Update: Project Esther
In September, I shared a piece about the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther,” and how it proposes policies to conflate “antisemitism” with essentially any protest against Israel’s ongoing military occupation of Palestine. (In light of recent events, I’m taking down the paywall on that piece; thank you to paid subscribers for making this work possible.)
As I wrote then,
Heritage has never seemed particularly concerned about violence against Jewish Americans, or about hate crimes, generally. A search of its website finds many pieces on the dangers of 2020 demonstrations against police misconduct, but none in response to the 2017 “Unite the Right” Rally in Charlottesville, VA, that featured chants of “Jews will not replace us” and involved a white nationalist driving a vehicle through a crowd, killing one peaceful protesters and injuring dozens.
Instead, Heritage, the organization behind Project 2025, seemed much more interested in using attacks against Jewish people as a pretext for attacking their usual targets, complaining vociferously about “anti-Israel and anti-Zionist Jew-haters attempting to lay siege to our education system, political processes, and government…”
And, as I wrote at the time, it was hard to take seriously that Heritage Foundation was suddenly concerned with the well-being of Jewish Americans, in light of its heavily Christian nationalist bent, and its lack of support for steps to actually make those Americans, who have been increasingly under threat both before and after the October 7 terrorist attacks against Israel, safer.
Newly released government documents first covered this week by the New York Times show that the Trump administration has explicitly followed a similar roadmap to the one laid out in “Project Esther”.
Specifically, the Department of Homeland Security targeted Rümeysa Öztürk and other international students who residing legally in the United States, for deportation. Often, the Department targeted visa-holders and permanent residents based mainly or purely on the fact that they had made statements disagreeing with or criticizing Israel’s military actions against the people of Palestine— actions, it should be said, so obviously outrageous that even some of President Trump’s fiercest defenders have come out against it in the intervening months, with Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, labeling the country’s actions “a genocide”.
When even white nationalist Steve Bannon is criticizing your nationalistic foreign policy, it’s also hard to seriously argue, as Heritage did, that such a position is part of a leftist or “progressive” plot.
Öztürk’s essay said essentially what even those Trump supporters have said— albeit in much milder language— arguing that Tufts University leadership should respond to its undergraduate student union’s resolution on “the Palestinian genocide” and Israel’s “clear violations of international law”. She co-signed the letter with three other students; officials have not accused of any crime or any other action that could be considered truly antisemitic.
When a judge ultimately ordered Öztürk’s release, he wrote, “I suggested to the government that they produce any additional information which would suggest that [Öztürk] posed a substantial risk. And that was three weeks ago, and there has been no evidence introduced by the government other than the op-ed. That literally is the case. There is no evidence here.”
The Trump Executive Order cited in the orders to deport Öztürk and other students, like “Project Esther,” focuses heavily on antisemitic violence, intimidation, and harassment. Like Heritage Foundation, the Trump administration has rarely demonstrated much concern for actual antisemitic violence. For example, Trump and his cabinet have often flirted with openly anti-Jewish and Nazi-adjacent rhetoric.
In practice, then, the EO appears to be a way to provide cover for the more central agenda of deporting legal residents and visa-holders, while censoring speech (such as “leftist” or “progressive” political speech) that is disfavored by the administration. Obviously, since September, the administration has also greatly intensified its mass deportation actions, arresting legal residents, and citizens, including small children and the elderly. ICE agents have, by all appearances, murdered two people in the last two weeks, in Minneapolis, alone, operating on a frankly insane legal theory that they do not have to obey the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, and that they can use force, including violent and deadly force, to respond to almost any behavior they deem inappropriate.
That this is all deeply entwined with the idea that students and educators have no First Amendment protections if they don’t say what the administration wants them to say is fairly clear in the text of the EO and in documents like “Project Esther”.
Let’s not be fooled into thinking these pushes are about protecting Jewish people, or about ending criminal activity. They are about establishing an ever-larger “them” at the mercy of an ever-smaller “us,” about empowering the few at the expense of the many. Hopefully, if anything good can come from bad-faith censorship, from cruelty and violence, it’s that they will provide the motivation we need to come together productively and peacefully, to use collective power to push back, to mitigate harm in our communities, and to ultimately prove that antidemocratic methods are unsustainable and, if we are willing to stand up to them in time, doomed to fail.