It's Time To Fight

Project Esther is giving Trump the blueprint for total autocracy. We must act.

As of this writing, it has been one week since Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident, has been disappeared by ICE agents and shipped to a facility 1,000 miles away in complete contravention of the right to due process never mind the right to free speech, for the “crime” of peacefully protesting for Palestine on the Columbia campus. The State Department admits he broke no laws, but that he holds opinions that are “a threat to national security”. Since then, there have been reports of other green card holders being disappeared, including a German national who was arrested in the Boston airport, stripped naked, and tortured by ICE for no discernible reason. A Brown University professor was just deported for reportedly having “sympathetic photos”(???) of Hezbollah on her phone. Meanwhile, The White House released a fascist propaganda film documenting the deportations of random Venezuelan men to a concentration camp in El Salvador, with no trial and no proof that they were even criminals. Trump directed these deportations under an obscure 18th century law called the Alien Enemies Act which suspends the right to due process and has never been used outside of wartime. The last time this was used was to inter Japanese-Americans during World War II. If this all feels like a rapid escalation, that’s because it is. We seem to be closely following the trajectory of Nazi Germany 1932-1939. And while this is happening, Democrats are actively collaborating with the fascists. If you’re terrified, you should be. The Trump Administration is following a blueprint that is laid out in a truly chilling Heritage Foundation Document called Project Esther.

So what is Project Esther? “PROJECT ESTHER A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism” is a Heritage Foundation document that asserts that those that are pro Palestine are part of a global, highly organized “Hamas Support Network (HSN)” whose goals are to change the policy of the United States towards Israel but moreover to aid in the “destruction of capitalism and democracy”.

From the Heritage Foundation Website:

“This network is nominally American but benefits from the support and training of America’s overseas enemies. Its members hope to achieve their 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.”

The stated purpose of Project Esther is to, over the course of 12-24 months, dismantle this so-called “Hamas Support Network” using a combination of media, private organizations, and multiple arms of the state. The anticommunist sentiment in the document is clear, claiming that support for Palestinians “comes straight from the pages of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto”. And not surprisingly, the tactics they advocate for harken back to the last two red scares. Project Esther explicitly names some of the organizations they are intent on targeting: National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP or SJP), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Samidoun, Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation (WESPAC), Alliance for Global Justice, Tides Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and claims that these organizations have influence at the highest levels of government. The document itself reads like it was written by a paranoiac, tying people like George Soros to Palestine organizations, and claiming their goal is the wholesale destruction of western civilization.

The document claims that this Hamas Support Network’s goal is to “take advantage” of our open society and the rights granted in the constitution in order to collapse capitalism and corrupt our education system “often under the umbrella or within the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and similar Marxist ideology.” and that this is funded by outside, foreign backers. Project Esther explicitly names what they call the “Hamas Caucus” inside Congress: Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Summer Lee, Ayana Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Greg Casar, Andre Carson, Hank Johnson, Jan Schakowsky, Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal, Bernie Sanders, Chris Van Hollen, and Elizabeth Warren, and even goes as far as to call Chuck Schumer anti-Israel despite his steadfast support for genocide.

Project Esther lays out the desired “End State” for the attacks on pro Palestine individuals and orgs (termed HSOs or Hamas Supporting Organizations) as follows:

Desired End State (ES). Establishing the following criteria, which mirror current conditions, will achieve our desired end state:

• ES1: HSO propaganda eradicated from the U.S. education system at all levels.

• ES2: HSOs unable to disseminate propaganda inside the United States.

• ES3: HSOs no longer have access to U.S. open society.

• ES4: HSOs no longer have access to the U.S. economy.

• ES5: HSN loses access to Congress.

• ES6: Executive branch confronts, pursues, and prosecutes HSO legal and criminal violations.

• ES7: HSOs’ communications disrupted.

• ES8: HSOs rendered unable to conduct or sustain demonstrations and protests.

• ES9: U.S. Jewish community (and allies) unified against HSOs.

• ES10: American public broadly united against HSN/HSOs.

• ES11: Critical vulnerabilities exploited.

This document contains multifaceted strategy to accomplish these “end states” through a coalition of private networks, moneyed donors, Jewish organizations, and government apparatus, intended to push pro Palestine orgs and activists out of public life by any means. It compels authorities to use multiple laws to suppress and persecute activists and orgs such as Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), and counterterrorism, hate speech, and immigration laws. They also call for the surveillance of Palestine activists to search for any evidence of criminal wrongdoing, and to “expose” them and force them into hiding. Their ultimate goal is expressly to deny those who support Palestine the rights enshrined in our constitution as they believe that those rights are being exploited to threaten western civilization.

Project Esther explicitly references the House UnAmerican Activities Committee as a positive model for how to handle the “scourge” of anti-Israel activism and makes clear they will stop at nothing less than the total eradication of any criticism of Israel in the United States. As Israel has just broken the ceasefire and resumed its genocide campaign against Palestinians, the waves of Palestine protests will likely pick back up and the repression will increase.

While some of what the Trump Administration is doing, such as the deportations of Venezuelan immigrants, is outside of the bounds of the so-called protection of Israel laid out in this document, it follows the same playbook. We are witnessing a mass acceleration of repression that will eventually move on from just visa holders and permanent residents to all citizens in order to deny us our constitutionally enshrined rights. Even now, the Trump Administration is defying a federal judge’s order to halt the deportations to the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador. The law, the constitution itself, is only as good as the people willing to obey it, and this administration has made it clear that they will not. We must act now. We are hurtling towards a future in which anyone can be disappeared for any criticism of government policy. It starts with anti-Israel speech, with suspending the rights of immigrants, but make no mistake, that isn’t where it stops. We must all begin to act with the urgency this moment requires. There are far more of us than them, but we must move together.

Posting and doomscrolling isn’t enough. We need to start to form coalitions capable of stopping this. Time is running out for us to build an effective bulwark against this regime, and we will regret it if we wait until they are disappearing our friends and colleagues. Join your local socialist organization: PSL, CPUSA, FRSO, DSA. Among these at least one is likely operating in your city or town. Join Students For Justice in Palestine or Jewish Voice For Peace and plug into local protests. Check ANSWER Coalition for local actions and sign up for their notifications. Start or join a Marxist book club (yes seriously, Stalin got his first introduction to the writings of Lenin this way), join your local mutual aid network and build community, join a union. There are a lot of places to start but the important thing is that we begin to work together and move in solidarity with each other. Our runway is incredibly short and we are in immense peril. It is truly an us against them moment and we can’t continue to sit idly by while every single right and freedom we’ve ever had is stripped away.

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Resources:

PSL: https://www2.pslweb.org/join

CPUSA: https://www.cpusa.org/

DSA: https://www.dsausa.org/

FRSO: https://frso.org/

ANSWER Coalition: https://www.answercoalition.org/sign-up

JVP: https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/join-us/#local

SJP: http://nationalsjp.org/

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