Minister 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.” 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.
Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts and former deputy national security adviser Victoria Coates, now vice-president at Heritage’s Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, are among this year’s listed attendees.
Gorka listed for 7 October plenary
Sebastian Gorka, a senior White House official whose May anti-terrorism strategy promised to target and neutralize groups “whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist,” was scheduled to speak at the Jerusalem event. When the Guardian contacted the White House for comment, a spokesperson advised that Gorka would no longer be attending due to a scheduling conflict, and that he had condemned Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel. His presence continued to be advertised on the conference website.
Gorka is listed for a 7 October plenary titled “The Meaning of October 7,” alongside Israel’s diaspora affairs minister, Amichai Chikli, and 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.”
Israeli speakers include sanctioned minister and a rabbi who advocated an atom bomb
The Israeli program lists Smotrich, a self-declared “fascist homophobe” whom Britain sanctioned on 10 June 2025 alongside Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway, alongside Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, who has served as chief rabbi of Safed for decades. 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 held Smotrich responsible for “inciting, promoting and/or supporting” abuses, “in particular acts of aggression and violence against Palestinian individuals in the West Bank.”
In a November 2023 lecture his office posted to YouTube, Eliyahu said of Palestinians in Gaza: “Drop an atom [bomb] on them? It’s an option.” Eliyahu was earlier ordered to face disciplinary proceedings for racist incitement against Palestinians. A disciplinary hearing Israel’s high court ordered in 2020 was reportedly not held until June 2024, and its outcome was kept from the public.
The conference’s co-sponsors include the Sovereignty Movement and Regavim, the organization Smotrich founded. Channel 14, an Israeli television news outlet the Guardian describes as ultranationalist, 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.
European speakers include former intelligence chief and Austrian lawmaker
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 of the Freedom party, which has been subject to a policy of non-engagement by Israel’s government.
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.”
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 1956 founding were former SS officers — and Tel Aviv. He has visited the country repeatedly and in January reportedly led a European delegation that was received by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite criticism from Austria’s Jewish community.
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.
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 the writer Rod Dreher at one time called “racist.” Dreher appears to have since softened that view.
American contingent includes self-described Christian nationalist and unmasked far-right publisher
The 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, whom the Guardian identified in 2024 as the publisher behind the far-right internet persona “L0m3z.” Keeperman did not address questions sent to him. Wolfe did not respond directly to questions on his attendance at NatCon, instead sending personal insults.
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 Erick Erickson’s essay criticizing the conference “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.
Last month, the evangelical conservative commentator Erick Erickson singled out Roberts, Wolfe, Heritage fellow Scott Yenor — another Jerusalem speaker — and others 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 Charles Haywood, the subject of extensive previous reporting in the Guardian. He was supported in his efforts by other NatCon attenders, including the writer Rod Dreher.
Last October, Roberts defended Tucker Carlson after the broadcaster gave a friendly interview to Nick Fuentes, whom the Guardian describes as a white nationalist and Holocaust denier, 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 Hazony to its board.
Scholars analyze the coalition and its internal tensions
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.”
Matthew Taylor, a senior visiting fellow at the Georgetown Center for Faith and Justice and author of the 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.”
McGeever also 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.”
Taylor 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.” On 28 September, Hazony called Carlson’s show “the leading clearinghouse for antisemitism on the political Right in America.”
Foreign minister listed for conference dinner
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who last month welcomed a speech by FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl at a Strasbourg event Vilimsky organized with Likud as making possible “a substantive, open and sincere dialogue” despite the ongoing disengagement, is listed for the conference dinner on 6 October.
Hazony’s former communications director was among the Jewish conservatives who criticized him in January after he blamed an “antisemitism-industrial complex” for failing to make the case against Carlson. He has since refused Carlson a speaking slot in Jerusalem. Charles Haywood’s private foundation gave the Edmund Burke Foundation $25,000 for “general operations” in the year to June 2023, according to its tax filing.
The Guardian contacted Smotrich, Eliyahu, Maaßen, Vilimsky, Wolfe, Keeperman, Heritage, Haywood, Erickson, Hazony, Channel 14, Pinkoski, and the Carlson Network’s press office for comment.