Who’s Miriam Adelson, the 'rabid' Zionist and Trump’s biggest donor

“Intensely pro-Israel”, “rabidly partisan” and “fiercely hawkish”.

These are the adjectives that the mainstream US media has used to describe Miriam Adelson, a Tel Aviv-born multi-billionaire who is in the limelight for being the single-largest donor to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

The 79-year-old business leader has dished out roughly $100 million to a pro-Trump Political Action Committee (PAC), a tax-exempt organisation that collects money from its members to donate the funds to political campaigns.

Her financial support is critical for the Trump campaign, which has lagged behind its Democratic rival in mobilising funds for the tightly contested race. One in every nine dollars that the Trump campaign has raised this year came from Adelson.

Analysts have warned that she will become “one of the most powerful private citizens with a say in American foreign policy” if Trump defeats the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris.

Who’s Adelson?

US laws forbid foreign nationals from making financial contributions to political campaigns. But Adelson is a dual citizen of Israel and the US, which lets her use her more than $37 billion of assets to buy influence and potentially shape the world.

Adelson was born in 1945 in Tel Aviv, then a part of British Mandate Palestine. Her parents were Polish who went to Palestine to escape persecution in Europe. Her grandparents died in the Holocaust.

She went to Hebrew University, where she majored in microbiology and genetics. She then attended medical school at Tel Aviv University and joined the Israeli military as a research officer.

She was in New York on an Israeli scholarship in the 1980s when she first met US businessman Sheldon Adelson, her future husband. They got married in 1991 in West Jerusalem.

Her husband founded and led the casino group Las Vegas Sands for three decades. He passed away in 2021, leaving her in charge of the vast business empire that makes Adelson the world’s 43rd richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Las Vegas Sands, the main source of her wealth, is the largest casino operator in the world, with outlets in the US, Macau and Singapore. Her majority shareholding in the casino empire is worth nearly $20 billion.

Adelson also holds a majority stake amounting to $3 billion in the Dallas Mavericks, a major basketball team in the US.

Cash holdings of $14.5 billion comprise the rest of her $37 billion net worth.

‘Dead to us’

In an article in Forbes last November, Adelson described the protests against Israel’s war on Gaza as “ghastly gatherings of radical Muslims”.

“They are our enemies… they should be dead to us.”

She called for shaming those who called for a ceasefire while urging people to “deny them employment and public office” and defund their colleges and political parties.

Her husband was Trump’s largest donor in the 2016 campaign, the reason the couple had “front-row seats” at a ceremony to mark the shifting of the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The embassy shift occurred shortly after the Trump administration recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2018.

To make sure that the move, widely condemned in the US and beyond, was irreversible, the duo immediately purchased the US ambassador's official residence near Tel Aviv for $88 million.

The Associated Press described the quick transaction as a move to “cement” the US embassy's controversial move to Jerusalem.

According to a Haaretz report, Adelson is backing Trump for a second term in office on a condition: an Israeli annexation of the occupied West Bank and a US recognition of Israeli sovereignty in all the regions of the land.

“Under these conditions, there's no room for the Palestinian Authority, and nobody to sign a peace accord with,” it says.

She has denied the charge. However, a New York Times story quoted Shmuley Boteach, a rabbi and a longtime friend of Adelson, who said the Republican megadonor indeed supports the annexation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and considers the so-called “land for peace” deals to be actually “land for war”.

“Do I believe that Miriam supports the creation of a Palestinian state? Absolutely not,” it quoted him as saying.

Profusely praising the then US president in a 2019 article for an Israeli publication, Adelson likened Trump to the “heroes, sages, and prophets of antiquity” while suggesting that a “Book of Trump” be added to the Bible.

“Would it be too much to pray for a day when the Bible gets a ‘Book of Trump’, much like it has a ‘Book of Esther’ celebrating the deliverance of the Jews from ancient Persia?”