by Viviana Weinstein, posted on Workers World, May 21, 2025
My father Max was an immigrant, a U.S. citizen, Jewish and veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought the fascists during the civil war in Spain in the 1930s. Like many Jews who suffered through the years of the Holocaust, he was anti-Zionist.
My parents understood Zionism to be a racist project that wanted the Jews to take the land by killing all the Indigenous people (Palestinians) if necessary, in order to form the State of Israel in which only Jews could live or have rights under the law. Many Jews who were survivors or who lived during the Holocaust were anti-Zionist, and I grew up in this atmosphere.
I became active in Jewish Voice for Peace, which is an anti-Zionist, pro-liberation organization and has been the center of Jewish anti-genocide activism in the U.S. It has strongly opposed the aims of the Christian Zionist, pro-Israel think tank The Heritage Foundation. In 2023 this foundation outlined a plan called Project Esther, whose goal is to destroy the Palestine liberation movement against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.
Israel has received billions of dollars in military arms from the U.S. government, which has colluded in and enabled this genocide in Gaza. Project Esther is not well known [on May 18 there finally was an article in the New York Times about it] and it is being used to attack the Palestine liberation movement in the United States.
In the following, as a Jew who is anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine liberation, I will explain this dangerous strategy.
The Heritage Foundation claims what it calls “Project Esther” is “a national strategy to combat anti-semitism and protect Jews.” This claim is dangerously false and is based on numerous lies.
The project was given the name of Esther, a beloved Jewish hero who risked her own safety to save the Jewish community in the 4th century B.C.E. Her name, Esther, was usurped for this project to attempt to imply that saving Jews was its purpose, but this is false.
“Project Esther” is the opposite of what it claims. It stands the world on its head by punishing those who would live by the humane religious commandments of Judaism. These are: to treat the stranger with kindness as we too were once strangers in the land of Egypt; to not murder, steal or destroy the land; to celebrate our liberation each year for thousands of generations, because self-determination and freedom from oppression are the moral right of all peoples.
Project targets the pro-Palestine movement with big lies
In reality, Project Esther lays out a plan to crush the pro-Palestinian liberation movement by muzzling free speech, free press, education and activism against Israel’s genocide of the people in Gaza.
Its “strategic blueprint” begins with a big lie that claims the pro-Palestinian liberation movement is “anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anti-American and is part of a global Hamas Support Network or HSN which is trying to end the support of the U.S. government for Israel.” It further states that HSN has an even more ambitious goal, to destroy capitalism and democracy.
The project’s second lie is to demonize organizations that fight for self-determination of all people by suggesting that the liberation movement organizations that criticize Israel’s brutal siege and ethnic cleansing of Gaza somehow threaten Jewish safety by calling them “virulently anti-Israel” and thus antisemitic. It names the following organizations: National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP); The Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC); American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP); and Samidoun.
By falsely calling them “Hamas financed support organizations,” Project Esther hopes to marginalize and discredit them. It goes even further by slandering them as “hate groups.” The project ridiculously likens these groups to al-Qaida. Ridiculous because these movement organizations are anathema to al-Qaida and consider al-Qaida an enemy of people seeking freedom and self-determination.
The project displays a chart indicating the large number of universities in each state involved in the wave of pro-Palestinian protests that began after October 7, 2023, as Israel started indiscriminately bombing civilians and infrastructure in Gaza as well as preventing food, water and medical supplies from entering Gaza.
The project’s third lie calls the U.S. education system corrupt for allowing anti-Zionist and anti-Israel narratives to proliferate by using free speech. It promotes this lie in an attempt to mobilize the Jewish community and others to “eradicate this propaganda from the U.S. education system.”
Project Esther’s real goals are to stop the dissemination of truthful information and disrupt the movement’s communication, finances and ability to organize demonstrations. It also promises to pursue legal and criminal violations.
In the name of “protecting Jews,” the project plans to deny all democratic rights to university students, faculty and visiting scholars. It is threatening international students, green card holders and naturalized citizens with arrest and deportation for speaking out, writing or organizing against the genocide in Gaza.
Project Esther aims to purge speech and writing against the genocide of the Palestinians or expression of Palestinian self-determination from school curricula. It wants to remove and fire progressive faculty who support the students. It wants the administrations to prevent student liberation organizations from accessing the campus and deny them permits for demonstrations.
Project Esther proposes to go further to undermine students and faculty by canceling their degrees and credentials and their campus affiliation. It urges media platforms to stop hosting movement information and speakers.
Finally there is a constant repetition in the document of the HSN initials used like a drumbeat to convince the reader that the movement against the extermination of the Palestinian people and for their liberation is somehow evil. What is evil is The Heritage Foundation and Project Esther.
Project Esther also harms Jewish people
It is notable that nowhere in The Heritage Foundation document for Project Esther does it indicate such an intense effort to end discrimination against any other group except Jewish people. It further denies the need for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, because it claims the U.S. is multiethnic and multicultural, but it fails to mention multinational.
It never mentions the need for protection of people of color, including African Americans, who have been lynched and otherwise discriminated against since the founding of the United States and who have long struggled for protection.
It is obvious that Project Esther targets Palestinians and their supporters. But the concept that Project Esther has, that is, to protect only Jewish people, and do it by taking away the democratic and human rights of everyone else, also can and will create hatred and more antisemitism. The project is thus an enemy also of Jewish people and the Jewish religion, besides being an attempt to undermine and destroy the popular struggle for liberation and against the extermination of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
*Featured Image:Denver protest March 2, 2024.