The Trump-aligned Heritage Foundation is now going after what they call the “Hamas Support Network” – groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and American Muslims for Palestine. 

PREM THAKKER, ZETEO, OCT 29, 2024

As if Project 2025 – the 900-page repressive blueprint for the US put together by scores of Donald Trump-tied political staffers – wasn’t enough, the Heritage Foundation has released another lengthy and radical document, this time targeting pro-Palestine and anti-war Americans.

The 10,000-word “Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism” targets what it calls the “Hamas Support Network” (HSN), made up of groups that the document claims are “decidedly antisemitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American” and “involved in furthering Hamas’s cause in contravention of American values and to the detriment of American citizens and America’s national security interests.”

The network, the project says, revolves around American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) with “action arms” comprised of what the project falsely claims are “Hamas Support Organizations” (HSOs), including Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, that recruit members, spread propaganda, and conduct rallies with the support of “a coalition of leftist, progressive organizations” such as the Open Society Foundations and Tides Foundation.

Released on Oct. 7 – the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attacks on Israel and Israel’s subsequent genocide in Gaza – the project emerged just weeks before the election but has garnered no attention whatsoever in the US mainstream media.Subscribe

There has already been wide repression of Americans speaking out against US support for Israel’s genocide of Palestine, but Project Esther embodies a right-wing push to institutionalize the repression through the weaponization of government — especially one led by Trump. While the former president has previously tried to distance himself from Project 2025 (unconvincingly, given the litany of ties between him and the authors), this effort seems catered directly to him. “Our intent is to organize and guide all willing and able partners in a coordinated effort that employs all available resources to combat the scourge of antisemitism in the United States,” the authors write. “Our hope is that this effort will represent an opportunity for public-private partnership when a willing Administration occupies the White House.” (Emphasis not added.) The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. 

This is “the latest attempt to use the American Jewish community to advance the far-Right’s repressive agenda,” said Jewish Voice for Peace executive director Stephanie Fox.

Joseph Howley, a Columbia professor who has been involved in organizing Jewish faculty against the war and the instrumentalization of antisemitism, told Zeteo that the “far-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.”

Project Esther “is just more of the same enthusiastic authoritarianism from the American Christian-nationalist right, made all the scarier by the thousands of lives it’s costing overseas and the willingness of so much of this country’s Jewish institutional establishment to sign onto it,” Howley added. “It’s disgraceful.”

Freedom of Speech Does Not Apply

Project Esther equates anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel to antisemitism, and, moreover, anti-Americanism. It casts millions of Americans opposed to Israel’s violence in Palestine – and US support of it – as opportunistic, foreign-funded, and inauthentic. The authors claim that groups “pounced” on Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, “intending to use it as a George Floyd–style event to spring onto center stage and grab a giant microphone.”

The project aims to prohibit these groups from accessing America’s “open society” or economy, empower the executive branch to prosecute these organizations, and ban the groups from protests. 

To fulfill their goals, the authors envision using financial and academic audits, “name and shame” campaigns, and “lawfare” – including utilizing the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and, astonishingly, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), as well as counterterrorism, hate speech, and immigration laws. They also seek to disrupt communications between and among the targeted groups and monitor their social networks.

Project Esther’s authors write that the task will require “a broad coalition of willing and able partners to leverage existing—and, if required, work to establish additional—authorities, resources, capabilities, and activities.” If things go well, the authors write, the targeted groups “will not be able to generate any political pressure on the U.S. government or the U.S.–Israel relationship.” So, in essence, the effort seeks to prevent these groups from participating in American democracy.

The authors apparently don’t see those opposed to US support for Israel’s violence in Palestine as meritably American.

“America’s open society affords resident members of the HSN and its HSOs the ability to access everything in the United States in the same manner as every other American citizen can,” the document complains. “And just as every other American is, they are protected under the Bill of Rights and enjoy all of the freedoms that go with it, including the freedoms of speech and assembly, and the right to vote,” it continues, discussing the “strategy” these groups use to “take advantage of our open society.”

“Given Heritage’s extensive social and professional network across all dimensions of American society along with other like-minded organizations and super-empowered individuals, a coalition of the willing and able will be well-positioned and well-resourced” to take action, the authors write, adding that any coalition members who are high-net-worth individuals “may wield significant influence over the administration of those institutions, particularly if we sit on boards of directors.”

Despite the self-confidence and various levers of power they believe they can pull, the authors also note that coalition members still “may seek moral guidance from relevant religious texts.”

The push for Project Esther comes after House Republicans — led by Speaker Mike Johnson — have already launched probes into and vilified university student groups.

“It has never been clearer that defending Palestinian solidarity organizing is one of the most critical frontlines of democracy defense today,” JVP’s Fox said, noting “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.”

While presenting their targeted groups as foreign-funded, nefarious, and dedicated to terrorism (an already-dubious proposition), the Heritage Foundation authors then proceed to complain that from Oct. 8, 2023, to Aug. 31, 2024, the “vast majority” of the 18,000 or so Israel and Palestine-related demonstrations across the US were pro-Palestine.

The authors reconcile this mass activity in support of Palestine as not the manifestation of a new reality, but as the product of a wicked outside force that successfully infiltrated the US education system and popular culture: a foreign-influencing cabal pulling the strings.

Meanwhile, it’s not just Americans across the country who are of concern. The authors also identify a “Hamas Caucus” that the project falsely says is part of “an active cabal of Jew-haters, Israel-haters, and America-haters in Washington” – including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D–MI); Ilhan Omar (D–MN); Cori Bush (D–MO); 15 Jamaal Bowman (D–NY); Summer Lee (D–PA); Ayanna Pressley (D–MA); Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY); Greg Casar (D–TX); Andre Carson (D–IN); Hank Johnson (D–GA); Jan Schakowsky (D–IL); Mark Pocan (D–WI); and Pramila Jayapal (D–WA); with support in the Senate from Bernie Sanders (I–VT); Chris Van Hollen (D–MD); and Elizabeth Warren (D–MA).

The authors also complained about more Jewish Democrats voting against censuring Rep. Tlaib than in support of doing so last November, for her use of the phrase “from the river to the sea.”

The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the project, or the attacks on fellow Democrats.

First They Come for the Students

Equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is the authors’ attempt to justify their goals. “Had the intent of these critics been otherwise—had their goal truly been to change Israeli policies they found disagreeable—the so-called pro-Palestinian movement would not have organized so quickly across the world, including inside the United States, and immediately degenerated into the commission of blatant acts of antisemitism specifically targeting Jews,” they write, citing figures from the Anti-Defamation League, which has – like Project Esther’s authors – conflated criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism. 

“The rallying cry of these ‘pro-Palestinian’ organizations—’From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!’—begs the question: Free from what? Free from Hamas? Free from a corrupt Palestinian Authority?” the document continues, as if the decades-long Israeli occupation and endless bombardment of Palestine do not exist.

The Heritage Foundation looks to history for guidance. Citing the rise of Nazism in the US, the authors outline various factions of society that stood against the American Nazi group known as the German-American Bund, which, as the authors note, “held large rallies replete with Nazi-style uniforms and swastikas…and coordinated actions to implement a near mirror-image version of Hitler’s Nazi Germany here in the United States.”

“Though the Bund cloaked itself in what it portrayed as American values inseparable from Nazi philosophy, key Americans—including Jews—saw the Bund for what it was: an antisemitic de facto extension of the German Nazi machine propagating across the United States.”

The description was notable, given the Madison Square Garden rally held by a possible “willing administration” just this week – echoing perhaps the German-American Bund’s apex moment – where rally speakers (including Trump) warned of “the enemy within”; berated Latinos, Black people, Jews, and Palestinians; and deployed racist language used by the Ku Klux Klan and assorted neo-Nazi groups.

And yet, while the authors describe the rising American opposition to Nazism at the time as an organic, cross-sectional phenomenon (even applauding “Jewish gangsters” doing “‘less than kosher’ activities” to disrupt the Bund) – it now vilifies mass American opposition to similar strains of genocidal dehumanization as un-American and hostile. Indeed, it sees opposition – even of the “criminal” kind – then as noble; now, as criminal.

Interestingly, while appealing to the histories of Americans standing against Nazis and the KKK, the report says absolutely nothing about antisemitism from their contemporary forebearers – including those whose replatforming has been helped, for instance, by one of Trump’s most prominent supporters, Twitter owner Elon Musk.

Project Esther – named for the Biblical story of Queen Esther, who intervened against a plot of her husband’s adviser to genocide the Jewish people – after vilifying communists, teachers, students, and millions speaking out against genocide, concludes with the 1946 confessional poem by German pastor Martin Niemöller (one that does not include the oft-cited version that includes his remorse for the targeting of “communists,” or others including teachers and the press):

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.

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Download the pdf below to read the full ‘Project Esther’ document:

Project Esther via the Heritage Foundation ∙ 269KB ∙ PDF file ∙ Download

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For competing definitions of “antisemitism” see the “Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism,” “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” and “Debunking The Myth That Anti-Zionism Is Anti-Semitic.”