Trump’s plan to protect Jews follows Heritage Foundation road map

Ellie Cohanim was born in Iran, but her father whisked her family to the United States during the 1979 Islamic revolution. The new Islamic regime had denounced Cohanim’s father, a Jewish businessman for an Israeli company, as a Zionist spy.

Today, Cohanim is a co-chairwoman of the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, a conservative group supported by the Heritage Foundation. She served as a deputy special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism for the State Department during the first Trump administration. After Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, a wave of student protests rolled across the United States, accusing Israel of being an apartheid state. When she joined the task force that November, Cohanim felt like she was reliving family history. 

“The thought that the country we escaped to could get engulfed in the same radical Islamic anti-Semitism partnering with the radical left, to imagine that those same forces in America 45 years later, it was really incomprehensible to us,” Cohanim told WORLD.

The national task force is a volunteer group of roughly 45 Christian and Jewish conservative individuals or organizations, including the Zionist Organization of America and the America First Policy Institute. Task force co-chairman Luke Moon said that a few months after launching, the co-chairs had the idea to create a national strategy. They asked the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, for help. The result was Project Esther, a national strategy to counter left-wing anti-Zionism.

“Any strategy document looks at where the problem is and how to go about addressing it,” said Moon, who is the executive director of the Philos Project. “I’ve been fighting anti-Semitism for a long time, and this, to me, is one of the most comprehensive strategies.”

It might also be one of the most successful. In the first two months of this Trump administration, the White House’s actions to address anti-Semitism have followed the recommendations of Project Esther almost to the letter. The document, published by Heritage on Oct. 7, 2024, calls for defunding colleges that allowed pro-Palestinian encampments, deporting international students who express support for Hamas, and pressuring universities to abandon diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.

Earlier this month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate who mediated between protesting students and university officials last spring. He is an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent and a legal U.S. permanent resident. The Department of Homeland Security has accused him of “leading activities aligned with Hamas.”

On Tuesday, plainclothes federal officers stopped Rumeysa Ozturk on a sidewalk in Medford, Mass., and took her away in an unmarked van. Ozturk, a Turkish national, is a Ph.D. candidate on a student visa at Tufts University. She attended some pro-Palestinian protests last year and wrote an op-ed for her student newspaper, calling on the university to divest from any ties to Israel. The Department of Homeland Security said an investigation found she “engaged in activities in support of Hamas” but has not yet explained what those activities were.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said both students violated the provisions of their visas. If an applicant misrepresents any information when applying for permanent legal status or omits relevant facts, ICE may revoke the card. The State Department has said that detained students have ties or sympathies to terrorist organizations like Hamas, which gives grounds for deportation.

“We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses,” Rubio told reporters on Thursday. “If we’ve given you a visa and then you decide to do that, we’re going to take it away.”

The chairpeople of the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism could not say for sure whether anyone in the Trump administration read Project Esther before making decisions such as arresting Khalil or forming a government task force to investigate anti-Semitism on college campuses. The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment about Project Esther in time for publication.

Cohanim said some task force members have met with appointees in the new administration, though she could not say whether they discussed Project Esther. Co-chairman Mario Bramnick, president of the Latino Coalition for Israel, joined a group of pastors to pray over Trump in the Oval Office last week.

“It makes me so happy,” Moon said of the Trump administration’s actions thus far. “You just need to have a few examples of people who lose their student visas, green cards, or work permits for supporting Hamas, and that will cause a chilling effect for others.”

But pro-Palestine activists argue that the chilling effect runs afoul of free speech rights. On a virtual planning call earlier this month, Eva Borgwardt, the national spokeswoman for IfNotNow, said Project Esther attempts to criminalize any criticism of Israel or support for Palestine.

“Its sole target is pro-Palestinian organizations, which it accuses of being not just anti-Israel, but anti-Semitic and anti-American,” Borgwardt said. “So as you can imagine, the opportunities for guilt by association are endless and ultimately reveal the author’s true McCarthyist intentions, which is dismantling any domestic organizing that they deem anti-American under the guise of fighting threats to Jewish safety.”

Project Esther states that opposing the state of Israel is anti-Semitic: “Those supporters of Palestine and Hamas who have claimed for decades that criticizing Israel’s policies does not equate to anti-Semitism are at best insincere. They have simply masked their anti-Semitism in a thin veneer of political rhetoric to disguise their true intent—the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel.”

Although right-wing figures such as Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens have also stereotyped and criticized Jews as a group, Project Esther only addresses what it sees as sources of anti-Semitism on the political left. The report highlights popular support for Palestinians at left-leaning private universities, claiming that Hamas entities are infiltrating American society and influencing the highest levels of government: “It should be obvious at this point even to the casual observer that there is an active cabal of Jew-haters, Israel-haters, and America-haters in Washington—all apparently aligned with the far left, progressive movement.”

Rabbi David Saperstein, former U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, said he’s watched the administration’s first few months of work, and it matches with Project Esther’s founding assumptions.

“Project Esther is a manifestation of the broader Project 2025 or the Heritage Foundation,” Saperstein told WORLD, referencing Heritage’s comprehensive conservative policy manual. “I’m always delighted to have people come out against anti-Semitism. The way that this focuses only on anti-Semitism on the left, as a conspiracy of left-wing groups, ignores the significant anti-Semitism of extreme groups on the right.”

As examples, Saperstein cited the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., where attendees expressed hatred of Jews, and the shooting attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue by a white supremacist in 2018. He said Project Esther “feels more like a political tool against the left than a serious effort to deal with anti-Semitism, which has to accept that it comes from both the right and the left.”

Moon recognized the political disparity. He told WORLD that he and Bramnick are working on a new report to spotlight right-wing anti-Semitism. He specifically referenced Owens, Carlson, and some guests on the popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience.

“It’s quite concerning, and it seems to be on the rise,” Moon said. “We need to create a bright line between the good right and the bad right. And the good right is the ones that are not anti-Semitic [but] pro-Israel and not xenophobic … pro–all people.”

Moon said they have not yet contacted Heritage for assistance in another version of Project Esther focusing on the political right. WORLD contacted the Heritage Foundation for this report and was told by a spokesperson, “We are unable to provide further comments on Project Esther at this time.”

“A lot of my Jewish friends and colleagues and allies are very concerned about Project Esther,” said Rev. Jennifer Hosler, an ordained pastor at Washington City Church of the Brethren. She wore a red T-shirt that read “Christians against Zionism” to a Senate confirmation hearing for Mike Huckabee as the next ambassador to Israel. “They see it as weaponizing anti-Semitism to silence political speech that’s concerned about human rights, and to silence activism. The issue of anti-Semitism is real, and also stopping people talking about Palestine is not the way to solve that problem.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) published a rebuke of the Trump administration for Khalil’s arrest and filed a friend-of-the-court brief along with the Rutherford Institute and the National Coalition Against Censorship. The brief argues that the administration must provide evidence of a crime to justify student detentions.

“Allowing the secretary of state to deport any noncitizen whose views, in his subjective judgment, are against America’s foreign policy interests places free expression in mortal peril,” the brief states. “As China’s experience shows, allowing the government to step in as censor when it believes speech threatens the government’s interests is a loophole with infinite diameter. It has no place in America’s tradition of individual liberty.”

But Moon says that Project Esther simply targets pro-Hamas ideology seeping into American society, especially on college campuses. He said criticism of Israel is permitted, but support for Hamas is too far. When protest encampments cropped up at colleges but did not extend to cities during summer recess, he said conservatives took note.

“I don’t know anybody in this space who would say a blanket criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic,” Moon said. “The point in which it becomes anti-Semitic is where Israel is treated differently than any other place on Earth.”

Leaders in Congress have also adopted strategies similar to those outlined in Project Esther. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., released an investigative report into anti-Semitism on college campuses in December. One of its recommendations was that universities should recognize discrimination against Zionism as anti-Semitic expression and a civil rights violation. The report noted that criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-Semitic.

On Thursday, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., announced during a hearing that the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions will launch an investigation into American Muslims for Palestine, a group that organized student encampments last year and has alleged ties to Hamas. It is closely affiliated with Students for Justice in Palestine. Both are listed in Project Esther as Hamas support organizations.

The National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism set a goal of dismantling Hamas-supporting networks in the United States within a year of its founding. According to Project Esther, the best opportunity was “when a willing administration occupies the White House.” Trump’s reelection presented that opportunity.

“We were thrilled,” Cohanim said. “We heard those campaign trail promises that he was specifically going to take on the universities, and we were really hopeful as soon as President Trump won that some of the avenues that we had identified as a task force could be implemented. Within eight days after coming into office, Trump issued an executive order… that brought a whole-of-government approach to combating domestic anti-Semitism.”