Mitchell Plitnick
Mondoweiss / November 22, 2024
The Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther” claims to combat antisemitism but in fact, aims to destroy the Palestine solidarity movement as a first step in a crusade against all domestic dissent in the U.S.
The Heritage Foundation got a lot of publicity during this election cycle for its infamous Project 2025. But that’s not the only project they intend to carry out now that Donald Trump is returning to the White House.
Project Esther is a new proposal from Heritage that claims to lay out a plan to combat antisemitism in the United States. In fact, it aims to destroy the Palestine solidarity movement as a first step in a crusade to, ultimately, restrict activism against American policy of all sorts, foreign and domestic. .
It’s not a new enterprise, of course. Disingenuous accusations of antisemitism have been weaponized by the Zionist movement and the State of Israel for a century or more but Project Esther means to unify and coordinate the cynical use of the fight against real antisemitism in order to completely destroy the movement for Palestinian rights.
But that is only its initial ambition. As the full plan makes clear, the people who produced this scheme see it as the key to devastating movements against both American imperialism abroad and white supremacy domestically.
What is Project Esther ?
The Project Esther document describes its purpose this way: “Named after the historic Jewish heroine who saved the Jews from genocide in ancient Persia, Project Esther provides a blueprint to counter antisemitism in the United States and ensure the security and prosperity of all Americans.”
It should raise concerns right away that the document treats the story of Esther as historical. Most biblical scholars agree that the story is apocryphal, or at best allegorical. Only the most puritanically fundamentalist approach to the Book of Esther would treat it as history.
The key strategy Project Esther proposes is to identify the Palestine solidarity movement as the “Hamas Support Network,” and organizations in the movement as “Hamas Support Organizations.”
This strategy carries two key effects. One is to discredit the Palestine solidarity movement and all the organizations within it by associating it with Hamas, an organization most of the American public identifies as nothing but a terrorist organization, based on decades of misrepresentations of the group and its goals.
The second aim is to attack the ability of organizations to function by casting them as supporters of terrorism, and specifically of an organization that has been designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization. This would make it impossible for those organizations to legally raise money or complete legal business transactions.
Unsurprisingly, the “Hamas Support network” purportedly revolves around American Muslims for Palestine and prominently includes Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Completing the picture are funding organizations such as the Open Society Institute, Tides Foundation, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
This demonization of the movement combines with the conspiratorial thinking that permeates the entire world in 2025 to take aim at many common tactics of activism.
After laying out allegedly “sinister” exploitation of the “open society” the United States ostensibly has, Project Esther makes the mere use of press releases, social media posts, letters to and meetings with elected officials, and other common tools of activism sound illegitimate simply because Palestine solidarity activists are using them. Again, they do this simply by talking about these activities being conducted by “Hamas Supporting Organizations.”
After establishing this, they state, without evidence, “It should be obvious at this point even to the casual observer that there is an active cabal of Jew-haters, Israel-haters, and America-haters in Washington—all apparently aligned with the far left, progressive movement.”
A political witchhunt
Throughout the document, in addition to erasing the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the writers attempt to paint the movement as a threat not only to Israeli apartheid—which, of course, it is—but also to democracy in the United States.
The conspiracy that Project Esther tries to paint also reaches into the United States government. The document names Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee, Ayana Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Greg Casar, Andre Carson, Hank Johnson, Jan Schakowsky, Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal, Bernie Sanders, Chris Van Hollen, and Elizabeth Warren as being part of or supporting the “Hamas Caucus.”
There is a lot to be read into who is on that list and who is not.
Anyone who follows Congress would immediately see that the range of Democrats listed is very wide. It includes some like Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman whose stances on Palestine have featured very prominently in their political images and stances.
But others on the list have been cautious about Palestine, sometimes standing for Palestinian rights, sometimes not, but even when they do, it has been with relatively little fanfare. That would include some like Jayapal and Casar, and even some like AOC and Pressley who have tried, on one hand to appease their left-wing base on Palestine but have generally been more cautious than Tlaib, Bowman, and Bush.
More telling though is the absence of any Republicans. Before Bernie Sanders’ current effort at passing a Joint Resolution of Disapproval on sales of certain arms to Israel, no senator has been more active in slowing, delaying, and questioning aid to Israel than Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.
In the House, Rep. Thomas Massie routinely breaks with his party to vote against military aid and other bills related to Israel. Yet neither his name nor Paul’s appear in the Project Esther document.
If, as the authors claim, votes against Israel in Congress are forms of antisemitism, and Project Esther is all about going after antisemitism in the guise of anti-Israel resolutions, where are Massie and Paul in this document?
Their absence clearly reveals the game. The document also attacks outgoing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, whom Project Esther says “called for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ouster for no apparent reason other than Netanyahu’s being on Israel’s political right.”
Schumer did make such a call and did so because he believed that Netanyahu was leading Israel down a disastrous path with his attempt at a judicial coup that threatened to strip away Israel’s thin veneer of democracy even within its 1948 borders. It wasn’t ideological, or even political; it was Schumer trying to save the apartheid state from itself, as he demonstrated shortly thereafter by attending Netanyahu’s despicable address to Congress.
Project Esther’s selective criticism shows its fundamental aim is certainly not to protect Jewish safety, and is politically broader than just the Palestine solidarity movement it targets.
Return to McCarthyism
Project Esther wants to pull out all the stops in its attempt to destroy the Palestine solidarity movement.
Its initial focus is very squarely on the academy, where the document makes clear it hopes to establish a new standard in universities and lower-level schools that treat critical examination of both Israel and the United States as unacceptable. So most of its first tactics revolve around many of the efforts we’ve already seen in universities, twisting existing anti-discrimination laws to defend Israel, using “naming and shaming” and doxing tactics, lawfare, and, of course, congressional activism.
But Project Esther seeks to expand on this, and it goes to great lengths to try to equate the growing movement in support of Palestinian rights with the rise of pro-Nazi elements in the United States prior to World War II.
They note how, in response to the rise of the pro-Nazi Bund in the U.S., various elements came together to fight them. These included organized crime figures from the so-called “Jewish gangland,” as they note, “Jewish gangsters like Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Abner “Longy” Zwillman, and Meyer “Mickey” Cohen—sometimes at the behest of their rabbis—happily coordinated “less than kosher” activities, pro bono, to disrupt and thwart the Bund.” That partnership with organized crime echoes Donald Trump’s own association with vigilante racist groups like the Proud Boys.
They further cite the creation of the House Un-American Activities Committees (HUAC) as a key element in the fight against both support for Nazism and Communism. “New York Democratic Congressman Samuel Dickstein, a Lithuanian-born Jew, worked with Texas Congressman Martin Dies to establish the House of Representatives’ Special Committee on Un-American Activities, also known as the Dies Committee, charged with uncovering Nazi and Communist activities inside the United States.”
The Dies Committee became HUAC in 1945 when it became a standing House committee, and it went on to commit some of the worst violations against civil rights in the United States of the 20th century.
This is what Project Esther would re-create if given the opportunity. And they are well aware that they have the opportunity right now. Written with Joe Biden still in office, and with too many Democrats doing their part to help create fertile ground for this plot, Project Esther states, “Our hope is that this effort will represent an opportunity for public–private partnership when a willing Administration occupies the White House.” That willing administration will arrive on January 20.
It only starts with Palestine solidarity
Speaking with Zeteo, Professor Joseph Howley of Columbia University, an anti-Zionist Jew, said, “[F]ar-right Zionist hegemonists have wanted for years to make being an anti-Zionist or non-Zionist or Israel-critical Jew illegal. This year they’ve succeeded in getting universities to make it policy …. Now they want to make it federal law.”
Once that is accomplished though, the aim is clearly against all possible dissent.
Jewish Voice for Peace’s executive director Stefanie Fox told Zeteo, ““It has never been clearer that defending Palestinian solidarity organizing is one of the most critical frontlines of democracy defense today… this McCarthyite initiative is led by Christian Nationalists, who directly threaten the safety and freedom of all marginalized people, including BIPOC peoples, religious minorities, queer people and women.”
Fox is right, and it goes even further. Project Esther intends to destroy the Palestine solidarity movement as a first step toward crushing dissent of all kinds against white supremacy within the United States and American military and imperial hegemony internationally. There is a very narrow band of people who will be safe from this effort if it’s not stopped.
Mitchell Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy; he is the co-author, with Marc Lamont Hill, of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics
