Profile: Miriam Adelson, Israeli-American casino mogul and Trump’s biggest donor

By Ivan Kesic 

Israeli-American casino mogul Miriam Adelson is back in the news. The fifth richest woman in the world has emerged as a kingmaker in American politics following Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

The 79-year-old widow of Sheldon Adelson who was known for his empire of casinos and resort hotels across the United States, Miriam Adelson is the biggest donor to the Republican Party.  

More importantly, she is a Zionist settler who was born and raised in the occupied Palestinian territories and has championed the cause of settler-colonialism through different means.

More recently, speaking at an annual conference organized by the Israeli daily Israel Hayom that she owns in the occupied Jerusalem al-Quds on Sunday, Adelson said Trump’s return to the White House “provides us (Israelis) with a tailwind.”

“Trump is the best president for Israel and the Jews, but he wants to engage with a united, energetic, rational, and successful people of Israel. He helps those who help themselves. He loves winners – and that's one reason why Israel is right to demand victory in this war. We deserve it. We need it,” she said.

According to a report filed with the Federal Election Commission in October this year, Adelson donated $100 million to a campaign committee supporting the candidacy of Trump.

The money was distributed through four payments to her political action committee (PAC), Preserve America, with $25 million in July, August and September, and an additional $20 million at the end of September.

She thus became Trump's largest single donor, continuing a pattern of donations with her late husband during previous presidential campaigns of Republican candidates, including Trump.

Who is Miriam Adelson?

Miriam Adelson, aka Farbstein, was born in 1945 in the Jaffa area (today’s Tel Aviv) of ​​occupied Palestine into an Ashkenazi Jewish family that had settled there in the 1930s.

Her parents were early Zionists, arriving from Poland before the establishment of the Zionist entity in 1948 and the beginning of the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Adelson’s father was a prominent member of the United Workers Party (Mapam), a left-wing political party on the Zionist spectrum, whose early leaders Yitzhak Tabenkin and Meir Ya'ari expressed and propounded the idea of “Greater Israel.”

As a child, she moved with her parents to occupied Haifa, where her father owned several cinemas, and later studied in the occupied Jerusalem al-Quds and Tel Aviv, then served in the Israeli army as a medical research officer.

After divorcing her first husband, she moved to New York and worked as a physician at Rockefeller University, where she met Sheldon Adelson, whom she married in 1991.

Sheldon, then a wealthy Jewish American businessman, simultaneously became involved in the gambling industry in Las Vegas, and his casino hotels amassed a fortune of tens of billions of dollars in the following years.

He was not involved in political activities before his marriage, and therefore it is believed that Miriam played a key role in his transformation into the largest donor to radical American and Israeli political currents over the past three decades.

Miriam mostly kept a low profile, leaving her husband in the foreground of their political and donor activities, until his death in 2021, when she stepped forward as his successor.

According to The New York Times, she has recently been spending more time in the Zionist entity than in the United States, where her son Matan also moved.

Even during her husband’s lifetime and her stay in the United States, she emphasized that "her heart is always here." This year, Forbes estimated her net worth at over $35 billion.

What are the couple's US political favorites?

The couple became close to Republican circles during the presidential term of George W. Bush, for whose second inauguration they reportedly donated half a million dollars.

Three years later, Bush appointed them to serve on the Honorary Delegation to accompany him to the occupied Jerusalem al-Quds for the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the illegitimate Zionist entity.

Adelsons emerged in the 2010s among the top Republican megadonors, spending a half billion dollars on their candidates in congressional, senate, and presidential elections.

In the early 2010s, they supported Republican Senators Roy Blunt, Dean Heller, Scott Brown, Pat Toomey and Mark Kirk, as well as Congressmen Eric Cantor, Joe Heck, Mark Amodei and Virginia Fox.

The couple had given $92.8 million to Israel-friendly candidates in the 2012 election cycle, including for the presidential campaign of notorious warmonger John McCain.

Miriam Adelson was ranked as the largest female donor during the 2012 presidential election, spending around $46 million.

A year before the 2016 US election, many Republican candidates, hoping for their support and donations, traveled to Las Vegas in what is now widely called the "Adelson primaries."

The couple initially had other favorites during the Republican primary, with Miriam favoring Ted Cruz and Sheldon Marco Rubio, but nevertheless, they later became Trump's main donors.

The key reason for this was their joint meeting in late 2015, described as "very charming" by Miriam, during which the main topic was the Zionist entity.

The Adelsons gave $20 million to Trump's 2016 campaign alone, with much going to pro-Trump super PAC Future 45, although reports suggest Trump received at least $100 million more at the beginning of the year.

Many experts point out that one of the factors that contributed to the Republican victory in 2016 was the influence of free-spending billionaires like Sheldon Adelson, Robert Mercer and Paul Singer.

Two years later, the couple gave another $113 million to Republican and conservative groups and candidates during the 2018 midterm election cycle, and in 2020 splurged $75 million more to the pro-Trump Preserve America PAC

They also donated $5 million to Trump for his inauguration festivities and gave $500,000 to Trump's lawyer during the investigation into alleged foreign interference in the 2016 elections.

In 2018, Trump awarded Adelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor, putting her outside of her husband's shadow. Trump later received $90 million from the couple during his 2020 campaign.

Adelson emerged as Trump's biggest donor in the latest election as well, reportedly on condition that he moves forward with US recognition of the Israeli annexation of the illegally occupied West Bank, in blatant violation of international law.

What are Adelson’s views on Zionism?

Adelson’s political views represent the most radical form of Zionism, extreme even concerning the American Jewish mainstream and the Zionist entity itself.

They are associated with the right-wing ideology of Neo-Zionism, which advocates not only the retention of occupied territories but also the further expansion of the occupation and annexation of Palestine and surrounding countries.

Sheldon Adelson once stated that the Palestinians are an "invented people" and the sole purpose of their existence is to destroy the Zionist entity.

The couple strongly opposed the two-state solution, as well as the existence of any Palestinian state in general, even at the cost of undermining the Israeli political system itself.

Sheldon's expressed views are close to those of ultra-nationalist rabbi and convicted terrorist Meir Kahane who also claimed that any solution leading to a Palestinian state was synonymous with "committing demographic suicide."

His ideas are also linked to those of Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Ariel Sharon, as they all advocated the idea of ​​an "iron wall" towards Arab neighbors and an aggressive foreign policy.

These ideas do not remain just words but are very much reflected in practice, as Trump recognized the occupied Syrian Golan Heights as part of the Zionist entity and moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the occupied Jerusalem al-Quds, which the Adelsons had been pushing for over a decade.

What are Adelson’s Zionist activities?

Adelson is also a major donor to illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, and this expansion has led to increased settler violence and forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homes.

In 2019, a US appeals court revived a $1 billion lawsuit by Palestinians seeking to hold Adelson and other pro-Israel parties liable for war crimes against Palestinians and support for illegal Israeli settlements.

In addition to supporting illegal settlements, the couple gave $25 million to the internationally boycotted Ariel University, located in one such Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank.

The Adelson Family Foundation is a large financial contributor to the Taglit-Birthright Foundation, giving more than $500 million to the organization in a 15-year period.

This organization takes young Jews from across the world to the Zionist entity for free, with the aim of developing their Zionist and settler aspirations, and about 850,000 of them have participated in the program so far.

The Birthright has been criticized for pushing a pro-apartheid agenda of an imaginary, propagandized portrayal of the entity, to erase the existence of Palestinian life, and to shore up support for Israeli occupation, apartheid and denial of the Palestinian refugees' right to return.

Adelson has also poured millions into the Yad Vashem and Israeli American Council, as well as to pro-Israeli groups to the right of the Jewish communal mainstream, including the Zionist Organization of America and Christians United for Israel.

Sheldon argued that the Jewish-American mainstream, including the Israeli lobby, was too soft, and that tough Jews were needed to protect the Zionist entity.

After 2015, the couple also got heavily involved in the campaign against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, launching the counter Maccabee Task Force (MTF) in a closed-door meeting at their Venetian hotel in Las Vegas.

This $50 million initiative was set to become America's largest pro-Israeli campus program, and the MTF later expanded its activities to Europe and beyond.

Adelson is further associated with financing various Zionist groups that have played a significant role in the production and dissemination of Islamophobic propaganda in the West.

They were also major sponsors of Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu and helped to shape pro-Likud views in the Zionist entity, so they purchased an influential daily, Israel Hayom, and a weekly, Makor Rishon, associated with conservative right and Religious Zionism.

Netanyahu's efforts to drag Washington into a war against Iran had the full backing of the Adelson family, with Sheldon proposing in 2013 to drop a nuclear bomb in an Iranian desert and saying that the next one could target the center of Tehran, unless the country's nuclear program was suspended.

The couple was also seen several times in the company of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Iranian autocratic ruler, whose propaganda campaign they reportedly financed.

New malignant influence on Trump

Miriam Adelson's sponsorship of Trump's new campaign has, according to observers, reshaped his stance on Israeli genocidal war against Gaza, as her remarks on Sunday reflect.

At the beginning of the year, Trump gave an interview to her Israel Hayom daily and said Tel Aviv should "finish up" its war on Gaza, saying that it is losing international credibility.

His changed stance, which unquestioningly follows the ongoing Israeli policies, is in line with Adelson’s stance, who wrote for the same daily that anyone who opposes Israeli tactics is "dead to them."

Her funding was also reflected in Trump's choice for the new US ambassador to the Zionist entity, Mike Huckabee, and new ambassador to the UN, Elise Stefanik.

Huckabee strongly opposes the idea of ​​Palestinian statehood and denies the existence of Palestinians, and also supports illegal Zionist settlements and denies Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

Stefanik has equally extreme pro-Israeli views, and what they further have in common is that they both won the "Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Defender of Israel Award" at the Zionist Organization of America's "Heroes of Israel" gala.

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