United States President Donald Trump has ramped up his campaign against Harvard University and criminalised campus students and staff for speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Against this backdrop, an investigation by New York Times journalist Katie Baker reveals that the Heritage Foundation, a far-right think tank, developed a blueprint, named Project Esther, in October 2023 to destroy the burgeoning pro-Palestine and anti-war movement in the US, by claiming “all critics of Israel” are agents of Hamas.
Hamas is a liberation movement for Palestinian self-determination against Israeli occupation. It is recognised by most of the world’s peoples as part of the broad anti-colonial movement. However, the US has designated Hamas a terrorist organisation since 1997, under Bill Clinton’s administration. Anyone found guilty of supporting a designated terrorist group faces up to US$250,000 in fines and 20 years in prison.
Baker wrote that in April, the Heritage Foundation sent a team to Israel to meet with key Israeli political figures, “including the defense and foreign secretaries”, and with US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, to discuss Project Esther’s proposal to “to rapidly dismantle the pro-Palestinian movement”, along with its support at schools and universities, progressive organisations and within US Congress.
Controlling the narrative
According to the NYT, this would be achieved by “branding a broad range of organizations of critics of Israel as ‘effectively a terrorist support network’, so that they could be deported, defunded and sued, fired, expelled, ostracised and otherwise excluded from what it considered ‘open society’.
“Curriculum it believed to be sympathetic to a ‘Hamas support’ narrative would be taken out of schools and universities, and ‘supporting faculty’ would be removed. Social media would be purged of content deemed to be antisemitic. Institutions would lose public funding. Foreign students who pushed for Palestinian rights would have their visas revoked, or be deported.
“Once a sympathetic presidential administration was in place, the plan said, ‘We will organize rapidly, to take immediate action to “stop the bleeding” and achieve all objectives within two years.’”
Baker wrote that the project “singled out anti-Zionist groups that had organized pro-Palestinian protests, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for justice in Palestine, but the intended targets stretched much further”.
The Heritage Foundation’s support for Israel “took on a new dimension” recently, wrote Baker, “blaming the diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI] initiatives that gained prominence after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, along with other progressive movements, for rising reports of antisemitism on campuses.”
The authors of Project Esther are Victoria Coates — former national security advisor to Trump during his first term and vice president of the Heritage Foundation, Robert Greenway — a Trump advisor in his first term who ran the Abraham Accords Peace Institute founded by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Daniel Flesch — a policy analyst at the foundation.
Baker wrote: “Ms. Coates pointed to the Heritage’s increased presence in Israel, a country which, Ms. Coates said when she was there recently, ‘deserves a peace prize for what they’ve done over the course of the last year.’”
Coates also told Baker that the recent delegation to Israel discussed concerns over “a decline in Israel’s public image among younger Americans, a trend that has accelerated since Oct. 7”.
The main forces championing Project Esther are Christian Zionists, part of the white Christian nationalist movement, the NYT revealed, but some Christian Zionists declined to support it because it didn’t mention right-wing antisemitism, which made it seem too partisan.
Israel has come to rely on the Christian nationalists and other far-right organisations as its main supporters in the US. They far outnumber US Jews, who are increasingly divided over Israel.
Threat to democracy
While other mainstream media outlets (and Democratic Party politicians) have ignored the story, Baker told Democracy Now! on May 19 that, according to her analysis, the Trump administration and other Republicans appear to have called for “more than half of the actionable goals in Project Esther”, so far, and “it’s worth looking at the document in full to have an idea of what else we might see coming down the line”.
Stefanie Fox from Jewish Voice for Peace told DN! that Project Esther “has absolutely nothing to do with Jewish safety, and is intended solely to destroy the Palestinian liberation movement, using tools that can then be used against all communities and movements and democracy itself.
“We can see clearly that Project Esther sets out a path for the Trump administration to sharpen those legal regimes that will best advance MAGA goals. So, for example, the targeting of international students, like Mahmoud Khalil, for abduction and deportation because of their political views is a terrifying attempt to expand already unjust counterterrorism and immigration laws against [the] Palestinian rights movement, immigrant communities and civil liberties writ large.”
The Heritage Foundation was responsible for developing Project 2025, in anticipation of Donald Trump’s presidential victory. Project 2025 outlines a plan to give Trump the power to overhaul the executive branch of government and erase the gains of working people, Blacks, oppressed minorities and women.
The arch-racist Trump has enthusiastically begun to implement Project 2025 by executive order, and is well on his way to establishing an authoritarian regime, unless he is checked by a mass uprising.
Beating back Trump
Project Esther provides a similar pathway for Trump to smash all expressions of pro-Palestinian solidarity and activism, unless he is pushed back.
However, Trump cannot be defeated by relying on the Democrats.
Under former President Joe Biden (a self-described Christian Zionist) the Democrats led the way in cracking down on the pro-Palestinian encampments at universities and colleges, and labelled them as “antisemitic” at the same time that Project Esther was being developed.
While there has been resistance that continues to develop on the campuses in spite of the massive crackdown, which has been expressed in graduation ceremonies by boos of campus administration figures, and a majority of people in the US oppose Israel’s war on Gaza, it is only increasing mass resistance to Trump’s policies that can begin to turn the tide.
“The Trump administration and groups like the Heritage Foundation think that if they target the groups that will be the most vulnerable … then nobody will stand up and fight back,” said Fox.
“But this country’s fascist turn is not inevitable. If a united coalition can beat back these attacks now, we can destroy the momentum of Trump’s broader agenda.
“We understand that what justifies that agenda is the same thing justifying U.S.-backed Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Those tactics are decades old. And frankly they’ve had bipartisan support. The MAGA right is now consolidating and accelerating those.
“But there are millions of people, including the majority of Americans and massive numbers of Jews, who want to see a stop to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, who are outraged that our tax dollars are being used to murder and starve tens of thousands of children, and who want the Israeli government held accountable for their crimes against humanity.
“It is in the face of these repressive attacks our only option is to be bolder and clearer in our defense of Palestinian life every single day and to be demanding justice, equality and freedom for all people, no exceptions.”