Several speakers at the right-wing National Conservatism Conference in Jerusalem said on Wednesday that Jews complain too much about antisemitism — on the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, which were followed by a sharp increase in hate crimes against Jews around the world. 

NatCon, as the conference spearheaded by right-wing Israeli American intellectual Yoram Hazony is known, was held in Israel for the first time this week.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, whose defense of far-right commentator Tucker Carlson sparked a firestorm at his think tank last year, opened the conference on Tuesday with a speech supportive of the U.S.-Israel alliance and avoided controversy, after his organization had previously been roiled by accusations of tolerating antisemitism. He called antisemitism evil and a “malignant sin,” and said that Israel and the U.S. are part of an alliance against “red-green leftism.” 

But in a plenary on Wednesday titled “American Right: The Next Generation,” multiple speakers berated Jews for speaking out against antisemitism, accused Israel of drawing the U.S. into wars and mocked evangelical Christians’ beliefs about Israel. They also blamed liberal and neoconservative Jews for mass immigration to the U.S.

Jonathan Keeperman, the owner of a conservative publishing house who recently courted controversy for remarks against Indian Americans, said that most of the American right is “at present suspicious of the value of our country’s geostrategic partnership” with Israel, and “exhausted by efforts to use the Holocaust or Jewish suffering in generally as a moral obligation to support Israel. They are completely unmoved by accusations of antisemitism and any hardline approaches to disavow and shame Israel’s critics.”

Amanda Milius, a conservative documentarian, portrayed those accusing others of antisemitism as being “in a fit of hysteria,” and said that doing so is “at risk of becoming [Black Lives Matter] to the younger American right. They are correctly sick of being called racists.” 

Matthew Peterson of the Claremont Institute warned that “denouncing antisemitism in the abstract in America these days is like calling somebody racist; both have little currency in America these days … We have a boy-who-cried-wolf problem in the West.”

The remarks drew widespread criticism from the right. American First Policy Institute Vice Chairman Fred Fleitz wondered on X: “Why did NatCon host this antisemitic weirdo [Keeperman]? … I was invited to speak at this conference. I’m glad I’m not there.” 

George Mason Law Professor Eugene Kontorovich, who is a fellow at former Vice President Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom think tank, wrote: “Who on the American right argues a moral obligation to support Israel based on the Holocaust? They argue strategic utility, technological prowess, and common enemies. Then comes this gaslighting.” 

Omri Ceren, a foreign policy advisor to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), commented that “as an empirical statement, this claim is straightforwardly false. Americans continue to find antisemitism weird and off-putting. They code it as a foreign mind virus.” 

Also at NatCon, William Wolfe, a former Heritage staffer who is now the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership, said on stage, “Americans are war-weary. [Israelis] might say ‘join the club,’ but we are not [Israel]. We are not beset on all sides. … We have spent thousands in lives and American blood and trillions in American treasure in a region that many are asking ‘why are we over there?'” 

“We want our sovereignty back,” he added. “We want America First to mean America First.” 

Keeperman’s prescription for winning back young, right-wing Americans is for Israel to “secure its own peace and manage its own problems without drawing in American force” – even though the U.S. military has not been involved in any of Israel’s wars over 77 years, only fighting with Israel against Iran — and continuing the fight against Iran even after Israel stopped engaging this year. 

Keeperman said in a video later deleted by the NatCon X account that “neoconservatives,” frequently used as shorthand for Jews, are “identified as the most vocal proponents of foreign interventionism and have been openly hostile to Trump and his movement from the start,” and “have been deeply poisonous to the reputation of Israel.” 

President Donald Trump is more popular in Israel than in almost every other country in the world. 

“Furthermore, the overwhelming support of mass immigration by liberal Jews and the demonization of populists and conservatives by organizations like the [Anti-Defamation League], which claims to speak on behalf of Jews, has likewise been very damaging to this alliance,” Keeperman stated.

Kontorovich responded: “This sounds not great. Some Jews in America have politics we don’t like, so we will get mad at a totally different bunch of Jews.” 

David Wurmser, a former Middle East policy advisor to former Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote on X that he appreciated Keeperman’s speech, as he too is critical of Jews who have valorized victimization, but added: “I fear he may be edging too close to establishing a strawman to avoid holding to account those in the conservative movement who are wandering down destructive shibboleths.”

Peterson also said: “I can’t emphasize this enough: while many of my Evangelical friends still hear ‘Stand with Israel’ as a religious duty, many other religious Christians feel it is condescending that their faith is dependent on the interests of a foreign nation.” 

Wolfe argued that “theology is waning in the U.S. and simply saying ‘because the Bible says so,’ in light of these very difficult conversations, isn’t going to work.” 

Israeli Cabinet ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Amichai Chikli spoke the day before; their offices declined to comment. Despite the controversy over the remarks, Israeli Foreign Ministry Director-General Eden Bar Tal and MK Simcha Rotman addressed the conference on Thursday. 

Rotman told JI that he was unaware of the controversy and did not wish to comment on remarks he had not heard, but that “one of the nice things about a conference is that everyone can say what he thinks and we can debate.”

The Israeli Foreign Ministry had no comment.