“Shalom, Mahmoud,” the Trump White House declared last week on social media, celebrating the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia University. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Khalil at his doorstep as he returned home with his wife, eight months pregnant with their first child.
It took Khalil’s lawyers more than 24 hours to learn that he had been moved to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana operated by the private prison company GEO Group.
The motive for the arrest, however, wasn’t a mystery. Khalil was a lead spokesperson for Columbia’s student protests against Israel’s horrific war in Gaza. In recent weeks, pro-Israel advocates have been clamoring for the deportation of noncitizen student activists in the name of fighting antisemitism.
Last October, the Heritage Foundation included this recommendation in Project Esther, a set of strongarm policies to stifle the movement for Palestinian rights. Much like its better-known cousin Project 2025, Esther is an unabashedly authoritarian document. It calls on the Trump administration to “disrupt” and “degrade” pro-Palestinian advocacy using a variety of tactics lifted from the sordid history of McCarthyism in America. These range from the deportation of noncitizens to the levying of criminal and civil prosecution against activists, attacks on the nonprofit status of NGOs and liberal foundations, and public vilification campaigns against social justice leaders.
Khalil’s arrest, and the administration’s parallel efforts to defund and intimidate higher education institutions like Columbia in the name of fighting antisemitism, are lifted straight from the Project Esther playbook. And while student organizers such as Khalil and institutions like Columbia are the first target, they won’t be the last.
Upon Project Esther’s release, reporters noticed that there were few actual Jewish groups involved. Rather, it was backed mostly by a who’s who of conservative Christian groups, one of which, ironically, is named In Defense of Christians. Project Esther lamented that the American Jewish community “may be blind and deaf” or “in such disbelief that they cannot even acknowledge the threat.” Such accusations have been lobbed by Christians at Jews for centuries — only this time, instead of burning us at the stake for being “in disbelief,” they are claiming to fight on our behalf.
Project Esther is named after the heroine of the biblical Book of Esther, celebrated on the Jewish holiday of Purim, who uses her influence over an ancient Persian king to save the Jewish people from genocidal persecution. Indeed, one of the stranger unsettling facts of our time is that conservative Christians are pushing themselves to the front of the fight against antisemitism and claiming, in essence, to be better Jews than the Jews themselves.
“This is our moment, it is for this time that Christians, like Esther, have to stand up against these anti-Israel decrees,” Pastor Mario Bramnick, a leading figure behind Heritage’s initiative, stated last March while visiting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders on a delegation.
Their motives, however, are often less than altruistic. Most Christian Zionist leaders believe that support for Israel can help bring about the biblical end times, when Jesus will return and establish a global Christian dominion that leaves little room for Jewish, Muslim or any other faiths. “Israel is God’s end time clock,” proclaimed Pastor Bramnick in a sermon, “but it is also God’s end time glory.”
The right-wing Christian lobby group Family Research Council, one of the initial members of Heritage’s antisemitism task force, featured a speaker at last year’s annual conference who outlined a grim end times prediction in which two-thirds of world Jewry would die.
“God’s not done yet with Israel,” the speaker proclaimed, “and so we look forward to a massive number of Jewish people coming to faith in Yeshua, in Jesus.” Bramnick, too, once gave a speech calling on Christian Zionists to “embrace our Jewish brethren and tell them about the love of Messiah and the day that we are living in.”
Even while claiming to strenuously oppose antisemitism, many Christian Zionists seem perversely excited that its rise may be a harbinger of the Second Coming. Last summer, Luke Moon, another Heritage task force leader, helped organize a rally against antisemitism outside Columbia. The day before the rally, Sean Feucht, Moon’s co-organizer and a popular Christian musician, could barely contain his excitement. “We’re seeing this rise and this flood of antisemitism across the world — yes, these are the end days,” he told his followers in an Instagram livestream. “We’re one day closer to the return of Jesus, and as that ramps up, we’re going to see a rise … of hatred for the Jewish people.”
While Project Esther sets its sights on undergraduates, antisemitism continues to flourish on the right. Elon Musk and Steve Bannon are trying to turn the Nazi salute into an acceptable “ironic” public gesture for conservative leaders. In recent weeks, some of the country’s most popular podcasters — whose endorsements and platforms helped Trump win reelection — have hosted guests who promote antisemitic conspiracy theories, raising alarm even among conservative media leaders.
There certainly has been some genuine antisemitism at campus protests, even if more commonly the charge has been indiscriminately conflated with legitimate criticism of Israel or with brands of ultra-radicalism that sooner suggest political immaturity than anti-Jewish animus. But the richest person on the planet who is actively dismantling the federal government, or a podcaster with an audience in the tens of millions, hold much more power than any undergraduate or professor on a college campus. It is clear where the greater threat to Jewish safety lies.
When Trump declares “Shalom, Mahmoud” as he launches an attack on civil liberties, he may well fan the flames of the antisemitism he claims to combat. Recent polling shows support for Israel at historic lows across the American public, but powerful Christian Zionists — such as U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — stand ready to deepen American backing.
By putting a “kosher” label on their anti-democratic project, the Christian conservatives behind Project Esther can conveniently keep their own influence hidden from view. If this deflection ends up feeding the falsehood that a conspiracy of Jewish power lurks behind the scenes, then this rise in antisemitism is just further proof to their followers that the end times are near. Maybe that is precisely the point.
Ben Lorber is a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, focusing on white nationalism and antisemitism. He is the co-author of “Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism.”
