Esther

Part of a trio made up of Putellas and Aitana Bonmati, who both are two-time Ballon d’Or winners, Patri’s work at the base of Spain’s – and Barcelona’s – midfield often goes unnoticed.

But the 27-year-old “runs the show” according to Corsie, who added: “She’s the one… you see she starts everything, she controls the tempo, she chooses when they settle the game down.”

Spain boss Montse Tome said she believes Patri is the “best player in her position”.

“It’s not an easy position because it’s not well recognised from the outside and I believe her personality, she is humble, she is a hard worker and this means Aitana [Bonmati], Alexia [Putellas], Vicky [Lopez], Mariona [Caldentey] and [Claudia] Pina play more freely and Patri is key for that.”

Asked about Tome’s comments, Patri said: “I feel super happy and super proud knowing the coach said that about me.

“For the game model we have, midfielders have to participate because then everything flows and the team feels confident.”

As well as setting the pace and freeing up space for her team-mates, Patri proved she’s got an eye for goal, with a drilled finish giving Spain the lead against Italy.

Washington, DC – When the Heritage Foundation, a prominent right-wing think tank in the United States, released a playbook last year for how to destroy the Palestine solidarity movement, it did not garner much attention.

But more than eight months later, the policy document – known as Project Esther – now faces heightened scrutiny from activists and media outlets, in part because President Donald Trump appears to be following its blueprint.

The authors of Project Esther have presented their report as a set of recommendations for combating anti-Semitism, but critics say the document’s ultimate aim is to “poison” groups critical of Israel by painting them as Hamas associates.

Project Esther was created as a response to growing protests against the US support for Israel’s war on Gaza, which United Nations experts and rights groups have described as a genocide.

So, what is Project Esther, and how is it being applied against activists? Here is a look at the document and its ongoing implications for the US.

What is the Heritage Foundation?

The Heritage Foundation is an influential conservative think tank in Washington, DC, whose stated mission is to “formulate and promote public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense”.

Yet, critics argue that Project Esther calls for government interference to curb individual freedoms, including the rights to free speech and association when it comes to opposing Israeli government policies.

According to a New York Times report published earlier this month, the project is overseen by Victoria Coates, a vice president at the Heritage Foundation who served as deputy national security adviser during Trump’s first term.

The Heritage Foundation is also behind Project 2025, which critics describe as an authoritarian playbook for the second Trump presidency.

Ahead of the elections last year, Democrats repeatedly invoked Project 2025 to criticise Trump, but the then-candidate distanced himself from the document.

What does Project Esther aim to achieve?

The initiative says that it aims to “dismantle the infrastructure that sustains” what it calls the “Hamas Support Network” within 24 months.

What is the ‘Hamas Support Network’, according to Project Esther?

The authors claim that groups engaged in advocacy for Palestinian rights are members of the Hamas Support Network (HSN).

They define the supposed network as “people and organizations that are both directly and indirectly involved in furthering Hamas’s cause in contravention of American values and to the detriment of American citizens and America’s national security interests”.

In short, the document alleges that the “pro-Palestinian movement” is “effectively a terrorist support network”.

Does the ‘Hamas Support Network’ exist?

No.

There is no such network in the US, which has stern laws against providing material support to groups designated as “terrorist organisations”, including Hamas.

Beth Miller – the political director at Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a group that the Heritage Foundation names as part of the network – called Project Esther’s allegations “outlandish”.

“It exposes the length of lies and of absurdity that they are going through to try to tear down the Palestinian rights movement,” Miller told Al Jazeera.

The Heritage Foundation did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

How does Project Esther plan to take down the Palestinian rights movement?

The document calls for a multi-faceted campaign against supporters of Palestinian rights, targeting them legally, politically and financially.

The initiative outlines 19 goals that it labels as “desired effects”.

They include denying Palestinian rights supporters who are not US citizens access to universities, ensuring that social media platforms do not allow “anti-Semitic content”, and presenting evidence of “criminal activity” by Palestine advocates to the executive branch.

It also calls for refusing to grant permits for protests organised in support of Palestinian rights.

Project Esther suggests that Israel’s backers should conduct “legal, private research” into pro-Palestine groups to “uncover criminal wrongdoing” and undermine their credibility.

“We must wage lawfare,” it reads, referring to the tactic of using litigation to pressure opponents.

Is the Trump administration turning Project Esther recommendations into policy?

It appears to be the case.

“The phase we’re in now is starting to execute some of the lines of effort in terms of legislative, legal and financial penalties for what we consider to be material support for terrorism,” Coates told The New York Times.

Trump’s crackdown on college protests seems to align with what Project Esther is trying to achieve.

For example, the US administration has been revoking the visas of foreign students critical of Israel. This echoes a proposal in Project Esther, which calls for identifying students “in violation of student visa requirements”.

The Heritage Foundation also extensively cites Canary Mission – a website dedicated to doxxing and smearing pro-Palestine students – in its footnotes for Project Esther. The Trump administration is also suspected of relying on the website, along with other pro-Israel groups, to identify students for deportation.

In addition, Project Esther singles out the “Middle East/North Africa or Islamic studies” programmes as having professors who are “hostile to Israel”.

The Trump administration has been pressuring elite universities to revamp academic departments, including Middle East studies programmes, that it views as biased in favour of Palestinians. Columbia University, for instance, appointed a provost to review its programmes at Trump’s request, “starting immediately with the Middle East” department.

The White House did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

What groups does Project Esther name as targets?

The initiative explicitly identifies several Arab, Muslim and progressive Jewish organisations as well as student groups as part of the so-called Hamas Support Network.

The initiative claims that “the network revolves around” American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), an educational and civic advocacy group.

Osama Abuirshaid, AMP’s executive director, said Project Esther points the finger at the group because it has “Muslim” in its name, playing on Islamophobic bigotry.

“American Muslims for Palestine is an easy target. Given the Islamophobic tendencies, it’s easy to assume guilt of American Muslims, Palestinians. That’s a name that sticks,” Abuirshaid told Al Jazeera.

He added that the group is also a target because it is effective and has a “solid constituency”.

“If they can cripple and bring down AMP, that will have a chilling effect within the movement. So they think, if they can bring us down, other organisations will stop working on Palestine solidarity,” Abuirshaid said.

Why focus on universities?

Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a US policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank, said Project Esther targets universities because Israel is bleeding support among young people in the US.

“That’s why there’s such an overwhelming focus on universities and college campuses,” he told Al Jazeera’s The Take podcast.

Kenney-Shawa explained that support for Israel’s war on Gaza has been trending downwards across US demographics. But on college campuses, the change is more pronounced.

“While this change is absolutely across the political spectrum, it’s obviously a lot more acute in the left and among young Americans,” Kenney-Shawa said.

A recent poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 53 percent of US respondents had negative views of Israel, a number that rises to 71 percent among Democrats below the age of 50.

Is Project Esther working?

Advocates say that, in the immediate future, the crackdown on the Palestine solidarity movement threatens the safety and wellbeing of activists, especially foreign students. But it has also sparked a backlash.

“The extreme nature of these attacks has also emboldened people to defiantly continue to speak out in the face of these attacks,” JVP’s Miller said.

“And it has actually, in many cases, awoken people – who weren’t paying attention before – to the hypocrisy that has so long existed in the willingness to silence and censor Palestinian rights activists.”

Earlier in May, several right-wing lawmakers and Trump allies came out in opposition of a bill that aimed to expand restrictions on boycotts of Israel, citing free speech concerns.

Abuirshaid echoed Miller’s comments. He acknowledged that the media attacks, arrests and lawsuits against advocates and student protesters have been “distracting” from the mission of focusing on Palestine.

However, he added, “I’m going to be clear: It’s energising us to continue this fight.”

On October 7, 2024 – exactly one year into the United States-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip that has now killed more than 53,000 Palestinians – the Washington-based Heritage Foundation unleashed a policy paper titled Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.

The conservative think tank is the same force behind Project 2025, a blueprint for consolidating executive power in the US and forging the best-ever right-wing dystopia. The “national strategy” proposed by Project Esther – which is named for the biblical queen credited with saving the Jews from extermination in ancient Persia – basically consists of criminalising opposition to Israel’s current genocide and exterminating freedoms of speech and thought along with a whole lot of other rights.

The first “key takeaway” listed in the report is that “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement’ is part of a global Hamas Support Network (HSN)”. Never mind that, in reality, there is no such thing as a “global Hamas Support Network” – just as there is no such thing as the HSN’s alleged “affiliated Hamas Support Organizations (HSOs)” that the Heritage Foundation has also taken the liberty of inventing. Among these alleged HSOs are prominent American Jewish organisations such as Jewish Voice for Peace.

The second “key takeaway” of the report is that the so-called HSN is “supported by activists and funders dedicated to destroying capitalism and democracy” – a curious choice of terms, no doubt, from a think tank that is doing its best to eradicate what remains of US democracy as we speak.

The phrase “capitalism and democracy” appears no fewer than five times in the report – although it’s not quite clear what Hamas has to do with capitalism aside from governing a Palestinian territory that has for more than 19 months been on the receiving end of billions upon billions of dollars’ worth of US-funded military destruction. From the perspective of the arms industry, at least, genocide is capitalism at its best.

And as per the genocidal logic of Project Esther, protesting the mass slaughter of Palestinians is fundamentally anti-Semitic – hence the need to pursue the prescribed national strategy of “extirpating the influence of the HSN from our society”.

The October publication of the Heritage Foundation report occurred on the watch of President Joe Biden’s administration, which the think tank diagnosed as “decidedly anti-Israel” despite its complete and utter complicity in the genocide in Gaza. The report included many suggestions on how to “combat the scourge of antisemitism in the United States … when a willing Administration occupies the White House”.

Fast forward seven months, and a recent New York Times analysis indicates that, since US President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, “the White House and other Republicans have called for actions that appear to mirror more than half of Project Esther’s proposals”. These range from threats to withhold gargantuan sums of federal funding for US universities that refuse to silence resistance to systematic slaughter to efforts to deport legal US residents for the crime of expressing solidarity with Palestinians.

In addition to allegedly infiltrating US academia and disseminating “anti-Zionist narratives across universities, high schools, and elementary schools, often under the umbrella or within the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and similar Marxist ideology”, Project Esther’s authors contend that “the HSN and HSOs have mastered the use of America’s liberal media environment [and] are quick to gain attention for any and every demonstration, no matter how large or small, from every network across the country”.

And that’s not all: “The HSN and HSOs have made prolific and unchecked use of social media platforms, such as TikTok, across the entire digital ecosystem to spout antisemitic propaganda.”

To all of these ends, the policy paper offers a whole host of recommendations for how to stamp out the domestic pro-Palestine movement as well as humane and ethical attitudes in general: from purging “HSO-supporting faculty and staff” from educational institutions to making “potential demonstrators fear affiliation with HSOs” to banning “antisemitic content” from social media – which in Heritage Foundation jargon of course means anti-genocidal content.

And yet in spite of all of Project Esther’s ruckus over the ostensibly existential anti-Semitic threat posed by the HSN, it turns out that “no major Jewish organizations appear to have participated in drafting the plan, or publicly endorsed it since its release”, according to a December article in the Forward.

A news outlet catering to American Jews, the Forward reported that the Heritage Foundation had “struggled to attract Jewish supporters for its antisemitism plan, which appears to have been assembled by several evangelical Christian groups”, and that Project Esther “focuses exclusively on left-wing critics of Israel, ignoring the antisemitism problems from white supremacists and other far-right groups”.

Meanwhile, in an open letter published this month, influential American Jewish leaders warned that a “range of actors” in the US are currently “using a purported concern about Jewish safety as a cudgel to weaken higher education, due process, checks and balances, freedom of speech and the press”.

Now, if the Trump administration seems to be taking Project Esther and running with it, it is more out of concern for propagating a white Christian nationalist agenda that utilises Zionism and anti-Semitism charges to its own extremist ends. And this, unfortunately, is just the beginning of a far more elaborate project.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.