Project Esther aims to criminalize Palestinian solidarity. This must strengthen our support for Gaza’s resistance.

There is only one path forward for the pro-Palestine movement: to defy the efforts at destroying our solidarity with the resistance, and build the united front that can break Zionism’s power. Every effort that the U.S. empire has made to recapture the movement, and to separate it from the resistance forces in Gaza, has had the aim of undermining that project. With the emergence of Project Esther, the Heritage Foundation’s effort to criminalize solidarity with Palestine, the message we’re getting from the state is that we’ll have to give up our solidarity to survive as a movement. But if we come to believe this, we’ll have already lost.

The woke right wants to cancel anyone who doesn’t denounce “terrorism,” and both wings of our ruling class are united in aiming to carry out this persecution effort. There will be liberal voices that urge us to comply, and to join in on denouncing the resistance for the supposed greater good. The state wants us to think that if we condemn the resistance and its actions, it will be worthwhile for the sake of keeping our orgs above-ground, allowing them to operate with more ease. This is the trap that the empire sets: getting its challengers to compromise for fear that if they stay principled, they’ll lose everything. But the only way we’ll lose everything is if we become anti-resistance, and thereby destroy our own ability to advance the struggle.

Of course, the imperial state’s laws prevent its citizens from having any ties with the orgs that this state calls terrorist groups. But these laws don’t prevent us from assisting the anti-occupation struggle in critical ways, and they won’t stop us even if a full crackdown gets imposed. As long as we’re advancing efforts at weakening the Zionist entity, whether that’s through informational warfare or through economic divestment campaigns, we will not be turning our backs on the Palestinian people. To do this effectively, though, we’ll need to refuse all pressure to condemn the liberation fight. Once an individual or organization does this, they’ve come to participate in the effort at isolating the Palestinians, and at dividing their movement from the outside.

The most damaging effect the “pro-Palestine, anti-Hamas” stance has is to help the occupier’s effort at separating Gaza from the West Bank. This is a key strategic goal that the occupier has been pursuing, at least as far back as when it entrapped Gaza in a giant barrier; the colonizers want the indigenous people to be fractured into two groups, with the more severely subjugated group being the one that gets vilified the most. As the entity has exterminated the people of Gaza, it’s gotten its puppets in the Palestinian Authority’s leadership to direct slanderous vitriol towards the Gaza resistance, thereby forsaking solidarity with Gaza’s people as a whole.

Within Palestine itself, this divide-and-conquer scheme depends on the silencing of the many West Bank residents who don’t share the PA’s ideology; the united front among the Palestinians cannot truly be crushed, because the West Bank’s people are themselves being subjected to gargantuan violence. The Palestinians have no choice but to unify against the occupier, because it’s not like the occupier will stop assaulting the West Bank’s people if they condemn Hamas; the ethnic cleansing and genocide against them will keep speeding up either way. The question is whether those with the power to undermine Washington’s assistance to the occupier will fill our role as allies, and not be intimidated into affirming the anti-resistance narratives. Because if we let these narratives keep defining the discourse, the empire will be able to continue the extermination with impunity.

The bulk of politically engaged young Americans already understand this reality that we can only support Palestine if we support the resistance; when asked which side they support, they’ve said they’re with the side that’s fighting the genocidal forces. More than anything, Project Esther is a reaction to this great rise in solidarity among Gen Z. Through its paranoid hunts for “terrorism supporters,” it aims to keep the average Gen Z-er from getting into positions of power; the only ones from Gen Z who our ruling class will let into its cultural and political institutions are the minority which still embrace the Zionist ideology.

To combat Project Esther, we need to recognize those examples of when a young person who’s compatible with Zionism gets elevated, even though they may seem to be on the side of our cause. One of these examples is the 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani, who as Michael Schirtzer concludes is ultimately a Zionist; Schirtzer’s argument is that if we pretend Zohran hasn’t articulated a Zionist stance, then we’ll embrace a reformism that can only hurt the movement:

A zionist is someone who believes in the continuation of the brutal settler colony known as Israel. Mamdani when pressed by sycophantic sellout Stephen Colbert, said “I believe Israel has a right to exist and a responsibility to uphold international law.” This is the guy zionists are freaking out about and threatening white flight over. Now comes the part where people “explain how politics works” to me. They say he “had to say that to get elected.” I know dummy that’s the problem. He’s still working to appease zionists. Is lying to your constituency because you know it’s what they want to hear, even if it’s not what you truly believe, the hallmark of a great leader? People don’t say about President Thomas Sankara, man he knew how to pander! Was President Fidel Castro’s appeal that he would bend over backward for whoever was in front of him? He wore military fatigues to the UN because he wasn’t someone who let outside pressure impact his feelings on the inside, his speeches, or his actions.

I don’t point this out because I want to ankle-bite Zohran; in fact, I have a type of hope for Zohran, because he’s run on a platform of having New York City divest from the Zionist entity. If this happens, it will inflict a gigantic material loss upon the occupier, and start off a wave of divestments across other U.S. cities. But to help ensure that this happens—and to keep up the movement’s momentum in case it doesn’t—we will need to hold Zohran accountable. We cannot let the Zohran campaign draw us into the Democratic Party, and we’ll need to hold Zohran to the standard he’s set for himself; the standard where he’s said he’ll actually divest.

We cannot accept anything short of divestment from the politicians who’ve promised it. Moreover, we must not let Zionism be redefined, and have it simply come to mean “when somebody outright expresses support for Jewish supremacy.” Zionism is not when somebody puts off bigoted vibes, it’s an ideology that says there should be a Jewish state in Palestine. There are plenty of Zionists who claim to be against ethnic supremacy, but who are still Jewish supremacists in practice; that’s what “supporting Israel’s right to exist” is always going to entail, because there can never be a version of “Israel” that’s not racist.

Most people in Gen Z understand this too, as it’s something you’d have to recognize in order to side with the resistance. The mass will to build a solidarity front with Palestine is there, which means that if we build it, we will be able to overcome the crackdown. With the backing of the people, a movement is going to carry on and prevail, even if it has to go underground before its triumph. The danger is that the pro-Palestine movement will be compromised by the Democratic Party and its NGOs, which seek to make “supporting Palestine” mean something other than supporting the actual liberation struggle. We must evade the pro-normalization, anti-resistance traps that the state has set for us, and face the menace of Project Esther rather than surrendering towards it.

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