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Far-right figures from US, Europe and Israel to gather at conference in Israel

politicsOct 6, 202621243

A National Conservatism conference begins in Jerusalem today and will host US, Israeli and European far-right figures. Sebastian Gorka, a White House senior official who was advertised to speak, is listed on the programme but the White House told the Guardian he will not attend and said he condemned Hamas’s 7 October attack. Israeli speakers on the programme include finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, described in the programme as a self-declared "fascist homophobe" and an internationally sanctioned extremist, and Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, who in 2023 called for an atom bomb to be dropped on Gaza and was ordered to face disciplinary proceedings for racist incitement against Palestinians. European participants named include Hans-Georg Maaßen, the one-time head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency who faced a 2023 expulsion attempt by his then party, the CDU, and Austria’s Harald Vilimsky, whose Freedom party has been subject to a policy of non-engagement by Israel’s government and whose party’s first two post‑founding leaders were former SS officers. The American contingent includes William Wolfe, a self-described Christian nationalist who has called for "mass deportations, denaturalizations, and remigration," and Jonathan Keeperman, the publisher the Guardian unmasked in 2024 as the person behind the far-right internet persona "L0m3z." The Guardian described the Jerusalem event as perhaps the most significant recent gathering to bring large contingents of Israeli nationalists together with Christian nationalists and far-right European nationalists from a milieu sometimes shadowed by accusations of antisemitism.

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