The Herzliya Conference Explained: Where Israeli Leaders Make Their Security Speeches
Every year or so, for two days, the Israeli political and security establishment comes to a university campus in Herzliya to say what it thinks. Prime ministers, defence ministers, army chiefs of staff, heads of the Mossad, opposition leaders, American envoys. The Herzliya Conference is where they go when they want to set out a policy line in public, and where Israeli and foreign reporters go to listen for the line between the lines.
It's often compared to the American State of the Union address, which overstates it. But not by much.
Where it came from
The first conference met in December 2000, organised by the Institute for Policy and Strategy at what was then the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, now Reichman University. The institute's founding director was Uzi Arad, a former senior Mossad official who later became Benjamin Netanyahu's national security adviser.
The idea was a yearly review of Israel's national security in the widest sense: military, diplomatic, economic and social, plus the state of the Jewish world. It started as a closed-door gathering of the country's elites and opened up over the years into a large public event.
The speeches people remember
The conference earned its reputation from a run of speeches by Ariel Sharon. At the third conference, in December 2002, he set out his support for the international Road Map for peace. A year later, at the fourth, he first announced his plan for a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, the disengagement carried out in 2005.
On 24 January 2006 Ehud Olmert, then acting prime minister after Sharon's stroke, used the Herzliya stage to back a Palestinian state and to say Israel would have to give up parts of the West Bank to keep a Jewish majority.
Since then the format has broadened, but the pattern holds. When an Israeli leader wants to float a strategic idea without a cabinet vote, Herzliya is one of the obvious places to do it.
The 2026 conference
The 2026 conference ran on 30 June and 1 July on the Reichman University campus, under the title "Between National Security and National Resilience: Will We Navigate to a Safe Harbor?" President Isaac Herzog opened it, with the conveners Uriel Reichman, the university's founder, Boaz Ganor, its president, and Amos Gilead, the former defence ministry official who now runs the institute.
The speaker list read like a who's who of the opposition and the security establishment. Former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, former army chief Gadi Eisenkot, Avigdor Lieberman and Yair Golan, all of them party leaders. Former Mossad head Tamir Pardo. The defence ministry's director general, Amir Baram. Former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak, on whether Israel is still a democracy. US ambassador Mike Huckabee and the former American envoy Amos Hochstein. The European Union's ambassador, Michael Mann. And the head of Elbit Systems, Bezhalel Machlis, on the defence industry.
Iran had its own closed briefing for invited guests. Other panels covered Gaza and the West Bank, whether American support for Israel will last, the reserve army, the capital market as a strategic issue, and the conference's annual survey of Israeli society.
Why it matters outside Israel
For diplomats, analysts and investors, the conference is a useful reading of where Israeli policy is heading. Who gets a keynote slot, who stays away, and what each speaker chooses to stress all get picked apart in the following days. The programme and speaker list are posted on the Reichman University website.
For geopolitical coverage of the region, see OSINT.org.