Project Esther and the weaponisation of Zionism

Al Jazeera

19-05-2025

On October 7, 2024 – exactly one year into the United States-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip that has now killed more than 53,000 Palestinians – the Washington-based Heritage Foundation unleashed a policy paper titled Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.
The conservative think tank is the same force behind Project 2025, a blueprint for consolidating executive power in the US and forging the best-ever right-wing dystopia. The 'national strategy' proposed by Project Esther – which is named for the biblical queen credited with saving the Jews from extermination in ancient Persia – basically consists of criminalising opposition to Israel's current genocide and exterminating freedoms of speech and thought along with a whole lot of other rights.
The first 'key takeaway' listed in the report is that 'America's virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American 'pro-Palestinian movement' is part of a global Hamas Support Network (HSN)'. Never mind that, in reality, there is no such thing as a 'global Hamas Support Network' – just as there is no such thing as the HSN's alleged 'affiliated Hamas Support Organizations (HSOs)' that the Heritage Foundation has also taken the liberty of inventing. Among these alleged HSOs are prominent American Jewish organisations such as Jewish Voice for Peace.
The second 'key takeaway' of the report is that the so-called HSN is 'supported by activists and funders dedicated to destroying capitalism and democracy' – a curious choice of terms, no doubt, from a think tank that is doing its best to eradicate what remains of US democracy as we speak.
The phrase 'capitalism and democracy' appears no fewer than five times in the report – although it's not quite clear what Hamas has to do with capitalism aside from governing a Palestinian territory that has for more than 19 months been on the receiving end of billions upon billions of dollars' worth of US-funded military destruction. From the perspective of the arms industry, at least, genocide is capitalism at its best.
And as per the genocidal logic of Project Esther, protesting the mass slaughter of Palestinians is fundamentally anti-Semitic – hence the need to pursue the prescribed national strategy of 'extirpating the influence of the HSN from our society'.
The October publication of the Heritage Foundation report occurred on the watch of President Joe Biden's administration, which the think tank diagnosed as 'decidedly anti-Israel' despite its complete and utter complicity in the genocide in Gaza. The report included many suggestions on how to 'combat the scourge of antisemitism in the United States … when a willing Administration occupies the White House'.
Fast forward seven months, and a recent New York Times analysis indicates that, since US President Donald Trump's inauguration in January, 'the White House and other Republicans have called for actions that appear to mirror more than half of Project Esther's proposals'. These range from threats to withhold gargantuan sums of federal funding for US universities that refuse to silence resistance to systematic slaughter to efforts to deport legal US residents for the crime of expressing solidarity with Palestinians.
In addition to allegedly infiltrating US academia and disseminating 'anti-Zionist narratives across universities, high schools, and elementary schools, often under the umbrella or within the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and similar Marxist ideology', Project Esther's authors contend that 'the HSN and HSOs have mastered the use of America's liberal media environment [and] are quick to gain attention for any and every demonstration, no matter how large or small, from every network across the country'.
And that's not all: 'The HSN and HSOs have made prolific and unchecked use of social media platforms, such as TikTok, across the entire digital ecosystem to spout antisemitic propaganda.'
To all of these ends, the policy paper offers a whole host of recommendations for how to stamp out the domestic pro-Palestine movement as well as humane and ethical attitudes in general: from purging 'HSO-supporting faculty and staff' from educational institutions to making 'potential demonstrators fear affiliation with HSOs' to banning 'antisemitic content' from social media – which in Heritage Foundation jargon of course means anti-genocidal content.
And yet in spite of all of Project Esther's ruckus over the ostensibly existential anti-Semitic threat posed by the HSN, it turns out that 'no major Jewish organizations appear to have participated in drafting the plan, or publicly endorsed it since its release', according to a December article in the Forward.
A news outlet catering to American Jews, the Forward reported that the Heritage Foundation had 'struggled to attract Jewish supporters for its antisemitism plan, which appears to have been assembled by several evangelical Christian groups', and that Project Esther 'focuses exclusively on left-wing critics of Israel, ignoring the antisemitism problems from white supremacists and other far-right groups'.
Meanwhile, in an open letter published this month, influential American Jewish leaders warned that a 'range of actors' in the US are currently 'using a purported concern about Jewish safety as a cudgel to weaken higher education, due process, checks and balances, freedom of speech and the press'.
Now, if the Trump administration seems to be taking Project Esther and running with it, it is more out of concern for propagating a white Christian nationalist agenda that utilises Zionism and anti-Semitism charges to its own extremist ends. And this, unfortunately, is just the beginning of a far more elaborate project.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.