US national conservatism is becoming a prop for 'greater Israel' extremism

Following a decade of domination by Donald Trump, Republicans will need a coherent ideology when his second term expires, since he’s ineligible to run again. His appeal has never been ideological but personal. Alarmingly, the most influential emerging ideology is being shaped in part by greater Israel extremism.

The "National Conservatism" project, which held its most recent annual conference in Washington on September 2 to 4 is at the forefront of efforts to hold his coalition together in 2028.

With Vice President JD Vance in their ranks, the “NatCons” are well positioned to be among the most viable camps. They are largely defined by a Christian nationalist agenda that, until now, has been a fringe movement even among conservative Republicans.

This year's conference mainstreamed Douglas Wilson, an extremist preacher from Idaho. His reactionary religious-political agenda would impress even Muslim Brotherhood parties. He insists that women should not be allowed to vote, and non-Christians, and even liberal Christians, should be barred from public office despite the US Constitution strictly prohibiting religious tests for public officeholders.

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While not explicitly defending slavery, which he calls "un-biblical", he maintains that the southern states were correct on all other significant arguments during the US Civil War. A pamphlet he co-authored in 1996 claims that US slavery produced the most "genuine affection between the races" in human history. He dismisses criticism of his writings as "abolitionist propaganda". US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth is among his noteworthy devotees.

Speaker after speaker at the NatCon conference, consistent with the group’s emerging ideology, insisted that the US and western civilisation can only be saved by establishing a government that promotes and privileges Christianity and Christians.

It seems ironic, then, that a key leader of National Conservatism – with its echoes of 1930s German politics – is an Orthodox Jewish, Israeli-American academic, Yoram Hazony. But his seemingly implausible advocacy of Christian domination of US politics and society serves a clear purpose.

Mr Hazony’s embrace of American ultra-nationalism rests uneasily alongside his unequivocal allegiance to Israel. In his book, The Virtue of Nationalism, he listed Britain, the Netherlands and the US as countries "whose continued independent existence is meaningful to me personally." However, he continued, "My first concern is for Israel."

That’s understandable, but why lead a movement for an American nationalism defined by Christian domination over non-Christians?

It is a manifestation of Israeli extremism, not normal nationalism. Mr Hazony was a deep admirer – although he says not a follower – of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who founded the most extreme anti-Arab movement in Israeli politics.

Kahane was among the first to demand the expulsion of all Palestinians from Israel and the occupied territories. His Kach party was banned from Israeli elections because of their violent racism and designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the US.

Now the Israeli political scene is so radicalised that his followers include several powerful members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s cabinet. In a gushing memorial after his 1990 assassination, Mr Hazony wrote that his life was profoundly changed after hearing Kahane speak. He called him "mesmerising" and said he "changed our lives".

Mr Hazony insists he was never a follower of Kahane because of his "predilection for violent solutions", but not his racism.

Mr Hazony defines nationalism as "the collective right of a free people to rule themselves". The problem he and other Israeli nationalists face is that Israel's nationalism involves ruling over other, decidedly unfree, people, especially given that there are as many Palestinian Muslims and Christians in the theoretical “greater Israel” as there are Jews.

Mr Netanyahu recently confirmed that he considers the establishment of a "greater Israel" to be his "historic and spiritual mission". Apparently, so does Mr Hazony. In 1989, he moved his young family to a West Bank hilltop settlement and now lives in another settlement near occupied East Jerusalem.

Mr Hazony was a speechwriter for Mr Netanyahu, founded the right-wing Shalem Centre Israeli think tank, and denounced the Oslo Accords as "Jewish disempowerment". He said that very limited agreement with Palestinians represented "the near total collapse of the Jewish nationalist ideology which built the [Israeli] state".

He insists that "the land of Israel is the historical inheritance of only one people: the Jews”. He was horrified by Oslo for supposedly "creating an equivalence between Jewish and Arab rights", even though they did no such thing. But even a hint of any equivalence appalled him. The recognition that Palestinians might have any national or collective rights struck him as a total capitulation of Zionism and Israeli nationalism.

Therein lies the heart, and probably origin, of his national conservatism project.

His championing of nationalism as an exclusivist, ethno-religious project first needed salvaging in Israel (by restoring the goal of annexing the occupied Palestinian Territories). Then it needed to be normalised internationally, especially the US.

To defend illiberal nationalism, Mr Hazony bizarrely, and virtually alone, insists Hitler wasn’t a nationalist at all but “an imperialist”. However, the entire NatCon project seems to take its most fundamental lead from the Nazi political scientist Carl Schmidt, who argued that all politics boil down to an existential struggle between one’s “friends” and “enemies”.

For Mr Hazony, the whole concept of Israel as “a Jewish and Democratic state“ is nonsensical and dangerous. He has written that a state in which the people are Jewish and the state is a universalist democracy is, by definition, “a non-Jewish state”.

Unsurprisingly, Mr Hazony appears completely comfortable with Israeli apartheid. His global championing of "National Conservatism" seems like an obvious an effort to make the communal domination by seven million Jewish Israelis over seven million Palestinian Muslims and Christians, which he regards as an existential necessity for Israel as a Jewish state, internationally normative.

If comparable political systems are taking root in Washington, Israeli apartheid can hardly be criticised, ostracised or condemned. That’s why this hardline Israeli nationalist, inspired by Kahane, sits at the helm of the NatCon project that hopes to succeed Mr Trump.

Although few rank and file, or even leading, NatCons realise it, they are being used as props for “greater Israel” extremism. It is a sinister inverse of the slogan "globalise the intifada". There are many factors at work in the nascent NatCon agenda. But just below the surface lurks an effort to globalise the occupation.