Contents
- What is Project Esther?
- Who is behind Project Esther?
- What does it call for?
- Who does it target?
- How much of it has been implemented?
- Who has criticized Project Esther?
What is Project Esther?
- Project Esther is a right-wing plan to criminalize, defund, and dismantle U.S. civil society organizations that support Palestinian human rights and to suppress speech critical of Israel on university campuses and elsewhere.
- Weaponizing false claims of antisemitism and support for terrorism, Project Esther targets progressive and liberal organizations and individuals exclusively while saying nothing about real antisemitism on the right (including from President Donald Trump and other members of his administration and supporters).
- Project Esther was released in October 2024, a year after the start of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, which provoked nationwide protests against the genocide and the U.S. government’s complicity in it and caused support for Israel to plummet among the American public.
- After taking office for his second term in January 2025, Trump began implementing a number of measures contained in Project Esther. As noted by one of Project Esther’s authors, it’s “no coincidence that we called for a series of actions to take place privately and publicly, and they are now happening.”
- Project Esther is part of a broader authoritarian effort by Trump and the Republican Party to expand presidential power and dismantle democratic institutions, censor and criminalize speech they dislike, attack liberal institutions of higher education, eliminate diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) initiatives, and carry out mass deportations.
- While Project Esther targets supporters of Palestinian rights and others critical of Israel in particular, it threatens the constitutional rights - including freedom of speech, assembly, the press, and academic inquiry - of all Americans and everyone in the U.S.
Who is behind Project Esther?
- Project Esther is an initiative of The Heritage Foundation, a far-right Christian nationalist think tank that is also responsible for Project 2025, the blueprint used by Trump to weaken and dismantle liberal and democratic institutions and radically remake the federal government.
- Most of the people behind Project Esther are Christian Zionists who support Israel for theological reasons, believing that the establishment of the state of Israel is part of an end times prophecy in which Jesus will return and Jews, Muslims, and all other non-Christians will either convert or be condemned to hell.
What does it call for?
- Defunding universities that allow protests in support of Palestinian rights or critical teaching or scholarship on Palestine/Israel, suspending and expelling student protesters, banning campus protests, removing faculty from their positions and firing them, and censoring curriculum and academic research.
- Passing and weaponizing laws at the federal, state, and local level to suppress and criminalize Palestinian human rights activism, subjecting individuals and civil society organizations to criminal prosecutions, imprisonment, visa revocations and deportations, and civil penalties, including:
- Using racketeering laws intended for organized crime against organizations that support Palestinian rights.
- Designating organizations that support Palestinian rights as “terrorism support” entities, which can result in serious legal consequences.
- Charging organizations and individuals who support Palestinian rights with “material support for terrorism,” including people who participate in peaceful protests.
- Rendering organizations “unable to conduct or sustain demonstrations and protests” in support of Palestinian rights.
- Blacklisting individuals and organizations that respect boycotts in support of Palestinian human rights, disqualifying them from receiving government contracts, investments, or funding. (Dozens of states have already passed such anti-boycott laws over the last decade.)
- Investigating the finances and activities of civil society organizations that support Palestinian rights, engaging in public smear campaigns to “name and shame” and defund them, and weaponizing lawsuits to drain them of resources, distract them from their work, and shut them down.
- Banning the sharing of information critical of Israel and supportive of Palestinian rights on social media and elsewhere and disrupting the ability of organizations supportive of Palestinian rights from communicating.
- Preventing civil society organizations that support Palestinian human rights from accessing and communicating with members of Congress in violation of their First Amendment right of petition.
Who does it target?
- While Project Esther only singles out by name a relatively small number of individuals and organizations, including National Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, American Muslims for Palestine, and philanthropic organizations like the Open Society Foundations, Tides Foundation, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund, it casts a wide net, describing as “vast” what it terms the “Hamas Support Network.”
- It also targets a number of members of Congress, including Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and the majority of Jewish Democrats in the House of Representatives. It accuses Representative Jan Schakowsky, who is Jewish, of being part of what it terms a “Hamas Caucus,” composed of progressive Democrats, primarily women of color.
- Invoking antisemitic tropes, a Heritage Foundation presentation for potential donors to Project Esther claimed that Jewish billionaires like George Soros of the Open Society Foundations and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker are among a group of “progressive elites’” supposedly “leading the way” of the Palestinian rights movement, whose goal is to “dismantle Western democracies, values and culture.”
How much of it has been implemented? (As of February 2026)
- According to an analysis by Politico published in April 2025, of the 47 points contained in Project Esther, “the Trump administration and its allies in Congress have already moved in their rhetoric or policy to make at least 27 reality.”
- Parts of Project Esther that have been implemented by the Trump administration include:
- In January 2025, Trump signed an executive order threatening non-citizen students and others in the country legally with arrest and deportation for criticizing Israel or protesting its genocide in Gaza. Soon after, masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in plain clothes began abducting students and others and sending them to immigration detention centers to face deportation proceedings. The State Department also revoked the visas of at least 300 students, visitors and others.
- On March 10, 2025, the Department of Education announced that it had sent letters to 60 universities, threatening them with “potential enforcement actions” should they continue to allow students to protest for Palestinian rights. The Trump administration also began withholding billions of dollars in federal funding for universities that have had protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, attempting to dismantle their independence and pressuring them to restrict protests, freedom of speech, and academic freedom related to Israel.
- In April 2025, the Trump administration announced it would begin to monitor the social media accounts of foreign students studying in the U.S., green card applicants, immigrants, and visa applicants for what it labelled “antisemitic” content.
Who has criticized Project Esther?
Progressive Jewish organizations
- According to Jewish Voice for Peace’s Academic Advisory Council:
- “Project Esther deploys antisemitic conspiracy theories mixed with the false claim of ‘defending’ Jews as a smokescreen to attack the Palestinian liberation movement. While this movement is diverse, we know these attacks will be used to disproportionately target Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab people, non-citizens first among them, as well as organizations representing them.
- “Project Esther aims at nothing less than the full-scale dismantling of the Palestine solidarity movement as a crucial ingredient of the racist anti-immigrant policies unleashed simultaneously, and it invokes the defense of the Jewish people as rhetorical human shields in order to do so.”
- According to Jonathan Jacoby, President and National Director of the Nexus Project, which describes itself as “[working] to fight antisemitism, uphold democracy, and protect free speech”:
- “Despite its name, Project Esther is not a strategy for confronting rising anti-Jewish prejudice, discrimination, or violence. Rather, it is a blueprint for weaponizing the politicized charge of antisemitism to advance the goals of its ideological forebear at the Heritage Foundation: Project 2025. Project Esther and Project 2025 share a single goal: dismantling liberal democratic institutions in favor of reactionary authoritarian control.”
- “… It is a blunt instrument intended to advance a reactionary agenda by conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, equating pro-Palestinian advocacy with support for terrorism, and portraying progressive institutions as hotbeds of Jew-hatred. Rather than offering real solutions to rising antisemitism, it repurposes Jewish safety as a political weapon aimed squarely at dissent, diversity, and democratic norms.”
- According to Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, in testimony before the House Education and Workforce Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education:
- “The [Trump] administration’s campaign to center the threat of antisemitism as a catalyst to weaken democracy is taken right out of Project Esther, a plan developed by the Heritage Foundation without participation by Jewish organizations, without significant input by Jews, and without the insights of antisemitism scholars.
- “This plan weaves together a disparate group of civil society sectors and organizations into what it paints as ‘terrorist supporters,’ making a spurious, counterfactual case that they comprise a ‘highly organized, global Hamas Support Network’ of civil society nonprofits.”
Civil liberties and rights groups
- According to the Southern Poverty Law Center:
- “Right-wing organizations like the Heritage Foundation have even encouraged the government to take legal action against protesters critical of Israel. The foundation’s plan, called ‘Project Esther,’ serves to support its vision for a conservative, Christian America, similar in rhetoric and intent to its broader Project 2025. These bad-faith accusations of antisemitism are disproportionately deployed to silence and punish people of color, particularly Black and Arab people.”
- According to the National Lawyers Guild:
- “[Project Esther uses claims of antisemitism as a] pretext to surveil, criminalize, and dismantle the Palestine solidarity movement. Project Esther’s ultimate aim is a ‘McCarthy-era blueprint for crushing the American left,’ targeting everyone from anti-capitalists to environmental justice organizers under the guise of fighting extremism.”
- According to Diala Shamas, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights:
- “This is about equating pro-Palestinian groups with a foreign terrorist organization, which is a tried and true tactic that has [been] used for a very long time. All you need to do is try and paint a nebulous connection with Hamas, and then invoke these expansive laws.”
Others
- According to Kenneth S. Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate and former director of the division on antisemitism and extremism at the American Jewish Committee:
- “Project 2025 and Project Esther are both efforts to make universities toe an ideological line that isn’t self-directed by faculty but imposed by government edict… Antisemitism, while real, is being used as a political tool for those with a larger agenda—one that is dangerous to American Jews. American Jews have been least secure in times of authoritarian attacks on speech like the McCarthy period.”
- According to professors Michael Dreiling and Pedro García-Caro, coeditors of the American Association of University Professors’ Journal of Academic Freedom:
- “[In 2024] the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation authored Project Esther, a campaign framed as an anti-antisemitism initiative but strategically designed to suppress discourse on Palestine in K–12 and university curricula, and to quash what the project labeled as a ‘virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American “pro-Palestinian movement” [that] is part of a global Hamas Support Network (HSN).”
- “This project… emerged as an extension of Project 2025’s far-right agenda, seeking to criminalize dissent and reshape federal power to suppress speech critical of Israel. By urging universities and lawmakers to punish or expel those who support Palestine, the plan threatens to institutionalize ideological conformity in higher education.”
Go deeper
- Fact Sheet: Two Years of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
- Explainer: The IHRA Working Definition of Anti-Semitism
- Explainer: The Anti-Defamation League
- Fact Sheet: Is Israel an Apartheid State?