Last week, as Israel continued to prosecute its eliminationist war against Palestinians in Gaza, an eclectic group of right-wing bigwigs gathered in Washington, DC for the fourth iteration of the National Conservatism conference — convened by Yarom Hazony, an Israeli-born writer, activist, and former speechwriter for Benjamin Netanyahu. As our guest, historian Suzanne Schneider, explains, Hazony aspires to export Israel’s model of illiberal democracy and dispossession to the nations of the world. And if the embrace of NatCon by American conservatives is any indication, he is succeeding.
Nations, for Hazony, derive their legitimacy not from the consent of the governed (which, for Israel, would include disenfranchised Palestinians in the West Bank) but from God, who designated the land of Israel as the home of the Jews. All nations are born of divine covenant, not consent; political community is based on unchosen and inherited obligations extending outward in concentric circles of coercion, from the nuclear family, to the clan, to the tribe, and so on. This slipshod political theology authorizes a world of sovereign, militarized ethno-states, intensely protective of patriarchal prerogatives, and with no obligation to international law, human rights, judicial interference, or constitutional guarantees for religious or racial minorities. If Israel is the God-given home of the Jews, why shouldn't America be the God-given home of white Christians?
It’s not difficult to perceive the appeal of this vision for NatCon’s attendees, including Trumpist senators like Josh Hawley and Mike Lee, Catholic integralists like Gladdin Pappin and Chad Pecknold, racist nativists like Stephen Miller, or Viktor Orbán propagandists like John O’Sullivan. These figures may not all acknowledge or recognize their debt to Israeli Zionism, but they all look with admiration on the impunity with which Israel has treated its Arab subjects, seeing in Israel’s contempt for liberal norms, universal rights, and human dignity an aspirational model for America and the globe.
Further Reading:
Suzanne Schneider, "Light Among the Nations," Jewish Currents, Sept 28, 2023
— "How Israel’s Illiberal Democracy Became a Model for the Right," Dissent, Spring 2024.
— "Beyond Athens and Jerusalem," Strange Matters, Spring 2024.
— "A Note on Means and Ends," Dr. Small Talk (Suzanne's Substack), Feb 4, 2024.
Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (2018).
— Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022).
Sarah Jones, "The Authoritarian Plot (Live from NatCon 4)," New York Magazine, Jul 14, 2024.
Further Listening:
KYE, The Rise of Illiberal Right, Jul 2019.
KYE, Return of the National Conservatives, Nov 2021.
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