Middle East
What does Project 2025 Say About Israel, Palestinians, and Middle East policy?
The catastrophic war and death toll in Gaza makes it imperative to know what Project 2025’s policy architects plan for the future of the Middle East.
Editor’s note: The proposals below represent the policy proposals and positions of the US conservative movement on Middle East policy as stated in their 877-page blueprint, Project 2025. They do not represent the views of the Stop The Coup 2025 campaign team or editorial team. Our goal with this brief was to provide a clear, bulleted summary of what Project 2025’s architects propose for the next conservative administration. We provide a brief campaign commentary in our conclusion.
Background: As of late July, Israel’s most-recent military campaign to rout Hamas in Gaza had killed over 40,000 people, mostly civilians, and driven 2.3 million people from their homes, according to Palestinian health authorities. The Israeli ground and air campaign began on Oct. 7 when Hamas militants stormed across the border into Israeli communities and killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 253 people into captivity in Gaza. Approximately 110 hostages remain in Gaza, after about 100 were freed in a brief ceasefire in late November. (i)
Since the start of Israel’s Gaza campaign, a growing global peace and pro-Palestinian protest movement, has called for an immediate ceasefire and the return of the remaining Israeli hostages. Other demands include: the withdrawal and end to Israeli’s military campaign and occupation of Gaza; an end to further US military funding and aid to the Netanyahu regime; an end to US support for the illegal settler movement in Israel; increased humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza facing starvation, as well as displaced Palestinian refugees elsewhere; legal action and justice measures to be taken by the UN, International Criminal Court and other international human rights oversight bodies to address charges of genocide, war crimes and various human rights violations that have been leveled by various parties at Netanyahu’s regime and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), as well as counter-complaints made by pro-Israel groups who accuse Hamas of war crimes extend this accusation to its regional allies, including Hezbollah and Iranian-backed jihadist militias. The global peace movement has also decried the targeting of US student protesters as being anti-Semitic and denounced the increased reports of anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric and incidents of violence in the US linked to the Middle East war and the pro Palestinian movement.
Spotlighting the US role: In the big picture, pro-ceasefire and pro-Palestinian protesters accuse the US of waging a geopolitical proxy war in Gaza against Hamas and Iran – and Russia – and against the Palestinian people - via its continued funding and political support of Israel. On the other side, pro-Israel groups in the US, including Project 2025 members, denounce what they view as growing anti-Semitism against Israel and Jews, as well as Iran’s arming and funding of Hamas, Hezbollah, and regional militias who are branded Islamist terrorist organizations by the US government and Israel.
Project 2025’s public positions: Within Project 2025, Christian nationalist and conservative leaders and advisory groups, including the Heritage Foundation, which helms Project 2025, remain outspoken in their support of Israel and its right to militarily defend itself against Hamas attacks. Right-wing leaders have amplified a charge of anti-Semitism against pro-Palestinian protesters, charging them as being enemies of the US and its national interests (see Weaponizing anti-Semitism section below), and extended that charge to the Biden administration. Critics include former Trump officials who are key Project 2025 architects of their proposed Middle East policies (see our brief on Who’s Who: The Ties That Bind). (ii) – ACD, SO’D.
Project 2025’s main points on policy toward Israel and Palestine:
• Strongly supports Israel, and pledges to sustain that support.
o Why? In part because conservative Christian nationalists are key architects of the policy plan, and they include Christian “dominionists” who believe that Israel must exist as a precondition for the Second Coming of Christ (see details below).
• Plans to help Israel defend itself and attack Hamas by supplying it with more armaments as well as “ensuring Israel has both the military means and the political support and flexibility to take what it deems to be appropriate measures to defend itself against the Iranian regime and its regional proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.” (pg. 185)
• Calls for defunding the Palestinian authority (pg. 185) and labels the regime in the Palestinian territories “antagonistic” to US interests. (pg. 274)
Christian nationalists believe that Israel must exist as a precondition for the Second Coming of Christ.
• Calls for the US to build a new Middle East security pact that includes Israel, Egypt, the Gulf states, and potentially India, as a second “Quad” arrangement – to protect US national interests and protect against “Islamist” threats (pg. 185).
• Broadly conflates Islam – and by extension Muslims –with terrorism: using the linked phrase “Islamic terrorism” or “Islamist terrorism” in discussions of Iran, the Middle East, and Africa (pgs. 121, 185, 275)
• Plans to increase trade with Israel, in support of the Abraham Accords (pgs. 185, 274)
o Editorial note: The Abraham Accords were agreed to in the context of a prior rejected Trump administration Middle East peace plan that proposed to incorporate illegal West Bank settlements into the state of Israel; it was decried by Palestinian leaders. (iii)
• Urges cutting USAID’s footprint in the Middle East, redirecting funding “away from expensive and poorly performing international partners to more cost-effective local entities.” (pg. 275)
o Editorial note: Project 2025 also calls for remaking USAID into a “pro-life” agency and denying US foreign assistance to any group that refuse to implement “pro-life” policies that include eliminating DEI policies, services to LGBTQIA+ communities, and reproductive rights services, including abortion, and some forms of birth control. The USAID makeover calls for increasing funding for Christian agencies and private pro-Christian institutions, and redirecting funds away from international and local NGOs viewed as “woke.”
• Would cut foreign aid to states allied to Iran – apart from increasing funding to “persecuted religious minorities” -- read Christians. (pg. 274)
• Calls for denying visas to foreign students from “enemy nations” – a version of Trump’s Muslim ban.
o Editorial Note: On October 17, 2023, former president Trump announced that if he were elected again, he would subject all immigrants to “ideological screening”; he stated that he would expand his original Muslim ban and specifically bar refugees from Gaza. (iv)
• Backs a radical immigration policy including mass detention and expulsion of undocumented immigrants, as well as reversal of Biden Iran policy – proposals that would impact Middle East policy, and restrict the rights of Muslims, including Palestinians.
• Rejects the legal authority of the United Nations and international courts and oversight bodies including the International Criminal Court (ICC) and UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ), or World Court, which is the main judicial organ of the UN. (v) (See box below — The International Court Battles.)
The International Court Battles
Project 2025’s rejection of the authority of the UN, ICC and ICJ could have important implications for the Middle East given that the World Court issued “provisional measures” (or binding orders) on January 26, 2024, “in order to protect the rights claimed by South Africa that the Court has found to be plausible,” including “the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide.” (vi) The ICJ ruling came in response to a South African lawsuit in fall 2023 accusing Israel of genocide, a charge Israel called “wholly unfounded” and “morally repugnant,” while counter-accusing South Africa of “biased and false claims.” (vii)
At the ICC, Prosecutor Karim Khan announced in May that the ICC was considering issuing a warrant (viii) for the arrest of Israel hardline leader Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and three Hamas leaders: Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar; Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, the leader of the Al Qassem Brigades (also known as Mohammed Deif); and Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas politburo chief. (ix) Khan’s move ignited an ongoing firestorm of debate about ICC’s impartiality by pro Israel and pro-Palestinian camps. The ICC action follows a longstanding ICC investigation of similar charges against Hamas leaders, some dating back to 2014.
Outcry was swift: Netanyahu told ABC News the ICC’s decision had made criminal court into a “pariah institution,” while US Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned the ICC move as “wrongheaded,” while rejecting any comparison of the actions of Hamas leaders with Israeli officials. (x)
In the meantime, Israeli activists pushed for UN investigations of claims of torture and sexual violence against women hostages during and after the Hamas attack. These includes allegations of beheadings of babies, and other atrocities, and accusations that Hamas fighters engaged in a pattern of war-rape in Gaza. That led to an investigation by UN officials of four attack sites and a morgue where the bodies of January 7 victims were transferred.
In June 2024, UN Commission of Inquiry (CoI) published an in-depth legal and investigative report that concluded from “documented evidence” that there was a pattern indicative of sexual violence by Palestinian forces during the attack, but found "no credible evidence" that Hamas militants had "received orders to commit sexual violence," and thus could not draw conclusions on Israeli allegations of systematic war-rape. UN investigations did declare at least two of the sexual violence allegations to be unfounded.
UN and media probes also debunked the shocking gone-viral allegations of child beheading made by an ultra-orthodox member of Zaka, an Israeli search-and-rescue organization, to the press on and after the Hamas attack. Netanyahu and Israeli officials used these now-debunked claims to justify Israel’s intensified bombing campaign in Gaza. (xi)
At the same time, Palestinian activists and human rights groups have called urgent global attention to allegations and media reports of torture, rape, and deaths of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and detention centers, where 2,650 were detained as of mid-August. They have demanded an ICC investigation into these allegations and closure of the Israeli facilities. (xii) – ACD, SO’D
Project 2025 and Zionism (see our brief “Is Project 2025 a Christian Nationalist Manifesto?”) (xiii)
Project 2025 promotes a Christian nationalist agenda, and calls for aligning US law and policy with conservative interpretations of biblical doctrine, including Old Testament scripture. In practice, that calls for aligning federal regulations to adhere to conservative Christian “pro-life” principles that are anti-diversity (anti-DEI), anti-LGBTQIA+ and anti-reproductive rights. In domestic education policy, it seeks to promote Christianity to supplant secular education and transfer federal education dollars to promote Christian education in private schools. Its labor regulations would prioritize traditional, Christian families.
Project 2025 calls for making “international religious freedom” -- Christianity -- central to USAID’s development efforts
Foreign theocracy: In foreign policy, Project 2025 calls for making “international religious freedom” -- Christianity -- central to USAID’s development efforts, and for integrating religious training -- again, Christianity -- into all agency’s programs, including the five-year Country Development and Coordination Strategies due for updates in 2025. It also calls for increasing outreach, funding, and partnerships with Christian institutions and agencies while cutting federal funding for international agencies viewed as supporting “leftist” or “woke” policies.
End-times support of Israel and Jews: Project 2025’s architects include Christians who are “dominionists” including members of the fast-growing New Apostolic Reformation. NAR members believe they have a spiritual calling or role to serve as modern-day apostles and gain “dominion” or control over all key spheres of earthly activity as a preparatory step for the end times return, or second coming, of Christ (see our discussion of NAR and ‘Seven Mountains Dominionism’ in our web report on Christian Nationalism and Christian Zionists).
Christian Zionism: Dominionists support Zionism by viewing the Jewish people and the existence of the country of Israel as a necessary component for the return of Christ. That is a key reason Christian Nationalists support a strong Israeli state and support far-right Jewish settlement policies while rejecting Palestinian land claims. They promote a definition of the term “anti Semitism” that includes any critique of Israeli policy and delegitimizes that critique. Yet they privilege Christianity as the only “true” religion. (xiv)
Contradictory Anti-Semitism: There is a profound internal contradiction in Project 2025’s views about Israel and Jews: while they believe in the maintenance of a strong state of Israel as critical to the future return of a Christian God, they view Christianity as superior to all other religions or faith practices, including Judaism. There is a tolerance for other beliefs, but only Christianity is the “true” religion. The other piece of the return of Christ prophecy is that, when this happens, Jews must then convert to Christianity to be allowed to enter heaven.
Editorial Note: Project 2025 weaponizes the language of anti-Semitism
• It conflates criticism of Israeli government policies with generalized anti-Semitism. This is false: there are many Jewish Israelis who continue to challenge their own government. Prior to the start of the war, the Israeli left staged the largest protests to date calling for Netanyahu’s regime to resign, and denouncing his Gaza and settler policies.
• It is deliberately divisive: it uses the label of anti-Semitism to pit communities against each other, at a time when Middle East activists are calling for peace.
• It falsely states that support for Palestinian rights is the same as opposition to Israel’s existence.
• It labels US students protesting for Palestinian rights as enemies of the US – and suggest the protests are a threat to national security. (see discussion below)
An overt political agenda has been revealed: the right-wing weaponization of anti-Semitism to attack political opponents
Building Christian Zionism: For years, Christian nationalist leaders have pushed for closer relations with conservative Jewish leaders and groups and called for US Christian congregations to openly support Israeli groups. In the wake of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, and the subsequent Israeli Netanyahu government mass bombing of Gaza, that call has increased. The Heritage Foundation is among Project 2025 groups who call for funding and increasing arms to Israel, while Project 2025 leaders view anyone protesting Israel’s policy as anti-Semitic. (xv) Project 2025 openly calls for increasing support to Middle East Christians, among its proposals (pg. 185). Meanwhile, NAR members are calling on its congregations and members to pledge money to Israel and support the Netanyahu regime.
Weaponizing anti-Semitism Over the past year, an overt political agenda has been revealed: the right-wing weaponization of anti-Semitism to attack political opponents, which began before the Gaza student protests. In November 2023, the Heritage Foundation organized a task force of conservative Christian, Jewish, and other leaders to combat anti-Semitism and build support for Israel. When the student campus takeovers began, right wing leaders labeled them and student protesters anti-Semitic. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Tom Cotton (R-AK), and Gregg Abbott (R-TX) are among top Republicans who led that charge, and used the issue to attack Biden and other Democrats as being anti-Semitic in the process. Johnson even made an emergency visit to the Columbia University campus on April 24, 2024, to condemn the pro-Palestinian student encampments – after pushing through Congress a $26 billion aid package for Israel, including $9 billion in humanitarian help to Gaza.
Meanwhile, news reports noted the ongoing use of Israel and the Gaza war by GOP leaders to push through their other agenda: to demand the ouster of university officials they view as too “woke” – building on an ongoing effort to eliminate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies on American campuses. (xvi) The Middle East created a fresh wedge issue for that culture war. The pro-Israeli lobbying group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has also sunk over a billion dollars into attacks against progressive US political leaders, using the anti-Semitism label to lead their well-funded attacks, including routing ad funds through a super PAC, United Democracy Project, according to the watchdog group Open Secrets. (xvii)
Project 2025 is awash in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia
Underlying white supremacy: Christian nationalism also butts up against white supremacist ideology, which is woven into Project 2025 – the belief that the US should be a white Christian nation governed by whites. In the US, white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups have openly promulgated the “great replacement theory” – a racial and cultural fear of whites being replaced by non-whites, including Black and brown foreigners; Project 2025 is also awash in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. In 2017, when Trump was president, white nationalists marched in Charlottesville chanting “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.” (xviii)
This type of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-foreigner discourse is a hallmark of the US far-right white supremacy movement. Notably, leaders of far-right groups like the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and other white nationalist groups have joined in to support Project 2025. (See our White Supremacy briefs: “White Supremacy and White Grievance: A Look at Project 2025’s Deeply Racist Agenda” and “Who’s Who Among Christian Nationalist and White Extremist Groups”.) These groups are also mobilizing their members to serve as election watchguards in the November election under the banner of “election integrity.”
Specifically, what does Project 2025 say about Middle East foreign policy?
• Project 2025 argues for a major increase in defense spending – including new nuclear weapons – in order to counter threats from China (which it sees as the major threat), Russia, Iran, the Middle East, and North Korea, and to combat terrorism. (pg. 93)
• This includes “ensuring Israel has both the military means and the political support and flexibility to take what it deems to be appropriate measures to defend itself against the Iranian regime and its regional proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.” (pg. 185)
• Project 2025’s plan is to involve other states in the Middle East: “Second, the next Administration should build on the Trump Administration’s diplomatic successes by encouraging other Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, to enter the Abraham Accords. Related policies should include reversing, as appropriate, the Biden Administration’s degradation of the long-standing partnership with Saudi Arabia. The Palestinian Authority should be defunded.” (pg. 185)
• Project 2025 argues that the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords resolved the Arab Israeli conflict: “President Trump’s Abraham Accords signaled the end of the centrality of the Arab–Israeli conflict, which paralyzed U.S. approaches to the region, and focused instead on Iran as the principal threat to America from this region.” (pg. 274)
• Project 2025 argues that trade – rather than US aid dollars – will stabilize the Middle east: “Foreign aid must advance the Abraham Accords. Increased trade and investment between Israel and its Arab neighbors represent the most effective path toward reducing poverty, fostering the emergence of a middle class, and solidifying peace. […] USAID continues to expend hundreds of millions of dollars in nonhumanitarian aid to antagonistic regimes in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories.” (pg. 274) Aid should therefore be cut off.
A June Heritage Foundation special report on the Gaza protests charged that the pro-Palestinian movement is a cover for an effort to topple the US
• Project 2025 proposes to reverse Biden’s Iran policy.
• Revise the Executive Order related to the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 to give the next administration expanded powers to conduct domestic intelligence activities that might infringe on civil liberties and privacy.
The Trump administration’s Muslim ban signals what the future would hold under a conservative president if Project 2025 was enacted:
Despite the US Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion, in 2017 the Trump administration pursued a ferocious anti-Muslim ban for visitors to the US from predominantly Muslim countries. Trump’s recent comments indicate that he would follow the same strategy if he were re-elected. On January 27, 2017, then President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order that banned foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the US. By January 29, the ACLU had secured a nationwide temporary injunction to stop deportation of all people being detained at the airports. On February 3, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Executive Order, calling it a violation of the Constitution.
On March 6, Trump signed a new second version of the executive order, allowing those with green cards and visas to enter; on March 15, a judge in Hawaii blocked the second order. On June 27, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to the ban. It allowed a narrower portion of the ban, allowing entry for those who have a close relative in the US.
On September 24, Trump signed a third executive order banning Muslims; on October 17 a federal judge temporarily blocked this order. On December 4, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration’s ban to take effect until the case was litigated. Meanwhile, lower courts continue to block portions of the ban. Then, on June 26, 2018, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to uphold Trump’s third Muslim ban. (xix)
Same players, increased judicial activism: While Donald Trump has sought to deny his association with Project 2025 and denigrated some of its proposals, it was largely written by top Trump former officials, including his former senior advisor Steven Miller, who is credited as the architect of the Trump Muslim ban. Miller’s conservative think tank, America Legal First Foundation, was among initial Project 2025 advisory groups. Miller recently announced his group’s withdrawal from Project 2025, citing it as having become too toxic due to media coverage of its plans. But Miller remains a key player who is likely to have an important role if Trump is re-elected in November. His legal think tank has filed over 100 lawsuits and amicus briefs against “leftist” and “woke” companies that mirror Project 2025’s anti-DEI, anti-gender proposals. Miller continues to advocate poisonous anti-immigrant viewpoints.
The future? On October 17, 2023, Trump announced that if he were elected, he would subject all immigrants to “ideological screening”; he said he would expand his original Muslim ban and specifically bar refugees from Gaza. (xx) Meanwhile, many of Project 2025’s leadership are also outspoken in their support of Israel and opposition to Palestinian officials and the pro-Palestinian rights movement.
Heritage position: That includes the Heritage Foundation, where Kevin D. Roberts has taken the reins of Project 2025. A June Heritage Foundation special report on the Gaza protests charged that the pro-Palestinian movement is actually a cover for an effort to topple the US – a neat reversal of fact that Project 2025 openly seeks to dismantle the US government and its system of pluralistic democracy. In it, co-authors Mike Gonzales and Mary Mobley charged that the growing coalition of groups backing a ceasefire in Gaza is identical to the groups that support Black Lives Matter protests and “they aim to do much more than destroy Israel. Their goal is to dismantle Western democracies, values, and culture, and their primary target is the United States.” (xxi) Gonzales is a former journalist and Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation who writes on identity politics, DEI and CRT, assimilation, and nationalism, as well as foreign policy.
Here, Gonzales and Mobley seek to assert that the anti-Israeli protests are funded by socialist and Communist groups that secretly backed BLM, and broadly disparage the protest movement. “There is ample indication that activists who focus both on the Palestinian issue and on achieving a global Marxist revolution have manipulated for their own aims the emotions of students who were already indoctrinated to see the world through an “oppressor v. oppressed” prism (which itself is a Marxist concept),” they write.
Summary and Conclusion
To summarize, if enacted, Project 2025 would:
Continue conflating support for Palestine as de facto anti-Semitism, including if voiced by progressive Jews in Israel and the Middle East
Continue using anti-Semitism as a polarizing wedge issue to build support for Israel and attack the pro-Palestinian movement
Increase US taxpayer funding, military aid, and government political policy -- for Israel, while withdrawing support for Palestinian civilians
Support expansion and occupation of Palestinian land by Israeli settlements, and defend the settlements as legal
Resurrect and possibly expand the Muslim ban
Further restrict the rights of Muslims in the US and threaten foreign students with possible arrest and deportation
Further target and brand US pro-Palestinian protesters as “enemies” of the US and its national interests
Threaten to crack down on dissent under the guise of fighting domestic and foreign Islamic terrorism
Challenge the authority and actions of the UN, ICC, ICJ, and other international legal and human rights bodies investigating claims of war crimes and violations linked to the Middle East war.
Looking ahead: If enacted, Project 2025’s policy suggestions are poised to become the basis of US government policy in the Middle East. Its policies closely mirror Republican party platform policies adopted in July, and the official Trump campaign, Agenda 47. The GOP party platform supports Israel, and calls for a crackdown on the pro-Palestinian student protest movement: it pledges to “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again.” (xxii) It would resurrect Trump’s Muslim ban and calls for “revoking Visas of Foreign Nationals who support terrorism and jihadism.” It also condemns anti-Semitism and calls for holding accountable “those who perpetrate violence against Jewish people.” On the security front, it wants to adopt Israel’s “Made in America” Iron Dome missile defense shield to cover the United States.
For his part, if elected, Trump has made his position clear, too: a hardening and expansion of pro-Israel Middle East and regional military, security, and aid policies he pursued in his presidency. Trump reversed longstanding US policy by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and shifted the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. His administration also flouted international law by arguing that Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory conquered by Israel in 1967 were not illegal.
Our campaign commentary: If enacted, Project 2025’s proposed policies are poised to exacerbate the devastating attacks and death toll of Palestinian communities in Gaza, and displace many more, using US taxpayer money to finance the Israeli military campaign in Gaza and its illegal settler policy. On July 19th, the ICJ confirmed the Israeli settlements are illegal on the grounds that they contravene Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Project 2025 would thus engage the US government – and US citizens by extension -- in a criminal action if it pursued its planned policy of supporting the settlement movement. Project 2025 also opposes the authority of the ICC and ICJ, which are being pressed to investigate claims of war crimes against the Netanyahu regime and Hamas militants, even as parties on both sides of the war critique the UN and the work and impartiality of its legal and investigative bodies.
Project 2025’s rhetoric is also polarizing and a deliberate strategy to divide American public opinion, by weaponizing anti-Semitism and labeling pro-Palestinian protesters as enemies of US, and possibly pro-Hamas “terrorists”. Its threats to crack down on pro-Palestinian protesters, including students on US campuses, disregards our US right to free speech and assembly, including dissent. (See Module 5 of our Toolkit for Community Organizers on free speech for more.)
On the religious front, Project 2025’s big-picture policy is to advance and impose a conservative Christian nationalist theocratic agenda and “remake America” to be a Christian nation, ruled by the Christian bible. That means Jews and members of other faiths, and those of no faith, would be forced to live under Christian-based laws, and their children would be taught in public schools whose courses would align with, and promote, Christian values. That agenda not only erodes the Constitutional separation of church and state, but presents Christianity as superior to Judaism and Islam and other religions and faith and cultural practices. In these ways, Project 2025 does not respect religious freedom.
Finally, Project 2025’s “pro-life” and immigration agendas, including its Muslim ban, also reflect an overarching white supremacy agenda that aims to eliminate diversity and pluralism that mark the melting pot face of America. Here, too, Project 2025 takes aim at Jews, Muslims, Arabs, and others who fall outside its vision of a future America led by, and for, white Christians who, via Project 2025, are readying their country and the world for the future return of Christ – the greater dream of the Christian nationalist movement.
Authors: Sally O’Driscoll, Anne-christine d’Adesky
i Goldenberg, Tia. “Families of hostages in Gaza hope cease-fire talks will end their nightmare,” ABC News, August 15, 2024.
ii d’Adesky, Anne-christine; Danzig, Alexis. “Who’s Who: The Ties That Bind. Former Trump officials who wrote, edited, or contributed to Project 2025.” Briefing paper, Stop The Coup 2025 campaign.
iii https://www.state.gov/the-abraham-accords/; https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Peace-to Prosperity-0120.pdf; https://time.com/6339889/cancel-abraham-accords/
iv https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/17/trump-muslim-ban-gaza-refugees
v The ICJ and ICC are both based at the Hague and investigate serious crimes but have different roles and jurisdictions. The ICJ settles disputes based on international law, including border disputes, as well as genocide. The ICJ’s 15 judges are elected to the UN General Assembly and Security Council for 9-year terms. The ICJ does not try individuals and its rulings do not result in criminal proceedings. The ICC is a permanent criminal tribunal to try grave international crimes including genocide, crimes against humanity and aggression. It acts as a complement to national courts and can be petitioned when states fail to prosecute crimes, but its rulings are only binding to ICC member-states (a “State Party”). Not all UN member-states are ICC members, including Israel, US, China, and Russia. That limits the ICC’s jurisdiction in cases related to Gaza.
vi Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), August 7, 2024. International Court of Justice. https://icj-cij.org/home
vii Casciani, Dominic. “What did ICJ ruling mean in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel?” BBC News, May 16, 2024.
viii “Reasonable Grounds to Believe Conflict-Related Sexual Violence Occurred in Israel During 7 October Attacks, Senior UN Official Tells Security Council,” press release, UN Office of the High Commissioner, 11 March 2024.
ix Abunimah, Ali. “ICC has no evidence for 7 October rapes, documents indicate,” The Electronic Intifada May 21, 2024.
x “ICC Prosecutor’s warrant requests for Israel and Hamas leaders ignite debate about court’s role,” Associated Press, May 22, 2024.
xi Gupta, Arun. “American Media Keep Citing Zaka — Though Its October 7 Atrocity Stories Are Discredited in Israel,” The Intercept, February 27, 1014.
xii Mraffako, Clothide. “Beatings, deprivation, torture, rape: Palestinians speak of the 'hell' of Israeli prisons, Le Monde, July 12, 2024.
xiv Ibid. xiv https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/17/trump-muslim-ban-gaza-refugees
xv Knowles, H. and Sotomayor, M. “Rare visit by House speaker to campus escalates tension at Columbia,” Washington Post, April 24, 2024.
xvi Ibid.
xvii Inskeep, Steve. “A pro-Israel group is challenging ‘The Squad.’ Why did it sit out Ilhan Omar’s primary election?” National Public Radio, August 14, 2024.
xviii Bauder, David. “What is the ‘great replacement theory’ and how does it fuel racial violence?” Associated Press, May 16, 2022.
xix https://www.aclu-wa.org/pages/timeline-muslim-ban
xx Ibid.
xxi Gonzales, Mike and Mobley, Mary. “How the Revolutionary Ecosystem Sustains Pro-Palestinian Protesters and the BLM Movement,” Special Report, Heritage Foundation, June 25, 2024.
xxii Jansen, Michael. “Trump’s Middle East policy laid bare by new document,” Irish Times, July 17, 2024.