Counterinsurgency against U.S. social movements has evolved since the 1960s. What was once the exclusive domain of state agencies has now been privatized. This is seen perhaps most clearly in the ongoing campaign to neutralize the Palestine movement.
By the time DHS agents showed up at Mahmoud Khalil’s door, a full-spectrum campaign had already marked him as a target. Columbia professor Shai Davidai had posted Khalil’s name and image online, called him a terrorist, and urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio to deport him. The smear was picked up by a network of doxxing accounts like “Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus,” which publicly lobbied for the revocation of Khalil’s visa. Rubio repeated the call, Khalil received death threats, and the university stayed silent. Then, federal agents arrived. A professor’s tweet had become a trigger for federal enforcement. A tweet, a tag, a dossier — these were the new informant files. This time, professors, NGOs, and anonymous social media accounts were the new operators.
This episode captures a defining feature of our current conjuncture: counterinsurgency is no longer the exclusive domain of state intelligence agencies. It has been privatized, digitized, and reframed as “civic action,” with Zionist nonprofits, right-wing law firms, and data-harvesting platforms organizing in concert with universities and police departments to neutralize Palestine organizing.
Though today’s tactics may look different, they reflect a familiar story. The FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was a covert program aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations deemed subversive. It is often remembered for its attacks on civil rights and Black liberation movements, but was also part of a broader Cold War strategy to suppress anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, and internationalist movements in the U.S, especially among youth.
Today, COINTELPRO’s framework has been rescripted in Project Esther, an initiative launched by the Heritage Foundation in October 2024 that frames pro-Palestinian advocacy as “terrorism” and seeks to dismantle the broader left by branding critics of Zionism as threats to national security. It calls for purging universities, defunding institutions, deporting foreign students, and weaponizing law enforcement to suppress dissent. Though marketed as an anti-antisemitism strategy, it ignores right-wing antisemitism and recycles antisemitic conspiracy theories in the service of political repression.
Thus, while these tactics may appear new, putting COINTELPRO and Project Esther in conversation reveals a continuity of structure and intent, especially vis-à-vis the targeting of solidarity with movements abroad as a threat to national coherence. While COINTELPRO relied on federal secrecy and classified directives, today’s repression develops through public-private coordination, open-source surveillance, and layers of plausible deniability. The outcome is a more privatized, legally ambiguous, and digitally mediated mode of disruption that launders the violence of the state through university codes, NGO reports, and data-mining activism.
This piece traces the throughlines between then and now — not to flatten their differences, but to expose the structural consistency of U.S. counterinsurgency across decades and geographies, and to show how it has adapted to new legal regimes, digital technologies, and ideological terrains. In doing so, it frames history not as a mirror, but as a weapon that reveals patterns, clarifies stakes, and helps us chart a way through.
COINTELPRO’s campus war
On February 21, 1967, the FBI sent a memorandum to all of its field offices, directing agents to enhance their counterintelligence capabilities at colleges and universities. From the late 1960s through the 1970s, university campuses became central sites of COINTELPRO operations designed to neutralize leftist campus politics. Identified as incubators of revolutionary consciousness, universities were surveilled, infiltrated, and manipulated by the FBI. At UCLA, the agency’s covert efforts to inflame tensions between the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the rival U.S. Organization culminated in the 1969 assassination of Panthers Bunchy Carter and John Huggins. The suppression of radical student alliances, particularly those linking local racial justice demands with global liberation movements, became a template for future state efforts to fragment and delegitimize youth-led political coalitions.
COINTELPRO aggressively tried to infiltrate, discredit, and destroy the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had grown into one of the most radical and influential youth organizations in the U.S. As SNCC aligned itself with Black Power ideologies and international liberation movements, U.S. intelligence agencies became increasingly alarmed. Amid concerns that SNCC might attend the 1965 World Youth Festival in Algiers, NSA staff proposed creating a private group to counter their potential impact.1 To destabilize SNCC from within, the FBI exploited tensions within SNCC’s leadership, pacified key figures through legal pressure, and sent forged letters to donors and community leaders, aiming to cut off financial support and damage the organization’s credibility.
COINTELPRO also sought to sow division between groups. To capitalize on tension between the Panthers and SNCC, the FBI circulated a fake memo with text that reads, “According to zoologists, the main difference between a panther and other large cats is that the panther has the smallest head.”2 The FBI memo goes on to say that “[The statement] is biologically true. Publicity to this effect might help neutralize Black Panther recruiting efforts.” In 1968, the FBI began telling informants that Stokely Carmichael, a prominent SNCC leader who would later change his name to Kwame Ture, was a CIA informant and to spread the message accordingly. In one incident, FBI agents posing as concerned friends called Carmichael’s mother to inform her that Panther members wanted to kill him and that he needed to go into hiding. The decisive split between the groups was solidified by September 1970, when Huey Newton publicly announced that “We…charge that Stokely Carmichael is operating as an agent of the CIA.”
Counterinsurgent invocations of antisemitism against Black radicals grew after SNCC became the first major Black organization to publicly adopt an anti-Zionist line. The FBI frequently accused SNCC and the Black Panthers of antisemitism to destroy their reputation among liberal sympathizers. The New York Office of the FBI proposed targeting Rabbi Meir Kahane, leader of the Jewish Defense League, as the recipient of a fabricated letter from a supposed older Black veteran whose son had joined the Panthers. The letter falsely claimed the son and other Panthers planned to bomb Jewish stores and spread antisemitic propaganda in churches. The goal was to manipulate Kahane, whose media connections could amplify the disinformation, and incite him to act against the Panthers. The FBI planned to follow up with staged “evidence” like Panther publications and photographs to further bait Kahane into a confrontation. Kahane, a former member of the fascist-aligned Betar youth movement and ideological forefather to Israeli politicians like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, led groups (Kach and Kahane Chai) that remained on the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organization list for decades without a single prosecution — until they were quietly delisted in 2022, just ahead of Ben-Gvir’s rise to power.
The New Left’s presence on college campuses made groups like SDS another prime target of COINTELPRO operations. As it holds today, Columbia’s visibility, location, and history put the campus at the forefront of both rebellion and repression. Columbia SDS emerged as the most influential student chapter in the country, playing a central role in the 1968 campus uprising that challenged university complicity with the Vietnam War and its occupation of Harlem. In response, the FBI launched a coordinated disinformation campaign to disrupt organizing and isolate student radicals from their families and communities. Field offices were directed to disseminate forged materials anonymously, taking “all necessary steps…to protect the Bureau as its source.” One fake letter, sent to the parents of students arrested during the 1968 Columbia uprising and signed “father of a ‘busted’ ex-student,” encouraged recipients to cut ties with SDS: “It’s your child and your money. Help throw SDS off the campus.” Another forged postcard advertised a fake event: “Attend the Cultural Bag of the Year—1968 SDS Crap Out. Do your thing. Bring your own grass, pot, whatever. Extra: Meet and gas with Mark Rudd!” These hoaxes aimed to discredit the movement through crude caricature, sow confusion among student ranks, and stoke moral panic among middle-class families already rattled by their children’s radicalism. Through psychological operations and manipulation of public perception, the state sought both to dismantle SDS and delegitimize the broader student movement at its most explosive and visible node.
Yet even at the peak of its campaign, the Bureau recognized that its grip on campus life was incomplete. “In the recent past,” one report acknowledged, “informant coverage of New Left organizations, particularly SDS, has been limited to off-campus informants and sources.” Most on-campus sources were “limited to various college officials who cooperated with this Bureau.” The lack of direct access to student organizers posed a strategic roadblock. “The penetration of SDS chapters by high-quality informants who are in a position to report on the plans of student activists remains a different problem,” the memo continued.
In response, the Bureau leaned even more heavily into counterintelligence like anonymous letters, fake publications, hoaxes, and provocations designed to provoke schisms and disillusionment. “The institution of instant counterintelligence programs,” one report notes, combined with “the certain disavowal of the New Left on the part of the vast majority of college students and officials,” was expected to increase informant access and turn the tide of campus sentiment. When direct infiltration fell short, the FBI relied on disinformation and sabotage to shape outcomes.
Though campus-based counterinsurgency during the COINTELPRO era focused largely on the Black liberation struggle and the New Left, it also laid the foundation for the surveillance of internationalist movements that would heighten in the following decade. As the state pivoted to confront new forms of dissent shaped by anti-colonial and anti-Zionist politics, its counterintelligence strategies adapted, expanding beyond Black, Puerto Rican, Indigenous, and New Left radicals to include Arab and Palestinian organizers.
The long arm of anti-Palestinian repression
The aftermath of the 1967 war marked a turning point in the surveillance of Arab American political activity. As Palestinians and other Arabs in the diaspora began organizing more visibly in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, they became immediate targets of federal surveillance. While Black, Puerto Rican, and Indigenous radicals had long been monitored under COINTELPRO, the state repression of Arab activists post-1967 added a layer of anti-Palestinian racism and Cold War geopolitics fused to conflate Arab dissent with foreign subversion.
In the early 1970s, the Nixon administration launched Operation Boulder, a coordinated campaign of surveillance, interrogation, and intimidation targeting Arabs and Arab Americans, particularly students, under the guise of national security. While publicly framed as a response to the events in Munich in 1972, Boulder had roots in a longer history of repression that began years earlier, driven by Zionist lobbying in the wake of 1967.
Surveillance of Arab students began in earnest after Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. That same year, the FBI began monitoring the Organization of Arab Students (OAS) and the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG). Flagging student support for Palestinian resistance and Third World anti-imperialist movements as cause for alarm, Congress member Gerald Ford stoked fears of “Peking-trained agitators from the Middle East.” The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) played a leading role in this counterinsurgency, often infiltrating the OAS conventions and meetings. One ADL intelligence report concedes that “The political activity of the Arab students in the United States will increase significantly in the coming school year (1969–70) with increasing effectiveness. They are beginning to display a much greater understanding of how to present their arguments to the various levels of the American public…and any successes are certain to increase their confidence and, hence, their activity.” As Arab organizers became more visible, the state’s response shifted from observation to preemptive disruption. The fact that Arab student politics were becoming more legible, compelling, and harder to dismiss provoked immense fear amongst intelligence agencies.
Although both the CIA and FBI fell short on evidence, they continued to frame the OAS as a conduit for “fedayeen propaganda,” warning that their political organizing could accelerate. This speculative threat justified placing Arab students under the scope of COINTELPRO. By 1970, “potential Arab saboteurs” were officially added to the program’s targets, citing potential for future violence as grounds for surveillance.
As the surveillance of Arab political activity escalated with COINTELPRO, Operation Boulder operationalized this intelligence framework into a formalized immigration enforcement campaign. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began systematically interrogating thousands of Arab students under the pretense of checking visa compliance. They routinely asked invasive questions about political views, factional affiliation, and opinions on Zionism. Some were searched, surveilled, or referred to the FBI. Minor visa infractions, typically ignored for other students, became grounds for deportation if the student expressed pro-Palestinian sentiments. This repression was often carried out in coordination with Israeli intelligence and Zionist organizations, a long-term partnership that continues to this day.
In tandem with state repression, far-right Zionist organizations attempted to physically intimidate and silence Palestinian organizing. Most notably, the Jewish Defense League (JDL) carried out a campaign of bombings and harassment throughout the 1970s and 1980s, targeting Arab American individuals and institutions across Los Angeles. These included the 1972 bombing of Palestinian immigrant Mohammed Shaath’s apartment, attacks on the Lebanese consulate, and the 1985 assassination of Alex Odeh, the West Coast director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), killed by a pipe bomb at his Santa Ana office. Despite strong suspicion of JDL involvement and public statements of support for the attacks by its leader, Irv Rubin, none of this vigilante violence was ever prosecuted.
In the 1980s and 1990s, this repression expanded beyond individual targets into broader Palestinian communities. The Los Angeles 8 — a group of seven Palestinians and one Kenyan arrested in 1987 — were long-term residents and community organizers in Southern California. They were initially charged under the McCarran-Walter Act with “promoting world communism,” based on their alleged support for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). After successfully challenging these charges on constitutional grounds, the government pivoted to using immigration and anti-terrorism laws to continue pursuing them. At the same time, the Reagan administration proposed secret concentration camps to detain tens of thousands of Arabs in a hypothetical “national emergency.”
One of the lesser-known FBI operations during this era was Operation Vulgar Betrayal, which focused on Bridgeview, Illinois, a predominantly Palestinian suburb outside of Chicago. Launched in the early 1990s and running for over a decade, the operation subjected mosques, community centers, and individuals to extreme FBI surveillance, often with no publicly stated basis beyond vague claims of “terrorism financing.” A central target was Muhammad Salah, a Palestinian Bridgeview resident, who in 1993 became the first U.S. citizen placed on a terrorist watchlist. He was later the first U.S. citizen designated as a Specially Designated National (SDN) by the Treasury Department, a designation that was ultimately withdrawn following a legal challenge.
After the signing of the Oslo Accords, the FBI began to monitor and wiretap conversations of members of the Palestine Committee in the U.S., a network of Palestinians engaged in Islamic political organizing and community work, which, at the time, operated legally within the U.S. and predated the State Department’s formal terrorist designation system. When the Palestine Committee held a three-day meeting in Philadelphia later that year, the FBI placed wiretaps inside the Marriott hotel and later introduced these transcripts as evidence during the Holy Land Five trials in 2007 and 2008.
During this period, federal agencies increasingly collaborated with private actors and entities engaged in surveillance and ideological warfare against Palestinian and Muslim communities. Chief among them was Steve Emerson, a self-styled terrorism expert and founder of the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT). Emerson played a pivotal role in the 1990s targeting of the Palestine Committee and Sami al-Arian and has continued to work as a key purveyor of Islamophobic disinformation. In recent years, his operations have come under renewed scrutiny. In 2021, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) revealed that multiple individuals had been paid by Emerson and IPT to infiltrate Muslim organizations and secretly record prominent community leaders, one of whom was compensated over $100,000 across four years.
This counterinsurgency was soon followed by far-reaching legislation designed to criminalize support for Palestinian political groups and factions. Although the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act initially limited “material support” to traditional forms like money and arms, the 2001 PATRIOT Act greatly expanded this to include vague categories such as “expert advice” and “personnel.” The Supreme Court upheld this expansion in the 2010 decision Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, effectively criminalizing any advocacy in coordination with blacklisted groups. These laws have been used to target groups like Hamas, the PFLP, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—notably in the cases of Sami al-Arian and the Holy Land Foundation Five, whose leaders were imprisoned amid secretive and politically charged trials.
The state’s surveillance and repression of anti-imperialist Arab and Palestinian political work, which gained traction in the wake of 1967 and expanded through operations like Boulder and Vulgar Betrayal, laid the foundations for what would become the post-9/11 security state. These earlier campaigns combined immigration enforcement, domestic intelligence, and foreign policy interests to proactively target political dissent. After 9/11, these tools were revived and vastly intensified. Practices that had once been exceptional or covert became normalized and institutionalized, as the program of campus surveillance and political suppression was reactivated under the mandate of counterterrorism. The War on Terror should be understood as a continuation of the domestic warfare of COINTELPRO, inheriting its toolkit and applying it with broader reach, deeper coordination, and the legitimizing language of national security.
The War on Terror period
U.S. intelligence agencies have long exploited university resources, global reach, and access to young people. During the height of COINTELPRO, FBI and CIA operatives surveilled foreign students, monitored leftist faculty, and infiltrated student organizations. Church Committee hearings in the 1970s exposed the scale of these operations, with hundreds of university personnel found to be collaborating with the CIA, some knowingly, many under the pretense of “national interest.”
Though the public exposure of these programs temporarily forced agencies to scale back their operations, the groundwork remained largely intact. In the years following September 11, 2001, U.S. intelligence agencies strengthened their presence on college campuses, reinstating Cold War and COINTELPRO-era tactics under the banner of counterterrorism. However, unlike previous decades, when such action often sparked public scandal or internal pushback, the post-9/11 period saw the university increasingly reimagined as a willing partner in the project of domestic national security. Administrators formalized liaisons with intelligence and law enforcement agencies, launched degree programs in security, and competed for federal designations as “centers of excellence” in intelligence, cyber-operations, and surveillance technology. Entire research labs were devoted to government-funded projects with classified components, often hosted off-campus in facilities shielded from public scrutiny.
In short, what changed after 9/11 was not so much the tactics but the terms of cooperation. Where there was once scandal and subterfuge, there is now formal partnership. Surveillance is no longer framed as exceptional, but as responsible management of an uncertain world.
The NYPD’s infiltration of Muslim Student Associations (MSAs) across New York City illustrates a staggering expansion of this kind of surveillance into academic life. On the basis of “public safety,” the NYPD’s Intelligence Division, through its Cyber Intelligence, Demographics, and Terrorist Interdiction Units, undertook a dragnet surveillance program that treated religious identity itself as inherently suspicious. Between 2002 and the early 2010s, MSAs on at least 31 campuses were subjected to systemic surveillance, including the deployment of undercover officers, cyber monitoring, and the coercive recruitment of informants. Public campuses under the City University of New York (CUNY) system were a primary focus. These schools, often serving low-income and immigrant students, became saturated sites of observation, where ordinary student activities were reinterpreted through the lens of state paranoia. Accordingly, the NYPD logged paintball trips as paramilitary training exercises and religious expression, such as prayer or wearing a hijab, as radicalization indicators in government databases.
The NYPD’s Cyber Intelligence Unit routinely monitored chat rooms, blogs, email listservs, and Yahoo groups, tracking content and interpersonal connections. In one case, an NYPD informant embedded himself so deeply in MSA activities that he slept over at fellow students’ homes, prayed with them, and was entrusted with spiritual guidance, only to be later revealed as an informant whose original recruitment stemmed from a minor drug charge. For many students, especially those from immigrant families for whom higher education represented opportunity and upward mobility, the risk of being labeled a suspect was enough to retreat entirely from campus life.
Project Esther and the rise of civic counterinsurgency
While government agencies have long surveilled and repressed dissent on campuses, today’s moment marks an evolution in the form of a network of privatized and semi-autonomous actors engaging in what could be called civic counterinsurgency.
A rhizomatic anti-antisemitism industry emerged in the 2010s, composed of groups like Canary Mission, Betar USA, StopAntisemitism.org, JewBelong, and other donor-funded watchdogs and legal outfits. These organizations share a common objective of criminalizing and delegitimizing Palestine solidarity activism by portraying it as foreign-backed, antisemitic, and dangerous. They comb through social media, compile anonymous dossiers, and collaborate with law enforcement to surveil and suppress Palestine organizing, especially on campuses. Whereas the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) once served as the primary arbiter of acceptable political speech on these issues, that role has increasingly been assumed by this diffuse network of private actors engaged in a broader project of civic repression.
The civic counterinsurgency model makes this repression harder to trace. We now see students surveilled, harassed, and disciplined not only by the state but by an entire ecosystem of privatized enforcers who disguise their repression using the language of safety, civility, and anti-extremism.
Project Esther represents the newest cornerstone of the anti-antisemitism industry. Created by the Heritage Foundation, Project Esther declares its mission as identifying and dismantling what it calls a “highly organized, global Hamas Support Network (HSN).” This network, as they define it, includes “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 Project Esther’s framework, the HSN is both antisemitic and fundamentally “anti-American.” The threat is framed in explicitly civilizational terms. “For al-Qaeda and all others of their ilk, including Hamas,” its founding document declares, “there is never any distinction between the West, the United States and Christians, and Israel and Jews: all are targets.” From this premise follows the conclusion that “Project Esther cannot be a solely ‘Jewish’ effort — it must be an American effort.” This represents a notable shift from earlier iterations of anti-Palestine solidarity groups such as Canary Mission and others, which were largely assumed to be rooted within Jewish community networks. Project Esther, by contrast, explicitly frames itself as a broad national initiative, distancing itself from being solely a Jewish communal project and openly embracing a broader right-wing coalition.
Project Esther relies on digital monitoring, facial recognition, AI-assisted data mining, and social media scraping to map associations between individuals, organizations, and actions. It uses behavioral modeling and predictive policing to repress resistance before it can coalesce. Surveillance is not limited to public behavior; it includes the collection of social media posts, protest footage, travel records, and group chats. These data are shared among campus police, university administrations, the Department of Homeland Security, and private security firms, creating a vertically integrated surveillance network.
Fracturing the movement from within is central to Project Esther’s strategy. Drawing directly from counterinsurgency manuals, it aims to sow distrust among organizations, isolate so-called “radicals,” and generate internal divisions. As its founding document plainly states, the goal is to ensure that “HSOs do not trust each other.” This also indicates their clear knowledge that they are fabricating a narrative, as it would be far more challenging to foster such distrust among actual, closely knit organizations. In the wake of high-profile incidents like the Elias Rodriguez case, federal agencies are likely monitoring how groups respond and flagging differences in tone or language as indicators of political fault lines to exploit.
Infiltration is a reality that cannot be ignored at this stage of the struggle. Student organizations have been secretly recorded and leaked to administrators and the police. In some instances, internal organizing materials have been circulated to media outlets within hours. In one leaked recording from a closed-door briefing, Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL admits that “Our analysts are in their groups,” he said, referencing SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace. Beyond collecting intelligence, these tactics are meant to sow distrust and stall momentum.
At the University of Michigan, the privatization counterinsurgency has enabled a new level of invasive, targeted repression against Palestine solidarity organizers. Between 2023 and 2025, the university spent over $3 million contracting a private security firm, City Shield, to infiltrate and monitor pro-Palestinian student groups. Undercover agents followed students across campus and into their neighborhoods, recorded them without consent, and in some cases faked disabilities or staged confrontations to provoke them. Surveillance footage collected by these agents was shared with law enforcement and used by the university in disciplinary proceedings. Multiple students were charged, some jailed, and at least one was sentenced based on City Shield’s fabricated or unverified claims.
Legal repression forms another core component of Project Esther’s strategy. Project Esther advocates the use of racketeering statutes (RICO), the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), material support for terrorism laws, and selective enforcement of immigration law to target individuals and organizations associated with Palestine solidarity work. In particular, the initiative supports stripping tax-exempt status from nonprofit organizations deemed sympathetic to Palestinian liberation, an effort sometimes referred to as the “Nonprofit Killer Bill.”
These legal tools are most aggressively used against non-citizens, as we have seen with the attempted targeted deportation of pro-Palestinian students based on political activity. The political function of Project Esther becomes even clearer when read alongside efforts by Republican attorneys general to investigate or revoke the visas of international students protesting the genocide in Gaza.
This legal repression works in conjunction with discursive maneuvers that cast Palestine solidarity as a national security threat. In 2024, right-wing think tanks and Zionist legal groups launched a coordinated campaign to discredit National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), accusing the organization of supporting terrorism and acting as an agent of a foreign power. These claims, heavily promoted by the Middle East Forum, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), and the Capital Research Center, try to materially connect the activities of SJP chapters to those of the Axis of Resistance, mainly Hamas. The aforementioned ADL leak alleges “a dramatic change in the language” in the rhetoric of student organizers, leading Greenblatt to the assertion that “something is happening with Iran,” whose “language and tactics seem to be bleeding into the American activist space.” These allegations operate less as claims of fact than as instruments of suspicion that racialize and securitize dissent by associating it with an external “enemy.”
Much like COINTELPRO leveraged Cold War anti-communism, Project Esther uses the pretext of “foreign influence” to criminalize anti-imperialist organizing. Anti-communism has long served as an ideological framework and a rationale for the disruption of networks connecting radicals in the imperial core to the Global South. The American Indian Movement, the Young Lords, Brown Berets, SDS, SNCC, and the Black Panther Party were viewed as domestic threats specifically because they called U.S. sovereignty into question. Today’s rhetorical assault on NSJP invokes this equation of international solidarity with subversion, only now, Islamophobia and anti-terrorism are the primary vectors of legitimacy.
The central allegation is that NSJP was founded by American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), a U.S.-based nonprofit that has long been subjected to Zionist lawfare for its advocacy. Critics of NSJP point to the fact that AMP’s founders were previously involved in organizations like the Holy Land Foundation and KindHearts, charities that were dismantled through protracted legal campaigns in the post-9/11 era after being accused of funneling money to Hamas. The attempt to tie AMP and NSJP to Hamas relies on tenuous connections — shared individuals, decades-old affiliations, ideological opposition to Israeli state policy, and speculative legal theories.
Some of the more extreme claims suggest that Hamas provided advance notice of the October 7 attack to NSJP, an assertion so blatantly absurd that it exemplifies absolute impunity from truth. Given the extreme secrecy surrounding the operation, which was deliberately concealed even from key Axis of Resistance partners and other Hamas bureaus, the notion that such sensitive information would be shared with a U.S. student organization is entirely illogical and ludicrous.
Columbia University: a case study in converging crackdowns
During the 2024–2025 school year, Columbia University’s Palestine student movement faced intensified repression across physical, legal, and digital fronts. Social media platforms, acting as privatized arms of state surveillance, began systematically shutting down key nodes of communication: Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine’s Instagram account, with over 100,000 followers, was banned by Meta; the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) account was disabled ahead of a planned protest at Barnard; and the Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition’s account was removed without warning in May 2025. These synchronized takedowns point to a pattern in which corporate platforms function as algorithmic enforcers of political orthodoxy, responding to pressure campaigns from alumni, donors, and Zionist NGOs embedded in the anti-antisemitism industry.
This digital censorship was shaped by direct intervention from Jordana Cutler, Meta’s policy chief for Israel and a former senior Israeli government official, who has used her position to push for the removal of pro-Palestinian content under Meta’s “Dangerous Organizations and Individuals” policy. Cutler, who has publicly described herself as “a voice of the [Israeli] government” within the company, personifies the merging of platform governance and foreign policy interests that operate through byzantine, asymmetrical mechanisms. While Israelis are granted a dedicated liaison within Meta, no such representation exists for Palestinians.
The Columbia administration created the Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) at the start of the 2024-25 academic year as a separate channel for handling discrimination and harassment complaints that bypasses standard student conduct procedures. Under an expansive interpretation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the office treats generalized criticism of Zionism as “discriminatory harassment.” Dozens of students have been targeted through secretive proceedings initiated by anonymous complaints submitted via a public web portal. Columbia students familiar with the OIE report that the office frequently relies on complaints submitted by Zionist student groups or ideologically aligned individuals elsewhere in the university. Upon being notified they are under investigation, students are required to sign restrictive non-disclosure agreements to view the unredacted evidence against them. Former prosecutors staff the OIE and operate with little transparency or due process, enabling provisional punishments such as suspension or diploma holds even before any finding of misconduct. Students can also be punished for “failure to report” perceived discrimination.
On March 7, 2025, the U.S. Departments of Justice, Education, Health and Human Services, and the General Services Administration jointly announced the termination of nearly $400 million in federal contracts and grants to Columbia. The order was issued by the Trump administration’s newly formed Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, a multi-agency body with broad enforcement authority. Officials emphasized this was only the “first round” of revocations and floated the possibility of placing Columbia under a federal consent decree. University officials quickly passed the consequences down the line: over 180 employees whose positions relied on federal funds were laid off, which redirected public anger toward student organizers rather than the federal agencies and political actors engineering the crackdown. This redirection is a hallmark of counterinsurgency that seeks to fracture solidarity, isolate the movement, and mystify the source of repression.
The counterinsurgency campaign extended beyond Columbia’s institutional sphere to target individual students, with Mahmoud Khalil emerging as the public face of this crackdown. In January 2025, Canary Mission, an anonymous blacklist site reportedly linked to Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, created a profile on Khalil. Within days, Betar USA publicly named him as a deportation target and claimed to have shared his information with ICE. After a March 5 protest at Barnard, Columbia Business School professor Shai Davidai tagged Senator Marco Rubio in a tweet demanding Khalil’s deportation: “Illegally taking over a college in which you are not even enrolled and distributing terrorist propaganda should be a deportable offense, no? Because that’s what Mahmoud Khalil from @ColumbiaSJP did yesterday at @BarnardCollege.” The claim was false. Khalil is not a member of Columbia SJP, and Columbia SJP had no role in organizing the protest. However, it circulated widely and helped catalyze a broader smear campaign. The day before ICE detained him, with assistance from Columbia’s administration, Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus picked up Davidai’s framing on X. The sequence of events suggests a coordinated effort between federal agencies, online Zionist advocacy groups, and university collaborators to orchestrate Khalil’s targeting. On May 29, his legal team filed a FOIA request seeking records of communications between the Trump administration and figures in the anti-antisemitism industry, including Canary Mission, Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus, and affiliated individuals.
In early 2025, the Department of Justice launched a sweeping investigation into CUAD and affiliated student organizers. Led by Trump appointee Emil Bove III, the probe sought membership lists, Instagram data, and explored coordination with ICE. A federal judge twice rejected search warrant requests, citing constitutional concerns. Nevertheless, the Department of Justice continues to press its case.
On April 11, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a sealed motion asking the Southern District of New York to override a magistrate judge’s denial of a search warrant targeting the Instagram account @cuapartheiddivest. Prosecutors argued that a March 14 post from the account constituted a criminal violation of 18 U.S.C. § 875(c), which prohibits interstate threats to injure.
The post featured a photo of Columbia President Katrina Armstrong’s residence marked with red paint, graffiti reading “FREE THEM ALL,” and a black inverted triangle. Its caption read in part: “The Columbia President’s mansion has been redecorated…Katrina Armstrong you will not be allowed peace as you sic NYPD officers and ICE agents on your own students for opposing the genocide of the Palestinian people.”
According to the DOJ, the post met the legal threshold for a “true threat” and was not protected by the First Amendment. Prosecutors claimed there was “probable cause to believe” the post was made “with the intent to place the administrator in fear of bodily harm.”
Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn had rejected three iterations of the warrant, ruling that the post likely constituted protected political speech. In its appeal, the DOJ faulted Netburn for narrowing her analysis to “the statement ‘you will not be allowed peace’ and the inverted triangle,” arguing she ignored the “full context” of CUAD’s rhetoric and actions. The filing reads: “An email reading simply ‘we plan to visit you soon’ has one meaning if the sender is a door-to-door sales agency, and quite another if it is the Ku Klux Klan.”
The DOJ is now asking District Judge John Koeltl to find the denial “clearly erroneous” or to issue the warrant directly. If granted, Meta would be compelled to hand over account data for @cuapartheiddivest. A ruling is pending.
On May 7, 2025, 81 students and community members were arrested by the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group after establishing the Basel al-Araj Popular University inside Columbia University’s Butler Library. In the days following the protest, Senator Marco Rubio called for a full review of the visa status of all students involved. Shortly after, the Columbia administration escalated its response, sending a questionnaire to students facing disciplinary action. The questionnaire asked pointed questions like, “How did you become aware of the planned demonstration?” “Did you make a conscious decision to remain in the room after being instructed to disperse? Please explain.” and “Did you bring any materials related to the protest on May 7, 2025 (e.g., banners, stickers, drums, megaphones) into the library? If yes, what materials did you bring, and how did you obtain these materials?” This line of questioning shows the administration’s effort to punish the students while also mapping political networks, assessing intent, and preempting future mobilizations.
The convergence of state power and civil society proxies—university boards, tech platforms, media outlets, philanthropic foundations, donor-funded lawfare groups, consulting firms, and think tanks—brings to the fore counterinsurgency’s privatization. These forces are not only parallel but increasingly coordinated, as universities have hired private security, devised new codes of conduct, and shared student data with law enforcement. The anti-antisemitism industry has become a vehicle for ideological enforcement through financial coercion, reputational sabotage, and lawfare. In this feedback loop, civic actors generate the justification, and the state supplies the force.
The domestic arm of Empire
Repression reveals what the state fears most. If we understand the U.S. state as fundamentally imperial, then its domestic repression cannot be disentangled from its foreign policy. Counterinsurgency at home mirrors U.S. strategies abroad. COINTELPRO functioned as a domestic arm of imperial war, designed to neutralize liberation movements that posed a material threat to U.S.-led imperialism. Today, Project Esther attempts to do the same to the Palestine solidarity movement, this time with the help of civil society proxies.
Project Esther’s preoccupation with “anti-Americanism” is noteworthy. Although it claims to target what it deems antisemitic, the deepest threat, in the eyes of the state, is anti-imperialism. The same fear that animated the FBI’s war on SNCC, SDS, and the Black Panther Party now animates its repression of students organizing for Gaza. Anti-imperialist internationalism is dangerous to the U.S. because it breaks the isolation on which repression depends.
The accusations leveled against student organizers of foreign coordination, terrorist affiliation, or espionage are fabricated and politically motivated. But they also reflect an underlying truth that Palestine solidarity, in its more radical formations, poses a real threat to the legitimacy and continuity of U.S. empire. When students reject the settler logic of the Zionist state, they are also rejecting the broader scaffolding of U.S. military hegemony, settler colonialism, and permanent war. It is precisely this alignment with a global resistance to imperial power that renders such movements dangerous, not because they are orchestrated from abroad, but because they articulate a domestic refusal of the geopolitical status quo.
Project Esther is not COINTELPRO 2.0. It is, however, part of the same infrastructure of counterinsurgency, updated for the age of digital repression. Recognizing these continuities helps us build a strategic response grounded in historical movement memory that refuses fragmentation, cultivates discipline, and sustains struggle across generations.
In order to resist effectively, we must remember that we are not the first to be targeted. There is a lineage of struggle beneath our feet. Through understanding the script, we begin to uncover the means to resist it. We begin to remember how our elders fought back, and how we can as well.
Carrie Zaremba
Carrie Zaremba is a writer and organizer based in Brooklyn whose work focuses on student movements, internationalism, and counter-repression. She is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) Solidarity Network and a proud Students for Justice in Palestine alum.
Notes
1. p. 299 of Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism ↩︎
2. G.C. Moore to W.C. Sullivan, Oct. 10, 1968. also cited in Agents of Repression The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement Second Edition by Ward Churchill ↩︎