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Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
What is Project Esther, the playbook against pro-Palestine movement in US?
Washington, DC – When the Heritage Foundation, a prominent right-wing think tank in the United States, released a playbook last year for how to destroy the Palestine solidarity movement, it did not garner much attention. But more than eight months later, the policy document – known as Project Esther – now faces heightened scrutiny from activists and media outlets, in part because President Donald Trump appears to be following its blueprint. The authors of Project Esther have presented their report as a set of recommendations for combating anti-Semitism, but critics say the document's ultimate aim is to 'poison' groups critical of Israel by painting them as Hamas associates. Project Esther was created as a response to growing protests against the US support for Israel's war on Gaza, which United Nations experts and rights groups have described as a genocide. So, what is Project Esther, and how is it being applied against activists? Here is a look at the document and its ongoing implications for the US. The Heritage Foundation is an influential conservative think tank in Washington, DC, whose stated mission is to 'formulate and promote public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense'. Yet, critics argue that Project Esther calls for government interference to curb individual freedoms, including the rights to free speech and association when it comes to opposing Israeli government to a New York Times report published earlier this month, the project is overseen by Victoria Coates, a vice president at the Heritage Foundation who served as deputy national security adviser during Trump's first term. The Heritage Foundation is also behind Project 2025, which critics describe as an authoritarian playbook for the second Trump presidency. Ahead of the elections last year, Democrats repeatedly invoked Project 2025 to criticise Trump, but the then-candidate distanced himself from the document. The initiative says that it aims to 'dismantle the infrastructure that sustains' what it calls the 'Hamas Support Network' within 24 months. The authors claim that groups engaged in advocacy for Palestinian rights are members of the Hamas Support Network (HSN). They define the supposed network as 'people and organizations that are both directly and indirectly involved in furthering Hamas's cause in contravention of American values and to the detriment of American citizens and America's national security interests'. In short, the document alleges that the 'pro-Palestinian movement' is 'effectively a terrorist support network'.No. There is no such network in the US, which has stern laws against providing material support to groups designated as 'terrorist organisations', including Hamas. Beth Miller – the political director at Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a group that the Heritage Foundation names as part of the network – called Project Esther's allegations 'outlandish'. 'It exposes the length of lies and of absurdity that they are going through to try to tear down the Palestinian rights movement,' Miller told Al Jazeera. The Heritage Foundation did not respond to Al Jazeera's request for comment. The document calls for a multi-faceted campaign against supporters of Palestinian rights, targeting them legally, politically and financially. The initiative outlines 19 goals that it labels as 'desired effects'. They include denying Palestinian rights supporters who are not US citizens access to universities, ensuring that social media platforms do not allow 'anti-Semitic content', and presenting evidence of 'criminal activity' by Palestine advocates to the executive branch. It also calls for refusing to grant permits for protests organised in support of Palestinian rights. Project Esther suggests that Israel's backers should conduct 'legal, private research' into pro-Palestine groups to 'uncover criminal wrongdoing' and undermine their credibility. 'We must wage lawfare,' it reads, referring to the tactic of using litigation to pressure appears to be the case. 'The phase we're in now is starting to execute some of the lines of effort in terms of legislative, legal and financial penalties for what we consider to be material support for terrorism,' Coates told The New York Times. Trump's crackdown on college protests seems to align with what Project Esther is trying to achieve. For example, the US administration has been revoking the visas of foreign students critical of Israel. This echoes a proposal in Project Esther, which calls for identifying students 'in violation of student visa requirements'. The Heritage Foundation also extensively cites Canary Mission – a website dedicated to doxxing and smearing pro-Palestine students – in its footnotes for Project Esther. The Trump administration is also suspected of relying on the website, along with other pro-Israel groups, to identify students for deportation. In addition, Project Esther singles out the 'Middle East/North Africa or Islamic studies' programmes as having professors who are 'hostile to Israel'. The Trump administration has been pressuring elite universities to revamp academic departments, including Middle East studies programmes, that it views as biased in favour of Palestinians. Columbia University, for instance, appointed a provost to review its programmes at Trump's request, 'starting immediately with the Middle East' department. The White House did not respond to Al Jazeera's request for comment. The initiative explicitly identifies several Arab, Muslim and progressive Jewish organisations as well as student groups as part of the so-called Hamas Support Network. The initiative claims that 'the network revolves around' American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), an educational and civic advocacy group. Osama Abuirshaid, AMP's executive director, said Project Esther points the finger at the group because it has 'Muslim' in its name, playing on Islamophobic bigotry. 'American Muslims for Palestine is an easy target. Given the Islamophobic tendencies, it's easy to assume guilt of American Muslims, Palestinians. That's a name that sticks,' Abuirshaid told Al Jazeera. He added that the group is also a target because it is effective and has a 'solid constituency'. 'If they can cripple and bring down AMP, that will have a chilling effect within the movement. So they think, if they can bring us down, other organisations will stop working on Palestine solidarity,' Abuirshaid Kenney-Shawa, a US policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank, said Project Esther targets universities because Israel is bleeding support among young people in the US. 'That's why there's such an overwhelming focus on universities and college campuses,' he told Al Jazeera's The Take podcast. Kenney-Shawa explained that support for Israel's war on Gaza has been trending downwards across US demographics. But on college campuses, the change is more pronounced. 'While this change is absolutely across the political spectrum, it's obviously a lot more acute in the left and among young Americans,' Kenney-Shawa said. A recent poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 53 percent of US respondents had negative views of Israel, a number that rises to 71 percent among Democrats below the age of 50. Advocates say that, in the immediate future, the crackdown on the Palestine solidarity movement threatens the safety and wellbeing of activists, especially foreign students. But it has also sparked a backlash. 'The extreme nature of these attacks has also emboldened people to defiantly continue to speak out in the face of these attacks,' JVP's Miller said. 'And it has actually, in many cases, awoken people – who weren't paying attention before – to the hypocrisy that has so long existed in the willingness to silence and censor Palestinian rights activists.' Earlier in May, several right-wing lawmakers and Trump allies came out in opposition of a bill that aimed to expand restrictions on boycotts of Israel, citing free speech concerns. Abuirshaid echoed Miller's comments. He acknowledged that the media attacks, arrests and lawsuits against advocates and student protesters have been 'distracting' from the mission of focusing on Palestine. However, he added, 'I'm going to be clear: It's energising us to continue this fight.'
The Guardian
13-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The ADL and the Heritage Foundation are helping to silence dissent in America
The repression that began under the Biden administration has accelerated under Trump. Mahmoud Khalil's detention by federal agents – reportedly Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers – despite his legal, permanent resident status will probably have its intended effect. People will speak up less; their fear of the irreversible harm meted out by a vengeful state is justified. Now we are all left to contend with the wreckage of the first amendment to the US constitution, which used to guarantee the right to speech in this country. Responsibility for the erosion of our rights is attributable – in part – to the bipartisan embrace of the non-governmental, non-profit sector. That's because from the 1940s onward, the federal government has ceded much state authority to philanthropies and non-profits. Those groups, in turn, have acted to craft policy – everything from how to develop equitable housing or the benefits of inoculating children to ensuring that speech targeting Israel is punishable by law. The tax code ensures that we subsidize special interest groups, such as the Israel lobby, even as it skirts the ordinary mechanisms of democratic policymaking and accountability. Today, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a rightwing Israel advocacy group, has taken the lead in seeking to undermine bedrock American freedoms in support of Israel. The Heritage Foundation's Project Esther roadmap explicitly describes its goal of having 'foreign ['Hamas Support Network'] leaders and members deported from the US'. It should be said here that 'Hamas Support Network' is a made-up, strangely emotional and overwrought phrase used by the Heritage Foundation to describe college students who oppose Israel's genocide in Palestine. In her essay How Philanthropy Made and Unmade American Liberalism, Lila Corwin Berman, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University, argues that the rise of the philanthropic apparatus in America, defined broadly as tax-exempt, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), presented special interests with the means to exercise power in an unregulated, nontransparent way. Starting in the early 20th century, when the federal income tax was codified into law, special effort was made to exempt 'public-benefit associations' from taxation. The argument was that they acted in the public good while simultaneously representing the best of capitalist success, a core tenet of American liberalism. There was a practical component to the argument, too. Philanthropies could act as policy labs – in the 1930s, the Carnegie Foundation could support educational programs away from the public. If policies were successful, they could be implemented across a broader swathe of society. For their utility, NGOs and philanthropies received tax-exempt status. Yet, as Corwin Berman said, 'any time there's a tax exemption, it's a tax expenditure, but it's an expenditure which avoids public scrutiny'. When Nixon restructured USAid through the Foreign Assistance Act in 1973, it was in part to obscure government efforts 'that doubled as global capitalist and neocolonial ventures' – all without democratic oversight or public participation. Early opposition to private policymaking for the 'public good' came from anti-elite quarters and from the right. In the 1960s, Wright Patman, a populist Democratic representative from Texas, kicked off a series of investigations designed to curtail the power of what's sometimes called the 'submerged state'. But in the 80s and 90s, the right began to co-opt non-governmental frameworks. The Heritage Foundation and others learned how to leverage 'philanthropy as a tool and a cudgel', as Berman said to me. Today, non-profits work across a broad range of policy issues both domestically and abroad. Many of the groups that have engineered the bipartisan consensus on the suppression of speech that is critical of Israel are non-profits. They obtain tax-exempt status and simultaneously craft policy, and they do so on behalf of Democrats and Republicans, away from public scrutiny. The ADL, which controls total net assets of 200m tax-free dollars, in particular lobbied for policy responses to student activism in both the Biden and Trump administrations. In 2022, the ADL – which regularly conflates antisemitism with criticism of Israel – commended the Biden administration for developing a 'national strategy to combat antisemitism'. The statement went on to take credit for the policy: 'This is one of the steps that we have long advocated for as part of a holistic approach to address the antisemitism that has been increasingly normalized in society.' After Khalil's detention, the ADL, whose leader, Jonathan Greenblatt, was paid more than $1.2m in 2022, issued a statement on X that reads in part: 'We appreciate the Trump Administration's broad, bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism.' There is an irony in all this. The right is now on a mission to defund universities, a process which started with angry pro-Israel billionaires on X. It seems reasonable to expect the IRS to be weaponized to revoke the tax-exempt status of philanthropies and other elite institutions deemed to be sympathetic to the Democratic party's agenda. Khalil's detention – a shocking assault by the Israel lobby on American freedom – is not the first time that constitutional rights in this country have been assailed by a president. Abraham Lincoln famously suspended habeas corpus during the civil war, this country's first major constitutional crisis. But this may be the first time that a dramatic erosion in Americans' constitutional liberties has been engineered by policymaking organizations that are subsidized by the public but are accountable to no one at all. Ahmed Moor is a writer and fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He is a plaintiff in a lawsuit that charges the US state department with circumventing the law to fund Israeli military units accused of human rights abuses
