The ugly truth is that ‘pro-Palestinian’ now means antisemitic

Jonathan S. Tobin

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An exterior view of The Heritage Foundation building in Washington, D.C., on July 30, 2024. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images.

As far as groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and the Nexus Project—and their cheering section at The New York Times are concerned—what the Heritage Foundation is doing is pretty much the end of the world. The Washington think tank has been at the center of a set of “democracy is doomed” conspiracy theories floated by the American left for the last three years.

But the current indictment of Heritage isn’t about Project 2025, their attempt to set forth a general agenda for what ultimately turned out to be the Trump 2.0 administration, in the manner that such institutions on both ends of the political spectrum are always trying to do.

Instead, it is now being demonized for seeking to do something about the unprecedented surge in antisemitism in the United States that has been raging since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Heritage’s Project Esther is an attempt to address a crisis for not just Jews but for the country as a whole, which the Biden-Harris administration and much of the American Jewish establishment largely failed to address, let alone successfully fight.

The Project Esther report was first published in October, weeks before the presidential election. It was the focus of a major effort by the Times’ national investigative reporter, Katie J.M. Baker, and made clear its bias right in the title of the lengthy article published on May 18 called “The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement,” along with a video that summarized it.

Project Esther and Trump

The conceit of the piece is that Heritage’s Project Esther is the script that the administration of President Donald Trump has been following in its efforts to deal with the targeting of Jews on college campuses by pro-Hamas mobs since Oct. 7. More to the point, the article claims that both Heritage and Trump aren’t interested in antisemitism. Instead, it is alleged that they see the situation in academia as an opportunity to roll out a plan to impose authoritarian tactics that are a blueprint for a scheme to subvert democracy throughout the country.

To make that case, one has to accept the terminology and the premise of those who have been organizing the demonstrations, encampments and building takeovers by students, faculty, administrators and outside agitators chanting for Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and anti-Jewish terrorism (“Globalize the intifada”) aren’t antisemitic. According to the Times, the outpouring of support for the mass murder, rape, torture, burnings, kidnapping and wanton destruction on Oct. 7—and then opposition to Israeli efforts to eradicate the Hamas terrorists and others who committed those atrocities—is merely “pro-Palestinian” activism. The acts of violence and the openly antisemitic objectives, including the destruction of Israel and the genocide of its population, in addition to the language used by this “movement,” are bizarrely rationalized and justified as expressions of idealism and support for human rights.

That is how the Times defines “pro-Palestinian.” And the widespread support for eliminating the one Jewish state on the planet is reported as mere “criticism” of Israel.

According to the newspaper, whose coverage was echoed in far-left outlets like Democracy Now and the Islamist Al Jazeera, the opposition by both Heritage and the administration to the takeover of academia by those who think discrimination against Jews, but not other minority groups like African-Americans or Hispanics, is an outrageous attempt to subvert democracy.

Who’s really threatening democracy?

That has a familiar ring to it. Since 2022, the liberal press has been seeking to anathematize the scholars at Heritage. For trying to envision what the next Republican administration could do to roll back the leftist, woke tide threatening to replace the values of Western civilization and the American republic—the substance of Project 2025—they were falsely accused of hatching a plot to replace American democracy with a new form of Trumpian authoritarianism.

Project 2025 was a major Democratic talking point last year during the presidential campaign, and it obviously scared the Trump campaign enough for him to repeatedly disavow it. Strictly speaking, his denials of complicity in Heritage’s project were entirely truthful. The think tank’s effort was launched at a point in time when it wasn’t clear that Trump would be the GOP’s presidential candidate in 2024. At that point, many of those who cheered the effort could have easily envisioned some of the proposals outlined in the report being implemented by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who, as the Times has noted, has already championed the same efforts to defend Jewish students and oppose woke ideology that is fueling antisemitism in his state.

Trump’s campaign had no input on what Heritage published. But the agenda they were hoping that the next Republican president would act on was entirely in sync with Trump’s understanding of the forces inside and outside the government that had done so much to sabotage and undermine his first term, as well as what needed to be done to thwart the takeover of American education by so-called “progressives.”

Once he won last year’s election and began a second term determined to roll back the liberal-dominated administrative state and the way the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) was harming American society and government, it was hardly surprising that he was acting on some of the same imperatives outlined in Project 2025.

As far as education is concerned, Heritage’s Project Esther provides a blueprint for pursuing a plan designed to deny federal funds to schools that violate the law by enabling DEI-related racial discrimination and antisemitism that is fueled by the same toxic leftist myths about critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that falsely label Jews and the State of Israel as “white” oppressors of “people of color.”

The surge in Jew-hatred on campus is the direct result of these ideas. So, too, is the way foreign funders and students have helped spread this ideological war on Israel and its Jewish supporters.

Redefining antisemitism

What is so interesting about the criticism of Project Esther and Trump’s efforts to fight antisemitism is how its opponents frame the issue as an authoritarian effort to suppress entirely reasonable and even idealistic “critics” of Israel. That’s the substance of the Times’ article; groups that are directly opposed to calling out antisemites are allowed to pose as representatives of enlightened Jewish opinion. That Jewish Voice for Peace, which has engaged in open antisemitism, including blood libels and opposes Israel’s existence and efforts to defend it, would be quoted in this manner is as grotesque as it is misleading.

The same is true of the newspaper’s use of the Nexus Project, which has deceptively sought to redefine antisemitism in opposition to the widely accepted working definition encouraged by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, so as to make it safe for Jew-haters to call for Israel’s destruction without being labeled as hatemongers.

The point of this argument is to legitimize anti-Zionism and to try to falsely argue that it is not the same thing as antisemitism.

That’s a talking point regularly voiced by Jew-haters, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Suffice it to say that if you are willing to deny Jews rights that no one would think to deny to anyone else, such as the right to live in peace and sovereignty in their ancient homeland and to defend themselves, then you are engaging in discrimination against them.

Just as dishonest is the way that the Times deprecates Project Esther’s willingness to refer to a “Hamas support network” and to “Hamas support organizations,” such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, another font of antisemitic invective and goals.

In doing so, Heritage is simply being honest about this network of people and organizations that are devoted to the dismantling of Israel, the denial of Jewish rights and history, and the active targeting of American Jews for intimidation, silencing and even violence, as we’ve seen on hundreds of college campuses in the last 19 months.

By seeking to call out these lawbreakers—whose activities would never be tolerated, let alone encouraged by college administrations, were they directed at any other minority group—Heritage and Trump are simply demanding enforcement of the law that forbids the funding of institutions that violate Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And they rightly want academic institutions to reject the toxic teachings that help normalize such aberrant conduct and hatred. Taking such a position has nothing to do with suppressing free speech or destroying democracy and any assertion to the contrary is simply an effort to confuse the issue and provide cover for antisemites and supporters of a terrorist group.

Gaslighting the Jews

Yet for so-called progressives, this is not just the thin edge of the wedge of right-wing Trumpian authoritarianism. In order to discredit Heritage, those supporting this antisemitic surge are seeking to gaslight the country and tell us that the people trying to defend Jews are the real antisemites.

That’s the substance not only of the Times’ slanted news coverage of this issue but also of the writings of some of its left-wing columnists, like Michelle Goldberg. She hasn’t made any secret about her own version of “criticism” of Israel, which involves not just falsely labeling its democratically elected government as authoritarian but invoking opposition to Zionism and its existence as a Jewish state. In a gob-smacking analogy, Goldberg claims those behind Project Esther, like the admirable Heritage scholar Victoria Coates, are somehow akin to antisemites of the past like those who favored appeasement of the Nazis such as Charles Lindbergh.

What Goldberg disingenuously ignores is that organizations like Heritage, and even leaders like Trump, are the ones fighting to save “the liberal culture that allowed Jews to thrive” in the United States, not the “pro-Palestinians.” It is progressives like her and other anti-Zionists who seek to destroy that culture and replace it with woke leftist ideologies that, as we’ve seen since Oct. 7, condone and justify antisemitism.

Part of that involves smearing Christians who support Israel as antisemites who only want to bring on Armageddon, as did Detroit Free Press editorial page editor Nancy Kaffer, who echoed the Times’ disgraceful attack on Project Esther as being linked to Jew-hatred.

Boiled down to its essence, the leftist critique involves a willingness to see those who oppose the murder, rape and kidnapping of Jews, and the destruction of the Jewish state, as bad people who should be viewed with distrust. At the same time, they want us to believe that those “pro-Palestinian” advocates are not haters of Israel and the Jews, even though they celebrate or rationalize Oct. 7 and oppose efforts to prevent Hamas from repeating its crimes.

The label “pro-Palestinian” is equally dishonest.

Anyone who wishes the Palestinian Arabs well would want them to be free of the rule of Islamists like Hamas, a terrorist group that preaches endless war on Jews and Israel. Genuine friends of the Palestinians would welcome Hamas’s destruction and call for it to release all the remaining hostages it took on Oct. 7, and to surrender. Those who wished the German people well in 1945 would not have called for a ceasefire with the Nazis that would allow the Adolf Hitler regime to survive World War II, but urged a swift Allied victory that would allow for that country to be rebuilt as a democracy. Still, that’s what Project Esther’s critics at the Times and elsewhere are doing with respect to the baby-killers and criminals of Hamas, as well as opposition to Israel’s justified campaign to defeat them.

Advocates for genocide

In this context, it’s clear that the functional meaning of “pro-Palestinian” in 2025 America has nothing to do with the welfare of the residents of Gaza. A “pro-Palestinian” is now someone who opposes Israel’s existence and supports, whether openly or tacitly, Hamas’s murderous war to destroy it. Though they mendaciously label Israel as perpetrating a genocide of Palestinian Arabs, they are the ones advocating for the genocide of Israeli Jews.

It is a sad fact that Palestinian nationalism, whether the version exemplified by Hamas or the equally intransigent one displayed by the Palestinian Authority, is inextricably tied to a century-old war on the Jews that they stubbornly refuse to end. The same is true of those who support them from afar by labeling Israel’s existence as illegitimate. It would be better for all concerned if this weren’t so. But it is now undeniable that those who claim the title of “pro-Palestinian” are indistinguishable from antisemites in their rhetoric and intentions.

Liberal Jews who dislike Trump because of partisan leanings and who distrust Heritage for the same reasons should not be deceived by the effort to convince them to reject Project Esther and the administration’s long-overdue enforcement of the law to protect Jewish students. Project Esther is no conspiratorial threat to democracy. Instead, it is a much-needed clarion call for ridding colleges and universities of Jew-hatred that deserves to be cheered by those who care about Jewish safety. Its opponents are a clear and present danger to Jewish life that should be labeled for who they are: the allies and fellow travelers of a pro-terrorist movement that seeks Jewish genocide.

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Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.

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