Transcript

Mari Cohen: Hi, I’m Mari Cohen, associate editor at Jewish Currents. As President-elect Donald Trump rolls out appointments and plans for his incoming administration, it’s clear that the policies of a federal Republican trifecta could have serious consequences for supporters of Palestinian rights, who have already faced an environment of what has been described as “McCarthyist repression” since October 7, 2023. Trump’s pick for attorney general, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, is on record suggesting that federal officials revoke visas of pro-Palestine student protesters who aren’t citizens. His pick for the Department of Justice civil rights head, Republican Party official Harmeet Dhillon, has promoted suing colleges unless they crack down harder on protesters. House Republicans, with help from a small number of Democrats, have already passed a bill that would give the administration wide latitude to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofits deemed to be supportive of terrorism, without any requirements for due process. And the right-wing Heritage Foundation, creators of the infamous dystopian policy plan Project 2025, are circulating a plan called Project Esther, which details a strategy for purging pro-Palestine organizations and voices from American public life.

MC: Today we’re going to talk about some of these concerning prospects for Palestine organizing under Trump. What measures are on the table, and what would their impact be? What might be effective strategies for fighting back? To discuss this, I’m joined by Alex Kane, senior reporter at Jewish Currents.

Alex Kane: Hey there.

MC: Emma Saltzberg, US Strategic Campaigns director for the organization Diaspora Alliance, an international organization that fights antisemitism and its instrumentalization. Thanks for joining us, Emma.

Emma Saltzberg: Hi, thanks for having me.

MC: And Dylan Saba, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, a nonprofit providing legal defense to the Palestine solidarity movement, and a contributing editor at Jewish Currents.

Dylan Saba: Good morning.

MC: All right, thank you guys so much for being here. Really excited to discuss this. I think we’ll get right into it. Maybe just to get started: Dylan, I want to turn to you to set the scene for us a little bit. As a lawyer who defends the rights of pro-Palestine activists, I’m curious: What are some of the top areas of policy or enforcement change that you’re especially thinking about or on guard for under this coming administration? What are you most concerned about, looking at the moment?

DS: That’s a really good question. In part, there’s a lot of uncertainty around what’s going to happen in the next administration. On the other hand, though, there is a lot of certainty in that we know what the strategy of repression is for pro-Israel advocacy groups (and the Zionist movement in general), and that hasn’t really changed all that much between administrations. It’s really been a question of degree. We do have some worrying indications about where things are going. These are all things that have been areas of concern under the Biden administration, which has been, I would suggest, the most pro-Israel US Administration in history. It’s not to say that Trump can’t come in and do a whole bunch of crazy things, but I think we do need to recognize that the first one, as you named already, is about the student movement.

DS: So we’ve seen an explosion in grassroots organizing at the level of college campuses, and there have been heightened calls for repression of this political organizing on campuses. And usually, that call for repression has come in the language of anti-discrimination. It is identified by pro-Israel groups as a threat to Jewish students to have these kinds of views expressed on campus. So, there’s been a concerted attempt to really turn important anti-discrimination protections, passed in the civil rights era, against forms of political expression. And the form that that’s taken, often, is to demand repressive action from university administrators and to leverage the federal civil rights law (so Title VI in terms of administrative complaints) and, really, to push state institutions to adopt things like the extremely problematic IHRA definition of antisemitism, which has, as its effect, to muddle the distinction between what is properly protected as political expression and these anti-discrimination frameworks. So that’s been a push that’s ongoing, and that’s something that we expect to see accelerate in the Trump era. I imagine that the appointments in the Department of Education, such as Linda McMahon, will be on board with the more right-wing approach to these issues.

DS: There’s also the weaponization of anti-terror laws. So, when I say the weaponization of terror laws, I mean the Material Support for Terrorism legal paradigm, which is a very broad and vague federal criminal law that really came into full force after 9/11, that criminalizes a lot of activity that we might regularly think of as being protected by the First Amendment in terms of speech and expressive activities. So there’s some concern around how that may continue to be weaponized, both in the criminal sense of criminal charges and in terms of the civil side too—because Israel advocacy groups like to bring these really weak and spurious lawsuits to try and occupy the time and resources of grassroots organizations and to smear their name. So that’s another bucket here that also has a parallel in the Department of Treasury’s sanctions regime.

DS: So, the Department of Treasury has pretty wide authority to issue sanctions, even on domestic US organizations, if they just slap a terrorism designation onto them. And that can be very concerning. There’s also the question of immigration. Trump has made a lot of threats about what his administration is planning to do on immigration more broadly, and there has been some indication that there will be a special focus on the Palestine solidarity movement. We don’t really know what that means or what it would look like, but certainly, that’s something that we need to be thinking about and anticipating. I would say that those are, broadly speaking, the areas of concern—with the caveat that, again, there’s a lot of bluster around Trump and a lot of scary things that he’s talking about doing, and ultimately, we’re not going to know until he’s staffed up, and the administration starts, and we see what their priorities actually are. It also may depend on contingencies that are not yet set. Like, we don’t know what the student movement will necessarily look like next semester. So it’s a bit of wait-and-see. But also, what we’re expecting is what’s already been ongoing. And the question is one of degree and particular tactics.

MC: Thank you. That’s super helpful. Alex, I may turn to you to go a little bit more specifically into something that Dylan mentioned, which is the use of this Title VI anti-discrimination law, which basically is a tactic that the pro-Israel movement has used for many years now. Filing antisemitism civil rights complaints with the Department of Education to intimidate pro-Palestine activists and also try to force colleges into complying with cracking down on them. You reported heavily on what that’s looked like since October 7, 2023, and I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about your sense from this reporting on what it might look like when the Trump administration is using this tool, and how that would compare to what we’ve already been seeing.

AK: I think it’s just worth being explicit about what Title VI is and how it bears on this topic. So, Title VI is a central plank of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It bars any institution that receives federal funding from creating or permitting a hostile environment for students on the basis of race or national origin and also mandates that colleges found to have violated the statute have to come to an agreement with the federal government to change policies. The text of it has no bearing on the treatment of Jewish students on campus, if you read the letter of the law, because it doesn’t mention religion as a protected class. That changed, however, through a bureaucrat; a very important bureaucrat named Kenneth Marcus, who is a conservative lawyer, who was the interim leader of the George W. Bush-era Office of Civil Rights. He issued guidance that instructed schools to consider Title VI to prohibit discrimination against groups that exhibit both ethnic and religious characteristics, such as Arab Muslims, Jewish Americans, and Sikhs.

AK: So I spoke with Dylan’s colleague, Radhika Sainath for my report, and she pointed out that this change was a good thing on paper because no student should face a hostile environment just because religion isn’t explicitly denoted in the Civil Rights Act. But she also said that the problem is that since that regulation, it’s been used to suppress student speech supporting Palestinian rights. During the first Trump administration, Marcus became the head of the OCR again, and he opened investigations into schools on the basis of complaints that cited pro-Palestinian activism and, crucially, pushed Donald Trump to sign an executive order that not only repeated his 2004 guidance and codified it into law but also directed federal agencies that enforced Title VI, including the Department of Education, to consider how they could incorporate the IHRA definition of antisemitism. That was very consequential.

AK: And when Biden came into office, he did not rescind the executive order—and, in fact, affirmed its importance as part of the Biden administration’s national strategy to counter antisemitism, and, in January 2021, said that it will consider the IHRA definition in handling complaints of antisemitism, though in that same guidance said that an incident considered antisemitic under IHRA doesn’t automatically violate Title VI. So I think this gets to the point of what Dylan was talking about, which is the bipartisan nature of this project. It started under the first Bush administration. The Obama administration didn’t do anything to clarify that Title VI civil rights complaints should not apply to pro-Palestinian speech. Trump escalates this strategy with the executive order. Biden leaves the executive order in place, and now we’re back with a Trump administration who could potentially escalate even further. We don’t yet know who’s going to lead the Office of Civil Rights, which is going to be key to figuring out exactly how Title VI and IHRA will be utilized.

AK: As Dylan mentioned, we have Linda McMahon (the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment), who has virtually no education experience other than, I think, a one-year stint on the Connecticut school board. She doesn’t have a track record specifically on antisemitism. What we do know about McMahon is that she is the former head of the America First Policy Institute, which is an institute similar to Project 2025 in the sense that it was basically aimed at being a Trump administration-in-waiting during the Biden administration, issuing policy plans and strategy papers about how the next Trump administration should act. And they, in a policy paper that they released on October 14 of this year, criticized the Biden administration. They said that the Biden administration has failed to counteract what they call antisemitism on college campuses, by which they mean the explosion of student activism for Palestinian rights. They say that the Biden administration hasn’t done enough to use Title VI, and they also recommend two things that are important to note. One is that what they call pro-Hamas college students’ visas should be revoked if they’re foreign students studying on non-immigrant visas. And I should note that whether the Trump administration could actually do that is, I think, a contested question. Just because you’re not a citizen doesn’t mean that the Constitution doesn’t apply to you. The America First Policy Institute has also wanted the Senate to pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would direct the Department of Education to consider IHRA—basically taking what Trump’s executive order did and having Congress pass it, so that it’s virtually impossible for any administration to revoke--absent a congressional reversal, of course--which would be strange. A lot of Palestinian rights groups are very concerned about this because, of course, the IHRA definition conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism, and they worry that this bill would be used to further crack down on student speech in favor of Palestinian rights.

AK: So that’s where we are right now. Basically, the tools are on the table for the Trump administration to escalate. The only question is how far they will go. I guess I should also close by saying that there are fissures on the right over this plan. The Department of Justice lawyer that you mentioned, Mari, Harmeet Dhillon, has said that she doesn’t support the Antisemitism Awareness Act because she thinks it’s a speech code that could unfairly curtail freedom of speech. And this has also been a concern amongst some close allies of Trump in Congress, who have raised concerns that the Antisemitism Awareness Act would criminalize Christians who say things like “Jews killed Jesus.” They don’t want the federal government to be able to classify certain speech as antisemitic and therefore take action against it. So, there’s some interesting fissures on the right over this overall strategy, although I think the balance is with those who want to use it as a speech policy to curtail pro-Palestinian speech.

DS: We wouldn’t want any actual anti-Semites to get hurt.

ES: Right. I was going to say the same thing. I wanted to dig in a little bit deeper on the fissures within the right because I think it’s revealing. We have Ken Marcus, whose strategic approach is very institutionalist. It has been two decades of him pushing forward gradually on this approach to getting Zionism legally protected as an inherent aspect of Jewish identity under civil rights law. And that is a project that depends upon the enforcement powers of the Office for Civil Rights, where he’s trying to use that machinery to advance a specific agenda. But also, on the right, there’s a guy named Zachary Marschall, who has been basically flooding the zone: filing dozens if not hundreds of very thinly-sourced complaints against colleges and universities under Title VI for antisemitism, to tie up the works of OCR. And then a third distinct strategy is the Republican Party electives who are consistently underfunding the Office for Civil Rights and actually trying to cut funding for it. I mean, Project 2025 wants to abolish the Department of Education and move OCR into the Justice Department. So there are real disagreements about how to use the machinery that exists to advance these goals, but there’s pretty broad agreement on the goals.

MC: Yeah, I think one thing that we’ve seen that’s been interesting is that the elements of the right that are more isolationist are still usually not particularly sympathetic to campus protesters for Palestine. Like, even the ones that dislike Israel--usually not for principled human rights reasons but for reasons of either America-first nativism and isolationism or even antisemitism--I think that they hoped that they would have some more purchase among Trump’s picks. And he has really gone, I think, with this more traditional pro-Israel lineup so far. I mean, thinking about even Mike Huckabee, for example, ambassador to Israel--he’s gone all in on that full Christian Zionism. But at the same time, even the people on the right, I think, who are less sympathetic to that foreign policy are still usually pretty unsympathetic to pro-Palestine protesters because they still see them as part of this woke left run amok, or whatever. So it’s interesting to see how these fissures are playing out. And yeah, it does seem that the more repressive and Zionist elements are tending to win out.

MC: Thinking about that trend, Emma, I’m also wondering if we can have you talk about Project Esther a little bit. Obviously, as I mentioned briefly in the intro, Project Esther is this other plan that was released by the Heritage Foundation. Reading the document is definitely a trip. For anyone listening to this who hasn’t read it, I recommend it just to understand the language that these guys are speaking in. But one thing I was even struck by that I think is ironic in reading this plan is that it actually uses a lot of what I think of as the conspiratorial structure of classic antisemitism. And then, it accuses a shadowy enemy of infiltrating the US government and media and impeding on traditional American values and that we have to uproot it, but we have to do that in the name of fighting antisemitism. And the enemy that they’re talking about is what they call a global Hamas support network, HSN.

DS: The flip side of the Protocols of Elders of Zion are the Protocols of the Elders of Palestine.

MC: Yes, that’s where we are with this document. And it’s basically just like, it uses a lot of jargon and terminology and acronyms, but basically just describes them wanting to disrupt what they call this HSN, which, to them, includes groups from Jewish Voice for Peace to American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine. A diverse amount of pro-Palestine groups are all lumped into this Hamas Support Network category. Tell us a little bit about this document. What’s going on here? Is this something that we actually expect to be implemented? What would that thing look like?

ES: Yeah, Project Esther is an addendum to Project 2025 that uses tactics that have been honed and developed by mostly Jewish, pro-Israel, anti-left organizations over decades but without actually involving almost any Jews in the creation of it. And it uses those tactics toward a Christian nationalist agenda of crushing their ideological opponents, starting with (but explicitly not limited to) organizations that have expressed support for Palestinian rights. So, Project Esther lays out a rationale for repression using all of the policy mechanisms Dylan mentioned, and it merges the anti-antisemitism rhetorical structure industrial complex with the anti-terror legal and policy infrastructure. So, it has all this rhetoric about how supporting Palestinian rights makes you anti-Israel, anti-America, antisemitic, and pro-Hamas. It constructs this conspiratorial worldview within their view, Muslims at the core of it.

ES: And just to talk a little bit about the origins of this and the name, it’s very revealing. So, in the original Project 2025 document, which was released in 2023; when it started getting a bunch of attention, I went to look: How are they talking about antisemitism? And they weren’t. There was none of this Title VI antisemitism stuff in Project 2025. There’s tons of stuff about Title IX and gender, about immigration status, but they weren’t using this Title VI strategy. And in fact, it was not until late November of 2023 that Heritage Foundation even announced the creation of the task force that would put together Project Esther and release it in the Fall of 2024. So, it is post-October 7 that Heritage realizes that this is a set of tools that can be useful to putting forward their goals. And the cast of characters named in that original launch document—there are multiple Christian nationalist groups, and the only Jewish group named in that release was the Coalition for Jewish Values, which is a pro-Trump group of Orthodox Rabbis founded in 2017. So, there was not even the political effort to give this cover. When it was released, the ADL, AJC, and even Christians United for Israel, they were like: We don’t know her. They did not claim affiliation with this. They didn’t claim knowledge of it, which I think really says something about the role of even the Republican Jewish Coalition in the Trump coalition. Even right-wing Jews, even Jews that agree with them, are not actually part of the landscape of people they’re working with.

ES: And at the same time, it’s borrowing from, for example, ADL tactics. So that’s the origin, right? It’s totally divorced from the Jewish organizations that honed these strategies over time. And then the name of it, Project Esther, is also super revealing, and I think worth spending some time on, because Jews know Esther as the hero of the Purim story. And the Purim story is a complex story. It’s a book with no mention of God in the Jewish version, and it’s a story that Christians have a long history, going right up to the present, of lifting and twisting and using for their own purposes. So, I’m actually—I want to read a little quote from a Washington Post article from 2022: “The Esther story has come to represent a different sort of tale for many Christians. As other Jewish texts and rituals have been repurposed by evangelicals, the story is often stripped of its innate complexities to focus on Esther herself as someone who has explicitly chosen to carry out God’s will. Esther has evolved to become a secret stand-in for the divine purpose used by leaders to justify their political decisions and to imply that God is on their side, even if the rest of us can’t see it.”

And also from that article: “In 2019, the Christian Broadcasting Network interviewed Mike Pompeo in Jerusalem and asked him whether Trump was, quote, ‘raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace.’” And so, right from the jump, right from the name of it, you can see that this is a Christian nationalist endeavor to use Jewish symbols, texts—actually Jews themselves—as instruments toward a policy agenda that is actually hostile toward the majority of American Jews.

DS: Yeah, thanks, Emma. That was such a helpful overview of Project Esther and its lineage. I think that the context that I wanted to add is a bit of legal context for what they are doing here, in terms of introducing all of this language and this theoretical or rhetorical framework, which, I agree, is laughably ridiculous and does indeed take the structure of antisemitism. But the question is: Why? What are they achieving here? And it’s not just a reflection of their kooky ideology. The framework of conspiracy is an attempt to do an end run around the protections of the First Amendment. Calling this a Hamas support network—totally bullshit, right? But that is an attempt to bring us under the umbrella of national security laws, which courts are far more likely to defer to the government on. If the government comes in and says, “This is an issue of national security,” courts are way less likely to go in and evaluate the truth of that than if you tell a court that they need to decide between civil rights protections and First Amendment protections. So, I think that’s really key to identify that when we are talking about what’s bad about Project Esther and, ultimately, what it’s trying to accomplish here.

DS: And I think it ties into what we’re talking about as the internal conflicts between different factions of the right, or even the Israel advocacy groups; because the anti-discrimination track, the Ken Marcus track, has seen a lot of success. They’ve also been able to get all the way to the finish line but not quite cross it in terms of getting IHRA formally codified. And one of the reasons for that is that it’s pretty explicitly a violation of the First Amendment. The IHRA definition, if you include the explanatory examples, prohibits someone from comparing what the State of Israel is doing to what Nazi Germany is doing. That’s explicitly in the explanatory examples. Meanwhile, you have Israeli leaders sounding like Nazis, and that’s not an exaggeration. So the idea that you can’t even point that out? It’s got some real serious and obvious First Amendment concerns. So I think that the shift toward a more natsec framework is reflective both of the political moment that we’re in--the approach of the Trump administration--but also some of the limitations of trying to pervert anti-discrimination law.

ES: Yeah, totally. And I’m not saying it’s a coincidence that it got picked up after October 7, but rather that it became evident to Heritage and their allies that the antisemitism justification for repression, for attacking civil society groups, colleges, and universities was one that would bring them more allies than otherwise. And, to be clear, what Project Esther identifies as antisemitism is solely support for Palestinian rights. Like, there is no talk of actual hostility, bigotry, discrimination against Jews in Project Esther.

MC: I think one question I have about all of this, or one thing I’m thinking about is: What do we know about how much Trump actually is interested in or wants to implement this plan? Because I think one of the dynamics that’s complicated is: How do we prepare for what’s ahead and to counter it while also not being convinced by scare tactics into giving up the fight ahead of time? And I think that that’s a dynamic that we see. And I think, Dylan, you even mentioned some of this stuff around, like, there could be serious constitutional issues with some of, for example, the deportations that Trump wants to do. I think this is a phenomenon that I’ve seen immigrant advocates point out, which is that we shouldn’t just automatically assume that everybody’s getting deported to the extent that we give up trying to protect them ahead of time, or that people are just convinced to leave the country on their own.

MC: So, we obviously don’t want to assume that we’re losing the fight in advance because we see this scary document, but we don’t actually know if Trump would want to implement this. And also, what it would actually look like to implement this. It’s a pretty vague plan. And it’s also pretty clear that they don’t actually know a lot about the groups that they’re talking about. Just from the way that they describe them, it’s pretty clear that they don’t actually know what the fuck they’re doing. That’s never stopped anyone on the right or in the pro-Israel movement from trying to criminalize or repress before. But it’s just worth noting that I think there’s a lot of ways in which this document is using very sophisticated language but is not actually very sophisticated. But I just wonder: What do we know in terms of how much of a constituency there actually is in power for using this strategy?

ES: I mean, we’ve mentioned Harmeet Dhillon. Trump himself is very explicit about wanting to go after his political enemies. His director of the FBI nominee, Kash Patel, apparently has an enemies list. So certainly, high up in the executive branch, there’s appetite for enacting retribution, and there are efforts that could be categorized as part of a Project Esther-approach that are well underway. Earlier this month, the FBI raided the family home of two SJP leaders at George Mason University in a case relating to graffiti. One of the activities named in Project Esther is releasing damaging oppo research. And like, hands up if you’re on Canary Mission, like I am--that is not actually new. And so, we, like Dylan said, don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but there are already vicious, repressive approaches being leveled at Palestine Solidarity activists. And so, in some ways, Project Esther and the incoming administration offer us a sort of clarification. One of the goals named in Project Esther is eroding trust within and between movement organizations. And so, I’m really urging people to err on the side of trusting people who are in the fight with you. Err on the side of relationships, on the side of coming together, and don’t slow down. Make sure you’re in compliance; get a lawyer, but, don’t slow down because there’s a real clown car element to the administration. We don’t know exactly what’s going to happen.

DS: I just want to totally agree with Emma’s framework here. I do think that the best way to think about this is not as a plan in waiting and trying to figure out what’s going to be implemented but really as a signal for what’s already underway. And it is very revealing in that regard. Emma’s right to point out the strategic approach that is laid out in the document--that they want to sow discord within the movement. So, in terms of what I’m expecting--and this is a continuation of what’s already been happening--is not necessarily a broad acceleration of repression in which everyone is targeted but a situation in which particular actors are targeted in a concerted attempt to sow movement division. And that’s important to think about because the way that the terrorism regime works is to isolate actors and make them toxic. And that is in the Congressional record in terms of how these acts are being discussed when they’re being passed. And so the strategy is: Try to pick off a group, raise their quote, unquote “threat level” or whatever, and sow discord by making it a liability for other movement groups to have relationships with them. So that is part of the strategy here. And so we need to be on the lookout for that. And then, the other piece of it is to bring in this broad rhetorical framework of a conspiracy to justify all kinds of surveillance. So something may not be a violation of any law, but by laying the groundwork for this, they can start a paper trail or continue a paper trail to justify mass surveillance of grassroots organizers and the movement more broadly.

AK: And, I mean, Pam Bondi, if she’s confirmed the next attorney general, has said that she thinks the FBI should be questioning student protesters about whether they support Hamas, which is a very specific proposal that is not unprecedented in the sense that there have been instances in which there’s a particular incident and the FBI is involved and they ask protesters, students, about: Well, do you support foreign terrorist groups? What’s your opinion on Hamas? That has happened. But as far as we know, there has never been, at least recently, a mass program that’s actually a policy of the FBI getting involved with students who were arrested and questioning them specifically about Hamas. And I think what you’re saying about Project Esther providing a rhetorical gloss as to why that should happen, makes a lot of sense.

AK: I mean, I also think that there are these individual cases that we can point to. There’s a lot of scrutiny of American Muslims for Palestine in particular, and they are, right now, battling an effort by the Virginia Attorney general to force them to disclose their donors as part of what seems to be a fishing expedition to figure out where their donors are coming from as a way to cripple them as an organization. They have also been repeatedly mentioned by House Republicans as being the puppet master behind the student protests. This is all based on a convoluted eight-degrees-of-separation type theory in which American Muslims for Palestine is an outgrowth of the Holy Land Foundation, which famously was convicted of providing material support to Hamas in a very, very, very contested case because they were sending humanitarian aid to Gaza groups that the government successfully proved (in a court, I should say) were linked to Hamas.

AK: So, I mean, there are all of these specific efforts that are going on that I think speak to the dangers of a Project Esther framework. But I also think that the ability to enact it on a mass scale depends on the ferocity of the student movement or the ferocity of the Palestine Solidarity movement. The encampments provided that opportunity for Republicans, but they didn’t have executive power. And so, the Biden administration did not take the opportunity to enact a far-reaching campaign of surveillance and repression that the right wing wanted. Democratic governors enacted their own form of repression, which relied on law enforcement crushing protests, but I think that response to the student encampments was different than what the Project Esther folks would have wanted. They want it to be far more far-reaching and really dismantle the ability of the Palestine Solidarity Movement to exist. We’re in a different moment now, unfortunately. The repression is really intense and seems to me to have been largely effective. I mean, the number of student protests have gone down. Of course, there is a very active movement, but the repression on campuses in particular seems to have worked. So I guess I’m saying that the opportunity could arise for a Project Esther-type agenda to be enacted by a right-wing administration, but I think it probably depends on conditions on the ground in the United States.

ES: Yeah, I mean, I hear what you’re saying about the power of the student movement being able to provoke more repression. At the same time, I think that the targeting of specific groups, sort of like the way Dylan was mentioning--of like, “We’re going after one group to try to make it toxic and also make it a test case”--doesn’t feel dependent upon whether or not there are active student protests in the spring semester. If I were the Trump administration, that’s a strategy I would want to try out, in part because they’re not wrong that the Democratic Party and progressive and liberal civil society have, historically, been reluctant to speak out for anti-Zionist organizations. And there has been an ambivalence about whether anti-Zionist politics should be vociferously protected by the First Amendment or not. It is a smart strategy on the part of the right to go after groups that haven’t always been defended by the rest of the democratic ecosystem. And if that succeeds, right, if we allow the administration to dismantle a group for ideological reasons, we have handed them precedent and power to do that to more groups.

ES: And Project Esther is really clear. It names the support network, and then it also names the broader infrastructure that supports those organizations: groups that have relationships with them, groups that fund them. And this was evident going back to this spring when the speaker of the House sent a letter to the Treasury Department asking for investigations into 20 organizations, and 10 of them were Palestinian rights movement organizations. So Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, among others. And then, the other 10 were funders: Open Society Foundation, Tides Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers. So that makes it so clear that the strategy of going after Palestine movement groups is both because Republicans have powerful allies in the Democratic Party--and the pro-Israel ecosystem who will support that and cooperate with it--and because it offers them an opportunity to go after their favorite targets. They’re, like, so conspiracy-brained that they’re like: We have to go after George Soros now. This is our time. But what that does also is it wraps in a much wider swathe of groups into being implicated. And so, this is really about going after Palestine activism on its own terms and as a tool for advancing a much broader repressive agenda of threatening educational institutions and really putting any civil society organization that disagrees with the Trump administration at risk. And so, it’s really important to vociferously stand up against this repression as soon as the administration tries it, both on its own terms and to stall their momentum and prevent the repression from spreading more widely.

DS: I think the only thing I’ll add is that I don’t know that we can say, at this point, that the repression on campuses has worked. I mean, I think that’s one interpretation of why campuses have seemed quieter this semester than they did last semester. But I think we also need to take into account the geopolitical context here and the overall arc of the movement, where in the spring, the push for a ceasefire was a broad-based social movement still, and there were indications that it might actually work; we might actually be able to achieve a ceasefire. Right? Biden’s talking about his red line in Rafah, and there was the election—which was a major inflection point and organizing opportunity, as the uncommitted movement proved. Now, ultimately, what ended up happening is that the Biden-Harris administration ignored it on the electoral front, potentially to their own demise electorally. And Israel blew through the US’s red line on Rafah and continued the genocide, and it became very clear that there was no lever on the Biden-Harris administration, especially after the election. So the campus fights are not totally about achieving a ceasefire in Gaza, right? They’re about disclosure, divestment, organizing to that end. But I don’t think that we can isolate them from the broader context here. And I think it’s too early to really assess what university policy changes or strategic or tactical approaches to repressing pro-Palestine expression have accomplished in the medium term, because I’m expecting the student organizing to continue. And we may, as a movement, have experienced a major setback (which I think we have), but the student movement’s not going anywhere.

MC: Yeah, I think this is a useful tension to think through. I also just want to go a little deeper into something that we’ve all gestured at a little bit, which is what this role of the Democratic opposition is going to be--quote, unquote “opposition,” you know, sometimes the Democratic collaboration--with some of these plans and what the repression might look like if the student movement does heat up again. And also just in general, these things that they’re already trying to do. I think we should talk about that through this nonprofit killer bill first. This is H.R. 9495, which is a bill that passed the House a couple of weeks ago that basically would allow the federal government to strip the tax-exempt status of nonprofits that are deemed to support terrorism. It’s obviously a bill that is very specifically in response to pro-Palestine movements because, specifically, it talks about this idea that groups are supporting terrorist organizations that are holding hostages. And so, it’s specifically a reference to Hamas and the hostages in that way.

MC: I think what’s interesting, is my understanding, is that when this bill first came to a vote in the spring, it actually had the support of the majority of Democrats in the House. And then, eventually, there was a lot more public outcry about it when it came back up for a vote in November because of the understanding of this context of an incoming Trump administration, and the fact that Trump could use it to basically target any of his political enemies, and that they would not have to document any evidence of, quote, unquote, “supporting terrorism” for the groups that it targets. And so, because of this change in context, a lot more Democrats were eventually convinced to drop their support for the bill. It ultimately passed the House, I believe, with only 15 Democrats voting for it.

MC: I think another note there is that there were some Jewish groups that usually either support these kinds of measures or stay out of them, that actually came out in opposition. So, I think the main denominations--conservative movement and reform movement organizations--ended up opposing this bill, and some other groups--I think, for example, some of the slightly soft, quote-unquote, “liberal Zionist” groups but ones that don’t usually put up that much opposition. I don’t know, Hadassah, Jewish Feminist Organization. That’s a very small example. But all these Jewish groups suddenly were opposing it that you might not normally expect to oppose it. And then, obviously, the ADL is still supporting as usual. But I think it’s just an interesting example of these dynamics that we are seeing, which is both that oftentimes, the Democrats are just going to go along with and support this stuff in general if they actually just think it’s targeting the Palestine movement, but also, there might be some opportunity to attract more opposition if it can be painted as a specifically Trumpist effort. And so, I’m just curious what you all make of this, and also, if anyone has thoughts on what’s next for the bill, now that it has passed the House and what its chances are in the Senate.

ES: So, I can speak to this a little bit. It was a really exciting and inspiring moment to see just an incredibly broad swathe both in the Jewish world--but also across civil society more broadly--how many groups mobilized to reject this bill out of hand. You know, self-interest is not nothing. But the rhetoric of national security and anti-terrorism has, in the past, been very potent, and it was really heartening to see so many groups, including in the Jewish community groups that have often showed up on the wrong side of IHRA fights, really explicitly saying: We don’t want this bill—we see what’s at stake for us in it. It is also worth saying that establishing a broad front against repression--getting as many actors aligned against administration overreach as possible--is going to be really important. In a lot of cases, what that is going to look like is talking about the rights that are being violated, talking about what is at stake for everyone in repressive efforts. It’s really important for everyone to get like a couple degrees braver than they’re accustomed to being, and that means really standing up for organizations on their own terms. If you can’t do that because your politics are too different from theirs, it means refraining from doing the throat-clearing about how much you don’t like whatever organization is being attacked. Like, if that’s the minimum that orgs can do—say: As much as I think JVP is a cancer on society, I still don’t think they should be dismantled by the feds--if that’s literally the only thing you can do, you should do that. But if at all possible, I think we need to stop fueling the rhetorical structures that enable anti-Zionist groups to be cast out of the circle of who is worth protecting and who counts. So, very cool to see liberal Zionist groups mobilizing. I particularly hope and encourage and request those same groups to hold fast and see through it when accusations of antisemitism get brought into the mix. It’s just really, really important to see through and call attention to the exploitation of concerns about antisemitism, and about war for terrorism, to undermine fundamental American rights to organize around our values and beliefs and, like, speak our minds and think for ourselves.

DS: But the question then becomes like—and I think we can assume that this bill in some version will pass just given the numbers in Congress—is what the response to that is going to be. And I’m worried that there are organizations that may make the calculation that it’s worth it to throw the Palestine movement under the bus in an attempt to shield themselves from being targeted by the administration. I think that there will be a concerted attempt to exploit that tension and those divisions. I’m not expecting a broad-based attack on movement organizations that might inspire some degree of solidarity between them. I’m expecting the opposite, which is that particular (and maybe particularly controversial) groups are targeted to split off the Palestine movement from the opposition coalition to the Trump administration and use it as a wedge. I think that’s really the challenge going forward, is: What are the contours of the coalition that we’re trying to hold together? And how do we solidify the bonds between the Palestine movement and the rest of the advocacy world? Because we know that it’s not going to work. You’re not going to appease the right just by kicking Palestine to the curb. And we know that because we know that Palestine is not exceptional. It’s not exceptional as an issue. It may be in the front pages right now, but it is broadly symbolic of a lot of the fights that we’re going to face down the road—including, and maybe especially, questions around immigration, which, regardless of what happens geopolitically in the Middle East, will continue to dominate the American political scene for the foreseeable future.

ES: I want to be clear: When I talk about the attacks expanding beyond the Palestine movement, it’s less about attacking everyone at once and more about understanding that, after the Palestine movement, anyone could be next. Reproductive justice groups have a lot of familiarity with operating in environments where the state government is trying to crush them. The Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta has been the target of a RICO investigation in a very similar way to the way that tactics might be deployed against Palestine protesters. Anti-pipeline, anti-fossil fuel protesters have also faced really severe repression.

ES: And so it’s more about not being certain who could be next and, I think, whether or not an attack is actually going to come for an organization. If they recognize their self-interest in preventing the possibility of it and that gets them active, that’s a good thing. I think one thing that is perhaps motivating for Jewish organizations is that Trump has been very, very clear over the years that he views any Jews that vote for Democrats as the wrong kind of Jews, as bad Jews, and as disloyal. And so, I think there is some recognition that if we start allowing the Trump administration to adjudicate who are the good permissible Jews and who are the bad Jews, that actually 70+% of American Jews fall on the wrong side of that. And that is not the same as actually facing raids on your offices or phones being tapped. And it’s still a very clear rationale for rejecting the kinds of attacks that are likely to emerge.

ES: And I just want to say that in a second Trump administration Project Esther environment, the way that we (and also liberals) think about, quote, unquote, “fighting antisemitism” is really going to have to shift, in part because the material stakes of calling someone out in public for doing tropes are about to go way up. It’s about to really endanger people to, like, accuse them of antisemitism in public. So, the model of, “We call antisemitism out wherever we see it!” is just not going to fly any longer. And that doesn’t mean that differences in how Jewish anti-Trump groups understand or want to approach antisemitism are going to go away. But it does mean that I think we have to really commit to having more conversations, conflicts, discussions about this stuff out of the public eye, just as a matter of keeping people safe.

MC: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s useful. It’s a useful caution. I think we’ve put a lot of stuff on the table here as to what things might look like going forward and what activists need to have in mind, so I really appreciate you guys being here. Thank you so much, Dylan, Emma, Alex; thanks to our listeners. I’m sure there will be many more conversations to come about this stuff, and we will be covering it here at Jewish Currents. You can subscribe to On the Nose. If you like this episode, you can leave us a review. Subscribe to Jewish Currents at JewishCurrents.org, and you can check out the work of Diaspora Alliance and Palestine Legal on their respective websites. So, thank you everybody.