Why Can’t You Say 'Free Palestine' Anymore? Ask the Heritage Foundation

The night sky in Gaza has no stars anymore. Smoke blots them out, and for the children beneath it, the stars might as well be myths. In Rafah, a toddler wails while her father wraps her burned feet in the remains of a UN blanket.

Across the world, in the quiet boardrooms of Washington D.C., suited figures sip coffee under soft lighting and plan how to make even speaking about this child a punishable act.

Palestinian boys look out of a damaged house at the site of an Israeli strike, in the central Gaza Strip (Source)

This is not fiction.
As of May 18, 2025, explosions once again light up Gaza’s night skies.

The Israeli military has launched Operation Gideon Chariots, a fresh and brutal wave of bombardments aimed at what they call Hamas targets. But the bombs do not distinguish.

Entire families sleep in tents after being forced from their homes. Schools have become morgues. Aid trucks sit idle at the border because Israel refuses to let any aid through to the Palestinian people and still, the airstrikes fall. NDTV broadcasted the footage: flashes lighting up the dark, buildings crumbling into dust, children screaming into the smoke.

Beneath the whine of drones and the thunder of falling bombs, there is a quieter sound… hollow bellies twisting in on themselves, children too weak to cry, mothers boiling grass just to pretend. The sky splits open with fire, but inside the shelters, the silence of hunger is louder.

They are not just dying from war. They are starving under it. Each day without food is a slow unraveling, a cruel countdown that makes the explosions feel merciful by comparison.

Israel has launched its most “extensive” new ground assault yet, bombarding Gaza with such force that more than 100 people were killed in one night alone, many of them children. This comes after 60 Palestinians were killed in a different IDF attack days before.

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What is Project Esther?

In October 2024, just as the dust of war and outrage settled over the Middle East, the Heritage Foundation quietly unveiled Project Esther… an initiative cloaked in biblical allusion and national security language, but bristling with political intent. Named after the Jewish queen who once risked death to expose a genocidal plot, the name drips with symbolism and irony.

They're taking a story about a woman who risked everything to stop a genocide and flipping it into a justification for silencing people who are speaking out against genocide. Esther saved lives by telling the truth. Project Esther is built to punish people for doing the same.

At its core, Project Esther is designed to collapse all support for Palestine into support for terrorism. If you attend a protest, post on social media about Gaza, or even teach a course that includes Palestinian history, you can be swept into what the Heritage Foundation calls the “Hamas Support Network.”

Project Esther was created by three high-ranking figures at The Heritage Foundation: Victoria Coates, Robert Greenway, and Daniel Flesch, a former IDF solider.

There is no distinction made between someone calling for a ceasefire and someone committing an act of violence. If you speak out for Palestinian lives, you are framed as a threat to be silenced.

This is not an exaggeration.

In its own words, the plan describes the pro-Palestinian movement in the U.S. as “exclusively pro-Hamas” and “effectively a terrorist support network.” That includes students, professors, journalists, human rights groups, and progressive members of Congress.

With Project Esther, The Heritage Foundation have shifted focus toward a new goal: rebranding pro-Palestinian advocacy as a threat to national security.

A Christian Nationalist Project Wrapped in a Star of David

Project Esther doesn’t just ignore Jewish voices. It steamrolls them. While its Christian nationalist architects brand every critic of Israel as a terrorist sympathizer, some of the most respected Jewish leaders in America are shouting from the sidelines, begging them to stop.

Despite branding itself as a shield against antisemitism, Project Esther has been largely rejected by major Jewish institutions. While the Heritage Foundation expected widespread Jewish backing, what they got instead was skepticism, even from longtime Zionist allies.

A few Jewish and Christian Zionist organizations reportedly told The New York Times that they refused to associate with the initiative because it ignored right-wing antisemitism and was too partisan.

Thirty-six former leaders of the most powerful Jewish organizations in America, people who once ran the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Hillel International, the American Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Agency for Israel, took out a full-page ad in The New York Times to make it clear: they would not be used.

Project Esther, they warned, was not about fighting antisemitism. It was about exploiting Jewish fear to justify political crackdowns.. on students, on teachers, on protestors, on anyone daring to speak out for Palestinian life.

They called it what it is: a threat to democracy.

These weren’t fringe voices. Among the signers were the former national chair of the ADL, Robert Sugarman, and top names from Jewish Federations across the country. They saw what was coming.. and they broke ranks to stop it. Not in their name. Not again.

Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which Project Esther labeled as a “Hamas Support Organization,” have publicly condemned the project and its framing.

The Heritage Foundation is not protecting Jewish people… they are exploiting them. Project Esther uses the deep, generational pain of Jewish history as a shield to justify authoritarian crackdowns. This is all a part of their larger goal: Project 2025.

Instead of listening to Jewish voices, Project Esther speaks over them. Instead of confronting actual antisemitism, it manufactures a narrative where anyone who criticizes Israel becomes part of a so-called “terrorist support network.”

In doing so, it reduces Jewish identity to a political tool and turns Jewish fear into fuel for a broader Christian nationalist agenda. This isn’t solidarity.. it’s manipulation and many Jewish leaders see it for what it is.

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Who is Funding This?

The architects of Project Esther, Victoria Coates, Robert Greenway, and Daniel Flesch, aren’t just former national security officials or policy analysts. They’re deeply embedded in the machinery of Trump’s political comeback, Israel’s far-right alliances, and America’s Christian nationalist movement.

Victoria Coates served as a deputy national security adviser under Trump and now oversees foreign policy at the Heritage Foundation.

Robert Greenway, another former Trump adviser, worked closely on the Abraham Accords and helps bridge the gap between American evangelicals and Israel’s hardline government.

Daniel Flesch, a former Israeli (IDF) soldier, is now positioned as Heritage’s voice on Middle East policy, appearing on Fox News to frame Palestinian solidarity as a security threat.

Behind Project Esther is the Heritage Foundation, bankrolled by the same right-wing megadonors who fund Project 2025 and Trump’s broader return to power. These include networks tied to the Council for National Policy, evangelical lobbying groups, and longtime funders like the Bradley Foundation and the Scaife family.

Christian nationalist donors fund Heritage because it delivers.

It defunds universities that support progressive causes. It silences student protests and targets immigrants who speak out. It rewrites the rules of education and public discourse to serve a fundamentalist vision of America. Politicians backed by Heritage-aligned PACs get talking points, media coverage, and votes.

Law firms aligned with the project are already circling, preparing lawsuits, lobbying for new criminal statutes, and setting themselves up to profit from contracts for surveillance, compliance, and ideological enforcement.

Their motivation isn’t Jewish safety, it’s about control. Control over public education, control over who gets to speak, protest, or teach, and control over the flow of federal dollars.

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Project Esther in Action

In January 2025, a leaked pitch deck obtained by The Forward showed us that the Heritage Foundation, one of the main architects behind Project 2025, was quietly preparing to “identify and target” Wikipedia editors it claimed were spreading antisemitic content.

In the case of Project Esther, the pitch deck was used by the Heritage Foundation to secure funding and buy-in from ideological allies. It’s essentially a sales tool, but instead of selling a product, it’s selling a political operation.

Known supporters of this pitch deck include evangelist and conservative groups: Family Research Council, Faith and Freedom Coalition, Concerned Women for America, Regent University, Independent Women’s Forum, the Coalition for Jewish Values, and the Steamboat Institute.

Heritage has also long been funded by DonorsTrust, a major vehicle for right-wing dark money, and the Prince Foundation, which is tied to defense contracting through Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater. These groups and donors aren’t just ideological allies… they have financial and political interests in controlling online narratives and silencing dissent.

This wasn’t about stopping Holocaust denial or neo-Nazis.

The pitch deck outlined plans to use facial recognition, hacked credential databases, and phishing tactics to unmask volunteer editors who dared to critique Zionism or reference Israel’s colonial history.

Many Wikipedia editors already operate under pseudonyms for their safety. Heritage even proposed baiting editors with fake accounts and malicious tracking links.

Just months later, in a suspiciously timed move, the Department of Justice under Pam Bondi threatened to revoke Wikipedia’s nonprofit status.

The DOJ echoed nearly identical language about foreign influence and antisemitic bias. Whether coordinated or not, the message was clear: dissent from the pro-Israel narrative, and you’ll be hunted, exposed, and punished… first by us, then by the state.

Around the same time, Elon Musk began publicly attacking Wikipedia as “Wokepedia.”

Wikipedia is just one front. Project Esther is part of a much larger campaign to punish pro-Palestinian speech.

Mahmoud Khalil

Since early 2025, over 1,000 international students and graduates have had their visas revoked or immigration statuses terminated for their involvement in pro-Palestinian activism.

These include high-profile cases like Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University, who was detained by ICE after being smeared online as a security threat. Others, like Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts student, were detained by ICE in unmarked vehicles. Badar Khan Suri, an Indian postdoc at Georgetown, was taken into custody for allegedly spreading “militant propaganda” a charge never substantiated with evidence.

As of today, Mahmoud Khalil remains in ICE custody at the LaSalle Detention Center in Louisiana. His deportation has been temporarily halted pending legal proceedings, but a federal judge has already ruled that he is eligible for removal under a provision labeling him a “foreign policy threat.” While other detained student activists like Rümeysa Öztürk and Badar Khan Suri have been released to fight their cases, Khalil’s continued detention shows us how far this crackdown has gone, and how selectively it’s being enforced.

His next immigration court hearing is set for May 22. While he was in ICE detention, his first born child was born without him there.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They form a pattern. A political operation was pitched in a boardroom, and then echoed in real-world detentions, deportations, and threats. What began as a call to unmask Wikipedia editors has grown into a sweeping crackdown on students, researchers, and anyone challenging the pro-Israel orthodoxy in American institutions.

If we don’t stop this now, we won’t just lose a few editors or activists.. we’ll lose the ability to challenge power at all. Today it’s Wikipedia and visas. Tomorrow it’s your job, your speech, your future.

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This isn't about Hamas. It's about power and it fits perfectly with the broader goals of Christian nationalists who want to reshape education, media, and civil society to reflect their ideology.

They are using fear and grief as cover. They are using Jewish pain to push a political project that Jewish leaders themselves have rejected and they are doing it in real time, while Gaza burns and while Americans are arrested for holding a sign.

I'm going to keep Project Esther, the Heritage Foundation and their ulterior motives, and the Trump administration’s illegal targeting of dissent in the spotlight… loudly, clearly, and for free. You don’t have to pay to access this work, and I’ll never hide the truth behind a paywall. If you want to support it, great, but whether you can or not, this information stays free because the people pushing this agenda are counting on our silence. I won’t give it to them.