‘We Are the Radicals’: A Visit to the Israeli Conservatism Conference
The recent Israeli Conservatism Conference shows that a growing number of right-wingers are being drawn to this active community, which encompasses philosophy and literature, media and activism, even if its financial support and many of its ideas originated in America
The audience at last month’s Israeli Conservatism Conference. Where else can you take a selfie together with Israel’s Omri Caspi, formerly of the NBA, and with a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman?Credit: Emil Salman
Tal Heinrich is U.S. correspondent for Channel 14, the right-wing, commercial news channel. That may not be a title that confers fame, but at the Israeli Conservatism Conference, she was a celeb. In her brief speech at the opening of the event, which took place in Jerusalem on May 26, she assured the large, enthusiastic audience that they all shared a common purpose. “By the end of the day, we will all leave here with greater insight and with another deep answer to the kind of fashionable and destructive claims that are put forward by people who are often ashamed of our wonderful country,” Heinrich said. She didn’t say a word about left-wingers, because there was no need to. The conservative audience knows exactly who is destroying what in Israel. “The good ideas have to win in the end, and here in this hall you’ll find plenty of those.”
The Conservatism Conference was no less a cultural event than a political one. In the past decade, the model of the American conservative movement has steadily gained ground in Israel. Organizations that identity themselves as “conservative” – as opposed to “right-wing” – under the leadership of the Kohelet Policy Forum in Israel and the U.S.-based Jewish, conservative Tikvah Fund, are spearheading an effort to reshape and broaden the Israeli right. In other words, to educate the right and arm its adherents with a wealth of ideas and arguments, as well as organizational assistance. Not a word about the Creator or about the promises made to Abraham. At the conservatives’ conference, all is rational, well-ordered and set forth systematically.
With an entrance fee of 250 shekels ($75) and a day’s work lost, the big question is who’s willing to pay the price. According to the Tikvah Fund, however, some 1,200 participants were delighted to clear their calendar and empty their wallets in order to spend the day at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center. The lectures and panel discussions may have been the raison d’être and crowning glory of the event, but it also offered an opportunity to meet and schmooze, and to request a selfie with one’s heroes.
Channel 12 political commentator Amit Segal and Meir Ben-Shabbat, former head of the National Security Council, gave rousing talks; the founders of the ultranationalist Im Tirtzu organization and of the sponsor Kohelet stirred interest in a panel discussion about constitution and law – and the audience could meet them and the other speakers in the corridors, because when they weren’t taking part in one session or another, they too became participants in the conference and got caught up in chance conversations. That sheer accessibility was part of the attraction. Where else can you take a picture of yourself with Israel’s Omri Caspi, who played in the NBA, and with a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman?
Gadi Taub alongside Roy Iddan at the Conservatism Conference.Credit: Emil Salman
With panelists tackling heady questions of politics and justice, culture and society, it was clear that broadening one’s intellectual horizons was the name of the game. Even so, the interplay between the panelists brought to mind Comic-Con, the comic book convention. There were no Iron Man accessories or costumes, but there was an authentic encounter between people who share spheres of interest and identity, as well as a self-perception of being outsiders.
“In everyday life, you sometimes have the feeling that you’re part of a small community, because you’re always meeting the same people,” Tom Ziv, deputy director of the Tikvah Fund’s Argaman Institute, told me. “It takes an event like this to see how many people share this worldview. Even if they don’t agree on everything, everyone takes an interest and asks what you’re doing,” he added.
Despite the arguments and contradictions – and thanks to them – the conference manifested a 21st-century innovation. Even if it’s not a broad movement (as yet), conservatism is already a genuine community.
The institute, which describes itself as “an academy for the study of Jewish, Zionist and conservative thought and policy,” is part of the Tikvah Fund’s educational program.The conscious effort being undertaken by both Tikvah and the Kohelet Policy Forum to create a conservative movement in Israel has borne fruit that has taken on a life of its own. Ziv noted, for example, that at the first conference, which was held in 2019, “I knew a third of the people, at least by face, whereas today I felt that there were a lot of people I didn’t know, which is a great sign.” Everyone prefers to ignore the lackluster second conference, held last year via Zoom (because of the coronavirus crisis, which led to the event’s cancellation altogether in 2020). It’s clear now that what was lacking in that event was a sense of community, which is burgeoning from year to year.
“What is the Conservatism Conference, apart from a symposium featuring mostly prestigious lectures? It’s thousands of occasions for small talk, most of which will definitely turn into actions that are very far from small,” PR person Alon Malik tweeted during the conference.
Revolt against the Histadrut
All the participants, both onstage and in the audience, appeared to be in full agreement on a large number of topics, ranging from a loathing for the Supreme Court to recoil from even uttering the name “Naftali Bennett,” who used to be their guy, until he became prime minister and, in their thinking, a “liberal.” But one question generated a large and mutually contradictory number of answers – in fact, seemingly as many answers as there were respondents. It was the Big Question: What does conservatism in Israel actually mean? The definition that gained a foothold among some of the participants came straight from the conceptual world of the Kohelet forum. It, too, is investing considerable capital (from American conservatives) in a variety of educational programs. “The Kohelet Policy Forum strives to secure Israel’s future as the nation-state of the Jewish people, to strengthen representative democracy, and to broaden individual liberty and free-market principles in Israel,” the organization’s English-language website states as its credo. (TP-but only for Jewish Israelis!)
Still, every definition that was offered ignited a stormy debate among speakers and participants alike. It’s a mirror image of the debate among left-wingers over what the “correct” left is. “I feel that we are using the term ‘conservatism’ as though it is self-apparent, and it is not,” said the author and political commentator Dr. Gadi Taub in a panel discussion on “Israeli culture.” “In Europe,” he added, “it’s easy to say what a conservative is: You’re against the French Revolution, and that’s enough, that’s your touchstone. If you’re an American conservative, your tradition is the American Revolution. So what does it mean to be a conservative? A similar problem exists in Israel. The Zionist tradition was a revolution in the life of the Jewish people – our tradition also includes a revolution.”
Panelists appearing in the session on Israeli culture, from left: Gadi Taub, Roy Iddan, Shay Golden and moderator Liat Koshizky.Credit: Emil Salman
This frame of mind, and the self-perception as revolutionaries resonated well with the audience. Both speakers and participants spoke in one voice as a group who feel that they constitute a distinctive and absolute majority in the population, but are nevertheless the losing side in the battle for culture and in the public discourse, which they claim is still dominated by a secular left-wing minority elite. This, despite the fact that Israel has been governed by right-wing coalitions for most of the past 45 years, and many on the left see themselves as an endangered species. It’s the revolutionism of the conservative movement in its infancy. Roy Iddan, the creator of the police series “Manayek” (Hebrew slang for “cops,” although the show’s English title is “Rats”), took this approach one step further. “In Israel,” Iddan asserted during a panel discussion with Taub and writer and media personality Shay Golden, “the left is the conservative monolith that preserves its institutions and bars any change, heaven forbid. The left is conservative, and we are the radicals. We are the revolutionaries.”
Iddan and Taub, like other panelists, agreed that there is, after all, one
common denominator that unites conservatives. “Zionism and nationalism – in the past this was accepted by everyone. We don’t have the privilege of abandoning those things,” said Iddan, as the audience nodded in agreement. To which Taub went further, adding that, “We are nationalists, and that is what unites us. I am not the first person to notice that the struggle has ceased to be over the future of Judea and Samaria, that it is now a struggle between nationalism and democracy, on the one hand, and a post-national, globalist, liberal elite that wants to be managed by international charters and for us to be in the European Union when we grow up. That is the heart of the dispute.”
The culture panel homed in on the erosion of the Zionist ethos in the left-wing camp. “Bialik would not find a publisher today, and neither would Alterman!” Golden said, referring to the two classical Israeli poets. “They are too Zionist, too national-oriented, and they employ too many religious references. Think of the film ‘Operation Thunderbolt’ [1977, about the Entebbe raid]. Today it would be banned from broadcast – seriously, can you believe that? I can say with authority, as one who is acquainted with the [Israel Film Fund’s] judges and other officials – there is no way a film like ‘Operation Thunderbolt’ would get funding today.”
In conversation, Amiad Cohen, Tikvah’s CEO, noted the importance of conservatism in the cultural realm and also what differentiates it from the already existing national-oriented right. “The right is engaged with two issues: Judea and Samaria, and state and religion. It is not engaged with all the other key issues. The right has not put forward an alternative that deals with all the domestic issues. The right has never offered an alternative, it hasn’t trained people. We are trying to expand the circles and to put forward an orderly worldview that serves as an alternative. We are empiricists, we want what will work. The proof is in the pudding, not in good intentions. We think the country can grow wildly, both economically and socially.”
When I ask Uri, a 26-year-old university student, what conservatism is, he’s astounded by the very question. As if he were a fish being asked what water is. “From my point of view, it’s an _expression_ of common sense and of the concepts I was raised on,” he replies. “I grew up with a concept of healthy conservatism – preserving what exists that’s good, without searching for extreme revolutions – and here at the conference those concepts are being given _expression_. For me it was natural. I grew up and was a group leader in Bnei Akiva [the religious-Zionist youth movement]. I was born and raised in a religious-Zionist moshav. I didn’t need an import from America. I know it from home.”
‘Give us ammunition’
A decade after Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked entered politics, and the Kohelet Policy Forum was founded, the conservative education project is bearing fruit. Religious Zionism, which in the past espoused the social-welfare values of the Labor Movement, has adopted free-market economics. Uri, who is a generation younger than most of the speakers, gives voice to the deep transformation that growing numbers in the right wing overall and in religious Zionism specifically are undergoing.
“To say that in Israel being a conservative means adopting the free market is to mix up America and Israel somewhat,” Taub said in the panel discussion, and, at age 57, he’s old enough to know of what he speaks. “They have a free-market tradition, and that really is conservative with them. Here we have a socialist tradition, and Israeli conservatism is in many senses a revolt against the Histadrut; [Arnon] Ben David is the tradition, we are the revolution,” he asserts, referring to Israel’s labor federation and its current secretary general.
The long, winding corridor that links the large halls of the International Convention Center was studded with dozens of booths. As they made their way to a panel discussion on “A Muslim Minority in a Jewish State” or to a talk with the ambassador of Bahrain to Israel, the participants could find a broad spectrum of answers to the question of what conservatism is. The Café Shapira Forum, which had its own booth, invited visitors to lectures intended to “restore logic to the discourse.” Next to it was a booth of a group called Habit’honistim, meaning people who see the world through a security prism. They were handing out ominous flyers (“Operation Guardian of the Walls was just the promo”), and implored whoever was interested that, “We have fighters, just give us ammunition!”
Summing up the list of speakers at the start of the conference, emcee Tal Heinrich quipped, “In short, you could have stuck with Twitter and saved yourselves the price of a ticket and a trip to Jerusalem.” Indeed, it seemed as though even if many of the attendees were meeting for the first time at the conference, they already knew one another from social media. In a sense, it’s a community that coalesces every day, and it meets here once a year to reinforce itself. The bill is paid by the uncle from America, of course.
Amiad Cohen explained to me that the open space and the considerable amount of time the participants had to wander around allowed for a “free market of ideas” to come into play. There was room for a booth for anyone and everyone who was willing to pay. “Five-hundred shekels [about $150], and that’s it,” Cohen says. “I’m trying to create a ‘big tent.’ Freud said that there is a narcissism of small differences, but I don’t believe that. Everyone here agrees on 80 percent of the issues. In the end, we want to create a space where everyone agrees on the foundations, though there will be endless differences here. There are a great many internal disagreements. We don’t know everything, we are clarifying and airing things.”
The most vivid illustration of Cohen’s “big tent” took the form of two booths that faced one another. One was that of the Ayn Rand Center, under the management of Boaz Arad, which preaches what he describes as “classic liberalism” and individual liberties. The other booth was promoting a journal of Haredi thought. I asked an ultra-Orthodox man who happened by whether he had also had a look at the booth across the way. “I enjoy being exposed to all sorts of views,” he replied. “To say that I agree with it all, or even with most of it – I don’t know.” To my question of whether he was acquainted with the writings of Ayn Rand, he replied that he had read “Atlas Shrugged,” and hadn’t liked it too much. “It’s a bit egoistic, no?”
The Ayn Rand Center’s booth. Along with the Haredi stand across the way, an example of what organizer Cohen called “the big tent.”Credit: Emil Salman
“My concept is that there is an inherent contradiction,” Arad says about the Israeli conservative movement, emphasizing that he shares only a partial “joint interface” with it. He points out that the American conservative movement, which is Israel’s role model, “sprang from a historical sociological process.” In other words, the movement that united around Ronald Reagan in the 1980s reflected a new coalition, a political movement that was created with the aid of generous financing by affluent individuals, and not a shared worldview. At the same time, it’s hard to deny the existence of a community. A new elite for a new right.
At the booth of the Israeli Immigration Policy Center, activist Akiva Lamm tells me about the importance this day holds for him. “We are trying to create a conservative immigration policy that is bound up with the State of Israel and seeks to preserve the state. On the other hand, some people connect less with this, and there are those who are working to change [its Jewish] identity. Today is a day for us to gain exposure with an audience that believes in the same universe of values that we believe in. Activism has a group of organizations, each of which is fighting for its niche.” The conference, he notes, allowed him to become acquainted with organizations that espouse similar goals and offer possibilities for cooperation.
A definitive example of how the conservative community is coalescing and being transformed into a distinctive, if small, bloc – one both right-wing and elite, was the appearance of Roi Yozevitch at the conference, where he rented a booth. Author, lecturer and independent researcher, he also hosts the podcast “Yozevitch’s World.” He doesn’t identify himself as a conservative and also usually steers clear of politics, preferring to talk about science and knowledge (his doctorate is in computer science). However, he realizes that his audience is conservative, and like him, Orthodox to a large extent. Still, no one is more surprised than he to discover that here, in the convention center, he is no less than a celebrity, and he is amazed each time he’s asked to pose for a selfie. His entry to the conservatism conference attests to the existence of a large enough audience that has already created stars for itself who aren’t occupied with politics but identify with the group.
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“This will sound a little odd here, but life isn’t all conservatism and politics,” Yozevitch told me, when I visited him at his booth. “The things that interest me are beyond that. But if you ask me whether I am a conservative or a progressive – and if I have no alternative – then the answer is yes, I am a conservative. But you know, Donald Trump is also a conservative, even though he did beauty queen competitions,” he adds. Yozevitch recounts a conversation he had with Gadi Taub, who he says told him, “‘It’s true that everyone here sees things slightly differently, but the progressives are something so significant that it’s worth uniting now against them.’” (Taub, a reformed liberal, has become an outspoken voice for many in the right. A senior lecturer in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he is a writer, an oped columnist for this newspaper, and a popular podcaster in the vein of Rush Limbaugh.)
Catering at the Conservatism Conference. The big tent that the Tikvah Fund is proposing is being built with dollars.Credit: Emil Salman
“I think there’s a place for discourse,” explains Aviad Cohen. “Normally, the experience of encountering these ideas is very much an individual thing: You read a book alone, you hear a podcast by yourself. Here we want to create a movement. It’s a meeting of people. And when you enter an event like this, you feel that it’s serious and deep, you feel that there are major ideas here, and you feel that there are a lot of people with you, so it works on all parts of your psyche. And it works. The mingling that you see brings people into an encounter. In the frame we have created, they meet people with whom they agree on the basic assumptions. That’s the big tent.”
The big tent that the Tikvah Fund is proposing is being built with dollars. Around 1,200 people agreed to pay 250 shekels to enter and take part in the community, but what they got in exchange went beyond the entrance fee. It was clear that a lot of money had gone into the conference, and there were signs of this in every corner. It stood out in everything from the catering to the interior design, with walls adorned by quotations and images of famous figures that should generate conservative inspiration. The tables were covered with silk-screened images of Ronald Reagan and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. That was perhaps aimed more at the large number of Americans who were in attendance. Indeed, the booth with the longest line was they one where guests could pick up headsets for simultaneous translation from Hebrew.
The Tikvah Fund’s modus operandi here was reminiscent of a model used by the American conservative movement in the 1980s. An attempt was made in America at that time, as in Israel today, by people with money and power to create a conservative elite and forge from it an organic whole, so that its members could serve as leaders in their individual communities. “You are leaders of the future,” declared former ambassador Friedman, who created the Friedman Center for Peace through Strength, which was also a sponsor of the event.
The Tikvah Fund’s new chairman, Elliott Abrams, has firsthand experience with the process of forging a conservative elite, as he himself is one of its products. He jumped on the bandwagon during the conservative push of the 1980s, and has served in foreign-policy roles in every Republican administration since Reagan’s, even after being convicted in 1991 of misleading Congress during the Iran-Contras affair (for which he was pardoned the following year by George H. W. Bush).
David Friedman, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel. You can meet everyone at the conference.Credit: Emil Salman
The speeches delivered by Abrams and Friedman at the Conservativism Conference, and in fact the whole spirit of the event with its ideas and particular lexicon, led Michael Peters to feel at home. The 20-year-old college student had arrived from Manhattan via a Tikvah Fund summer scholarship. For him it’s just the start of a process that he says will culminate when he makes aliyah. He first heard about the conference and about the Tikvah Fund from the yeshiva he attends in New York. When I ask him and the friend accompanying him, who preferred not to provide his name, what they think about Israeli conservatism, the friend replies, “I see how it’s compatible with the values of the Israeli right, but I don’t know what the difference is between American and Israeli conservatism, other than the fact that Israeli conservatism is supposed to be more Jewish and Israeli. I didn’t understand what the difference is here. From my viewpoint, it’s simply a right-wing gathering. Is there anything innovative here? Is the innovation the sheer appearance of conservatism in Israel?”
Despite the arguments and the internal contradictions – and in large measure thanks to them – the conservatism conference manifested a 21st-century innovation. Even if it is not a broad popular movement (as yet), conservatism is already a genuine community. The most common word I heard in response when I asked people why they had come to the conference was “networking.” Beyond forging practical ties, however, hundreds of people from a host of professions were present because they have a healthy interest in ideas. Right-wingers who want to enhance their worldview and base it not on the Bible alone, but on European and American thinkers and scholars.
From the perspective of the two young men from New York, the difference between Israel’s conservative movement and the one in the United States might not be apparent. However, it appears that for a growing bloc of right-wingers, conservatism is perhaps not a only a political movement, but something that is coalescing into an active community, one that includes philosophy and literature, media and activism. Donations from conservative Jews in the United States subsidize the community and continue to cultivate it through educational programs. “What do I think of this network?” asked Boaz Arad from the Ayn Rand Center. “There’s a movement that is growing stronger, and you see that it’s investing from the roots.... It’s no longer just going into the street with models of submarines [referring to a public campaign mounted by the Movement for Quality Government in Israel], and shouting. It’s something deeper that deals with things thoroughly, not like foam on the water.”
The Conservatism Conference in Jerusalem. About 1,200 people were in attendance.Credit: Emil Salman
Yozevitch found a different, more humane, connection. “There’s possibly an ‘echo chamber’ here, in which everyone knows everyone and they have all seen Bill Maher’s latest [clips]. In a panel discussion, Hanson spoke about Disney and trans people, and an entire audience applauded him. Just being in a whole audience that thinks like you is very nice,” he adds, referring to the American scholar and commentator Victor David Hanson, whose 2001 book “Carnage and Culture” was published in Hebrew by a Tikvah imprint (under the title “Why the West Has Won”).
Uri, the student, offers an explanation that reflects the interest of a new generation that has reached maturity along with Israeli conservatism. “It’s worth every shekel – both the content itself, and being part of a conservative community that is truly taking shape. I’m going through all the content here, checking out the different presentations and the representatives of the organizations. Naturally I’m also looking for interesting journalists to talk to. And, of course, a bit of networking. You can simply approach the speakers – here, look, it’s Caroline [Glick, who was next to us].”
If this were a left-wing conference, maybe some romantic couples would have emerged from it. Does that happen here, too?
Says Uri, laughing, “As you see, there’s quite a large male majority here, so if I were a conservative woman, maybe I’d come to this conference. We also have more [ideologically] mixed couples, so we can field couples that include members of the other camp, too. We’ll accept everyone; it’ll be bipartisan.”