[News] Inside Project Esther, the right wing action plan to take down the Palestine movement

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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Inside Project Esther, the right wing action plan to take down the
Palestine movement
Mitchell Plitnick
November 22, 2024
------------------------------
[image: IMG_2240-1536x1024.jpg]

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
<https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/report/project-esther-national-strategy-combat-antisemitism>
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
<https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/report/project-esther-national-strategy-combat-antisemitism>
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 <https://bibleodyssey.com/articles/esther/>, 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
<https://www.thecairoreview.com/essays/hamas-isil-and-israel-an-exercise-in-comparison/>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
<https://responsiblestatecraft.org/sanders-weapons-israel/> 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 <https://guides.bpl.org/Congress/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
<https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-republicans-voted-give-trump-treasury-more-power-1984733>
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
<https://zeteo.com/p/project-esther-the-right-wing-group-trump-palestine>,
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
<https://zeteo.com/p/project-esther-the-right-wing-group-trump-palestine>,
““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.
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