Instinctual Pep Rally

Last week I attended a conference hosted by the Center for Israeli Liberty in Jerusalem. I went alone, and didn’t meet anyone I knew, so it was a perfect opportunity to witness a political movement taking shape in real time in full observer mode.

From what I can gather, the Center for Israeli Liberty is the primary conduit for the infusion of NatCon ideas into Israeli political discourse through its affiliated organizations like Argaman, Shibolet Press, and HaShiloach. Big money is being pumped into these organizations to try to shift Israeli politics in the direction of small-c Anglo conservatism and away from the rotten labor-socialist roots on which the political institutions of the country were built. The featured guests of the evening were Douglas Murray, every Israeli’s favorite gentile, alongside Ben Shapiro, every philosemite’s favorite Jew. The crowd was mostly Anglo immigrants, overwhelmingly from the MO/DL¹ camp. To my surprise, there was also a significant demographic of native Israelis, likely the children and grandchildren of the aforementioned group, who seemed downright enthusiastic as they crowded around the stalls selling Hebrew translations of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life next to Netanyahu’s autobiography.

Themes of the evening revolved around the historical continuity of the modern Israeli story with its Hebraic origins, the shared fight between Israel and broader Western civilization against the barbarism of the Islamic hordes, and advice for how Israel ought to approach relations with the incoming Trump administration, the mere mention of which sent the crowd into a frenzied cheer. The mood was positively exciting, bringing to mind memories of high school pep rallies.

The existence of a homegrown, if slightly astro-turfed, national conservative faction in Israel is downright impressive given the absolute hegemony of the Mapai left in all educational and accrediting institutions until relatively recently. But if you dig into the foundations and organizations in the constellation of conservative NGOs operating here, you’ll quickly happen upon figures like Yoram Hazony, political theorist and author of The Virtue of Nationalism, which would likely win you some less-than-pleasant stares on most any American college campus. In it, Hazony argues that the Anglo-Protestant political tradition owes much to the concept of the nation that originated in the Hebrew Bible. It’s no doubt where Vice President-elect J.D. Vance found inspiration for his America is a Nation address, so clearly these ideas are gaining traction on both sides of the Atlantic. One could make the argument that bringing the Burkean tradition to 21st century Israel is really a continuation of the Zionist project: by retconning the indigenous political tradition to the land in which it was birthed, Hazony (whose name translates, fittingly, to visionary) is employing the thought of one of the great counterrevolutionary voices of the 18th century to instigate a political revolution. Yashar koach.

One thing conservative intellectual scholar types have a really difficult time with is packaging their ideas in a format that gets typically apolitical normie rightoids to show up and clap their hands. For this, Hazony and friends deserve full credit. Most everyone agrees that Israel will emerge from its current military engagements with a radically different political echelon from the current lineup of demagogues, arsonists, frauds and imbeciles; now is the time to sow the seeds and build a movement that presents a positive vision for the future beyond getting your youth to run through the Arab Quarter waving Israeli flags every year in a show of puerile chauvinism.

The problem is that conservative normies are congenitally predisposed to align their political views along axes of loyalty, most frequently of the familial variety. The Israeli right is no exception. They will ask you who you’re voting for, and if you say you don’t know, they will ask you who your parents voted for without blinking, the assumption being that political beliefs, like genetics, are hereditary. As a result, it’s inherently more difficult to corral them into supporting any sort of impersonal political movement or enterprise that your cousin or uncle didn’t pull you into. This one cool trick is a feature, not a bug, of being embedded in a thick web of existing communal relationships, often fortified by shared religious beliefs and practice. Fellow dissident right anon Yuri Bezmenov recently hit upon this phenomenon in his excellent writeup on the ongoing American Counter-Revolution of the instinctuals vs. the institutionalized:

America's Counter-Cultural Revolution

The instinctuals are far happier and healthier in every dimension because of their closeness with family, community, and reality. They would love nothing more than to be left alone. But as America turns 250, the institutionals have weaponized the institutions against the instinctuals. They have backed the instinctuals into a corner as they seek to sneer, sloganeer, and demographically engineer their way to permanent power.

Israeli instinctuals have a lot less institutional power than even their disenfranchized American counterparts by comparison, mostly because they were locked out of the institutions² since their inception, but also because they simply never had the desire to operate the machinery of a modern bureaucratic political organization until they realized relatively recently that they could game the system for their collective benefit just like the Haredim have been doing for decades. For Haredi parties, politics is openly transactional: we give you votes to pass your silly make-believe laws, you give us public money to run our yeshivot. For the institutionalized, this sort of corruption is an impediment to progress that must be rooted out at all costs. On the other hand, for the instinctuals, if your achi is trying to climb his way out of the food service industry into the white-collar world of hiteks and needs a leg up, despite his total lack of qualifications, you’ll do anything to help him out. That’s a lot closer to how the patronage system that is the modern Likud party operates these days. As they say, personnel is policy.

The country has reached a critical phase in which there is no clear hegemonic ethno-cultural group poised to seize the reins as the few remaining great-grandchildren of the Palmach fade into demographic irrelevance. All the other tribes are busy squabbling over appropriations in the Knesset to pay much attention to the fact that the country is figuratively, and sometimes literally, crumbling. Until one of them produces the kind of charismatic leadership necessary to cobble together a coalition that extends beyond one’s immediate friends and family, Israel will continue stumbling in the dark, lurching from crisis to crisis, with no clear strategic vision. It would be quite the achievement if somehow we were able to install Anglo-Protestant Burkean national conservatism as the new political operating system, but given demographic trends, unless there is a mass influx of Anglophone Jews from the rapidly disintegrating former commonwealth, count me skeptical.

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On a more personal note, throughout the entire evening, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was at a pre-game party for a team I’d used to root for but could no longer be bothered to care about. I went anyway, mostly because I was genuinely curious to see what kinds of people attend these sorts of events, but also partly to see if being physically present in a room full of people who genuinely love their country and believe fully in its divine mission can restore some of that rocket fuel that propelled me to pack my bags and build a life here in the first place. Part of it is dreading the thought of having to do it all over again, now with wife and baby, in reverse, to a very uncertain and precarious future in my country of origin. America has been good to the Jews, arguably much better than Israel, but will it stay that way? On one hand, as Schrödinger’s whites³, Jews are bearing the double burden of anti-white discrimination while getting sidelined by a growing movement of explicitly anti-Jewish white nationalists blaming the Jews (what news!) for their myriad misfortunes. Just read the comments on that bad boy.

Good luck, Israeli NatCons, in your quest to restore a national ethos to a very troubled and fractious country run by very troubled and fractious people. I’m rooting for you, but from a distance.

1. Modern Orthodox / Dati Leumi (religious nationalists): Technically not the same faction, but the same kind of people who land in the former camp in the diaspora tend to gravitate toward the latter camp when they move to Israel.

2. This point deserves a whole essay, but here is Israel’s supreme legal grand wizard Aharon Barak talking about how, in all these years, they still couldn’t find any suitable Moroccans to sit on the Supreme Court: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1591783281244546

3. People who like white people generally don’t count Jews as white, while people who don’t like white people generally do, so either way, nobody likes the Jews.