President Donald Trump has enacted a raft of suppressive policies ostensibly designed to combat antisemitism, such as cutting off funding to universities that he claims haven’t done enough to curb antisemitism on campus. But if you take a look at the little-known playbook that appears to have inspired many of his most aggressive moves, it becomes evident how little it has to do with ending bigotry against Jews.
The playbook is called Project Esther, a policy paper created by the Heritage Foundation, arguably the most influential right-wing think tank of the Trump era. Heritage also produced Project 2025, the extreme policy manifesto that has shaped much of Trump’s agenda. Project Esther is a kind of miniature Project 2025, offering guidance on using authoritarian tools to crush criticism of Israel across the country. Trump has used many of the extreme policies it has recommended, including deporting immigrants who express pro-Palestinian sentiment and attacking academia using public defunding.
The assessment doesn’t just preposterously conflate criticizing aid to Israel with supporting Hamas; it suggests that criticizing Israel is tantamount to a siege against the state.
There was some reporting on Project Esther before Trump entered the White House, although it got relatively little attention. But new reporting from The New York Times details how it came together and lays out how much Trump appears to have hewed to it. The White House didn’t respond to the Times’ query about Project Esther’s influence on its goals, and Heritage couldn’t confirm its influence, but a co-author of Project Esther told the Times he believed it was “no coincidence that we called for a series of actions to take place privately and publicly, and they are now happening.”
The Heritage Foundation formed an antisemitism task force after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, which helped lay the groundwork for the Project Esther paper. Strikingly, only one of the four people who started the task force was Jewish, according to the Times, while two of them were Christian Zionist leaders. The task force was joined by mainly conservative and Christian organizations, rather than Jewish organizations.
In a pitch deck that Heritage used to entice donors for the task force, George Soros — a Jewish billionaire and the bogeyman at the center of countless antisemitic conspiracy theories — is listed at the top of “masterminds” behind what it calls an antisemitism “ecosystem,” as Forward reported in 2024. That deck also singles out Jewish Voice for Peace — a progressive Jewish organization known for its organization of protests that criticize Israeli policy — at the top of its list of “organizers” contributing to the antisemitism ecosystem.
In its statement of purpose, the task force identified anti-Zionism as “hatred against Jewish people,” even though there has long been a tradition of anti-Zionism across the international Jewish community and it isn’t inherently antisemitic to criticize the ideology of Zionism.
In other words, this antisemitism task force was giving heavy Christian Zionist vibes.
Christian Zionists view their unconditional support of Israeli policy and Israeli expansionism as a spiritual duty. John Hagee, a pastor and chair of Christians United for Israel, has espoused repugnant antisemitic beliefs, and other Christian Zionists often weaponize a nominal concern about antisemitism — even while trafficking in antisemitic tropes and beliefs. As Emily Tamkin wrote for MSNBC in her assessment of Hagee’s appearance at a rally to support Israel in 2023, “One can support Israel and also spread antisemitism.”
The Times reports that the Heritage antisemitism task force’s policy recommendations served as the basis for Project Esther, which is an astonishingly radical and paranoid document — and not without some problematic statements about the Jewish community of its own. In a document that sounds plainly McCarthyist, Project Esther posits that the pro-Palestinian movement in America is “part of a global Hamas Support Network (HSN)” and that this network is “supported by activists and funders dedicated to the destruction of capitalism and democracy.”
It continues:
[T]he HSN benefits from the support and training of America’s overseas enemies and seeks to achieve its goals by taking advantage of our open society, corrupting our education system, leveraging the American media, coopting the federal government, and relying on the American Jewish community’s complacency.”
That last line is an astounding example of Project Esther’s condescension to American Jews — who the authors seem to think aren’t up for the challenge of identifying antisemitism. But this perspective also holds that activists in America objecting to U.S. support for Israel, as it commits what many human rights organizations and genocide scholars have described as genocide, are actually part of some nihilistic, shadowy international terrorist organization that wants to covertly take over and destroy America. The assessment doesn’t just preposterously conflate criticizing aid to Israel with supporting Hamas; it suggests that criticizing Israel is tantamount to a siege against the state in America. Based on its hyper-reactionary assessment of the pro-Palestinian movement, the Esther Project promotes a variety of policies that appear designed to circumvent First Amendment-protected speech and identify and suppress pro-Palestinian speech as support for terrorism. Many of its proposals, like a focus on deportations, have already been enacted. But some others, such as purging social media and expanding the idea of “material support for terrorism,” haven’t emerged in full force — and hopefully won’t. There has been a surge in antisemitism in America in recent years across the political spectrum, which is a deeply distressing social problem worthy of serious engagement. Notably, Project Esther has nothing to say about antisemitism on the political right, which, according to a recent study, is more common than it is on the left. But the proposals of the Esther Project aren’t good-faith efforts, nor are the Trump policies they’ve seemingly helped inspire. They instead exploit the reality of antisemitism to advance an antidemocratic project of unconditional support of Israel.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. 
