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For the last 18 months, the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank responsible for Project 2025, has been organizing to quash pro-Palestine activism in the United States, the New York Times reported over the weekend. The initiative is called Project Esther—after the courageous Old Testament queen who saved the Jews from a wicked Persian king—and it recommends that government officials instruct college administrators to jettison pro-Palestine curricula or risk losing federal funding. It also called for foreign students who took part in anti-Israel demonstrations to be deported. Overall, Project Esther says its goal is to “dismantle the infrastructure that sustains the [Hamas Support Network] and associated movements’ antisemitic violence inside the United States of America within 12 to 24 months.”
In November 2023, a month after Hamas attacked Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations took place across the US, the Heritage Foundation announced the precursor to Project Esther: a coalition called the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. This group, it said at the time, was “dedicated to combating antisemitism at home and abroad and to supporting the state of Israel.” Notably, the coalition was composed of about a dozen groups, generally not Jewish, but rather evangelicals who proudly call themselves “Christian Zionists.” Many of them are big names in the world of right-wing activism: the evangelical nonprofit Family Research Council, the conservative Christian advocacy group Independent Women’s Forum, and the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, to name a few.
Last year, I wrote about how, for some Christian Zionists, Israel plays a key role in their end-times scenario of choice. To bring about the Messiah’s second coming, some believe, the Jews must return to Israel. Once that happens, however, most of the Jewish inhabitants of Israel will perish, and those who remain will finally accept Jesus and convert to Christianity. This set of beliefs is common among adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation, a network of charismatic Christians who believe that God speaks directly to modern-day prophets and apostles and that Christians are called to take dominion over the United States. They will do so by electing Christian leaders who will, in turn, appoint Christian judges, enact laws and policies that promote Christian values, and allow Christianity to be taught in public schools.
Some of the Christian Zionist participants in the Heritage Foundation’s coalition appeared in another of my pieces last year. For example:
Take the Philos Project, a decade-old nonprofit with an annual budget of $8 million whose mission is to “promote positive Christian engagement in the Near East.” The group, which in 2020 received a $9.4 million grant from the public charity National Philanthropic Trust, says on its website that it supports “some variant of the two-state solution—ideally a Jewish state with a Palestinian minority and a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority.”
On Facebook in January, the organization’s executive director, Luke Moon, posted a photo of himself in Israel proudly signing a bomb that was “bound for Hezbollah.” That summer on Facebook, he posted a photo of himself wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Jesus giving the thumbs-up sign, accompanied by the slogan “Jesus Was a Zionist.” Philos Project leaders devoted a recent podcast episode to debunking what they called a “conspiracy theory” that AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] wields political power.
Last October, the Philos Project hosted an event in Washington, DC, to recognize the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ attack on Israel. Headlining the event was then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance. In March on Facebook, Moon posted a photo of himself meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Moon also announced the Conference of Christian Presidents for Israel, a new group of leaders of like-minded organizations who he said would “help ensure the unique relationship between Israel and the United States goes from strength to strength.”
According to the New York Times, Moon was one of the founders of Project Esther. The others were a charismatic Christian leader and president of the Latino Coalition for Israel, Mario Bramnick; senior Heritage Foundation staffer James Carafano; and Ellie Cohanim, who served as Donald Trump’s antisemitism envoy during his first presidency. Of those four, only Cohanim is Jewish.
Regent University, a Christian college in Virginia Beach, Virginia, also is included in Heritage’s task force. It’s home to the Israel Institute, a new center that says it is dedicated to “promoting robust Christian scholarship on Israel,” which was founded in part by Regent’s Robertson School of Government dean, Michele Bachmann, the former Republican representative from Minnesota and 2012 presidential hopeful. Bachmann, a devoted Christian Zionist, has emerged as a firebrand on the subject of Israel and Palestine. As I wrote:
Last year, in remarks at a conference hosted by the right-wing student group Turning Point USA, Bachmann said of Palestinians: “They need to be removed from that land. That land needs to be turned into a national park.” In an October 2023 appearance in Los Angeles, Bachmann theorized that “wokeness” in Israel prevented the military from anticipating the attack. “It’s entirely possible that perhaps the intel service in Israel also had wokeness and decided not to pass the information along,” she said.
Project Esther appears determined to ensure that Americans don’t fall prey to that same wokeness, with the goal of ensuring that all pro-Palestine groups become associated in the public consciousness with Hamas and terrorism. “The virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American groups comprising the so-called pro-Palestinian movement inside the United States are exclusively pro-Palestine and—more so—pro-Hamas,” the group’s initial report states. To silence that movement, it says, Project Esther must act strategically. “After 9/11 and more than 20 years of the global war on terrorism, the vast majority of Americans associate al-Qaeda and Islamic extremism with ‘bad,’” the report says. “This is precisely the effect Project Esther strives to generate when Americans hear ‘Hamas Supporters’ or ‘Hamas Support Network.’”
The Trump administration hasn’t officially acknowledged Project Esther, though many of its initial goals have been accomplished or are being implemented. The government has withheld funds for Ivy League colleges and universities, for example, and has made aggressive efforts to deport student activists. As Robert Greenway, the Heritage Foundation’s national security director, told the New York Times, it’s “no coincidence that we called for a series of actions to take place privately and publicly, and they are now happening.”
Correction, May 21: An earlier version of this story misstated the state that Michele Bachmann represented in Congress. She was representative from Minnesota.
