Miriam Adelson often tells a story from her childhood: Around 1950, when she was 4 or 5 years old and the state of Israel itself was one or two, she wanted to dress up for Purim as Queen Esther. Esther, the Tanakh tells us, was a beautiful Jewish woman who married gentile King Ahasuerus. She used her bravery, smarts, and station to thwart a plot to slaughter the Jews. But Miriam didn’t get to be Esther. Her family, like most Israeli families at the time, had no money. Her mother dressed her up in her older brother’s clothes instead.

Miriam Adelson is now 78 and worth $30 billion. She is effectively a queen — the fifth-richest woman in America and the richest Israeli. When she met her late husband, the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, in the late 1980s, she was a divorced addiction doctor who had left Tel Aviv for New York to pursue a research fellowship on methadone treatment. She had dedicated her life to lifting up the weak. But like almost all Israelis of her generation, the protection of the Jewish people, the security of the state of Israel, is her true calling. So after she married Sheldon in 1991, she leaned in. As Cicero put it, endless money forms the sinews of war.

Through the 1990s, Adelson learned her weapon. She switched from making modest donations to Democrats — common practice among Jewish Americans — to making large donations to Republicans, then unexpected and strange. In Israel, she and Sheldon backed Benjamin Netanyahu, a then-young right-wing zealot and Washington insider who rose to prominence by equating peace with surrender. The Netanyahu bet paid off. In 1996, he defeated sitting prime minister Shimon Peres. Two years earlier, Peres had won the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, for negotiating the first Oslo Accord.

Money to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Money to the Zionist Organization of America. Money to the Republican Jewish Committee. So much money up and down the ballot and across the globe that a candidate’s position on Israeli foreign policy — that is, a candidate’s position on a tiny country that most voters cared about not at all — determined the size of a campaign war chest. In 2005, trying a new tactic, Adelson gave $250,000 to President George W. Bush’s second inauguration. Sheldon did the same. The $500,000 combined got Adelson enough access to drop off at the White House literature about Islamic Jihad and tell Bush’s chief of staff, “I would like the president to see this.”

“It’s really amazing that we have this influence,” she said at the time. But the $500,000 did not get Adelson all that she wanted. Bush advocated for “two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.” Adelson has never believed in what she called the “useless mold of the so-called peace process.”

Sheldon echoed this. There was always going to be collateral damage. “All we care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel,” he said, conflating his own nationality with his wife’s. “I don’t think the Bible says anything about democracy.”

Citizens United, ruled on by the Supreme Court in 2010, was, to Adelson, a matanat el, a “gift from God.” Liberated to give unlimited amounts to super-PACs, Adelson donated $46 million to GOP causes in the 2012 election cycle, more than twice as much as the next 15 women donors combined. The Republican Party platform was not a flawless fit. “I don’t agree with the Republican stance on abortion,” she told Hadassah magazine. “Religion shouldn’t be political. But nothing is perfect.”

The press often reported the Adelsons’ giving as Sheldon’s. But it was not just Sheldon’s. Over the course of their marriage, Sheldon made 848 campaign donations. Miriam made 717. Over his lifetime, Sheldon gave $273 million to political campaigns. Miriam, 12 years younger, has given $284 million to date.

With Trump, in 2016, Adelson perfected her craft. At first she liked Ted Cruz, who was flamboyantly pro-Israel, as the Republican presidential nominee. But Adelson switched to Trump once she saw that he had more traction with voters. She and Sheldon donated $25 million to Trump’s super-PACs, understanding this would almost certainly enable them to mold Trump’s Israel policy. Campaign and patron understood each other. Before the first Trump-Clinton presidential debate, Rudy Giuliani kissed Miriam’s hand.

Adelson had learned her lesson from Bush in 2005: $500,000 to an inauguration is useless; $500,000 is chump change. She and Sheldon donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration. For the swearing-in, they sat up on the dais, a few rows behind Jared Kushner. Sheldon, then 83, looked spectrally pale, his peripheral neuropathy catching up with him. Miriam, 71, looked tanned, radiant, giddy, girlish. She snapped photos on her phone, her platinum-blonde hair glinting against her black camel-wool coat.

In the fourth year of his presidency, Trump announced his Middle East peace plan, which wasn’t really a peace plan at all. Kushner had designed it without any input from Palestinians. Netanyahu called it “the deal of the century.” Trump delivered a few pieces of the plan while still in office: He moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a clear insult to the Palestinians, as they, too, consider Jerusalem their capital. At the ceremony celebrating the Embassy’s move, Adelson beamed from the front row. That same day, at the Gaza border, Israeli soldiers killed 58 Palestinians protesting the Embassy move.

Many political-fundraising experts, including Craig Holman, Public Citizen’s chief ethics lobbyist, believe Adelson will be Trump’s top patron in 2024, as she was in 2020. What will she expect in return? Beyond unconditional support for the Israel-Hamas war, one can assume she’ll press for the unfinished items of Trump’s Israel agenda from last term. Top of that list: Israel annexing the West Bank and the U.S. recognizing its sovereignty there.

This is not just unpopular — it’s illegal under international law. That is not Adelson’s primary concern. October 7 was “another kind of Holocaust,” she said in a recent speech. “We are people that cherish hope and not hatred, that will fight for what is right, even if it means fighting alone.”

In December 2023, Adelson stood at a podium in Texas to give a speech. Nearly seven years had passed since Trump’s inauguration. Sheldon had died. Miriam was now majority shareholder of the family business, the Sands Corporation. As such, in November 2023, she sold $2 billion in stock and, with her daughter Sivan and Sivan’s husband, Patrick Dumont, who is president and COO of Las Vegas Sands Corporation, bought a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. This purchase was nice on a personal level. Adelson’s younger son, 25-year-old Matan, loves basketball. The family had already given him money to buy an Israeli Basketball Premier League team, Hapoel Jerusalem. He could grow into the NBA. Yet the true purpose of the Mavericks purchase was a bet to try to get a piece of the future of gambling in Texas. In 2023, the Texas Sands PAC spent $6 million on 63 lobbyists trying to legalize gambling in the state.

Two months earlier, Israel had been invaded by Hamas. Terrorists killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostages. In the process, they mauled the Israeli psyche. Biden had been standing stalwart by Israel, but his policy was not as comforting to Adelson as Trump’s. The new president believed “the only real solution is a two-state solution.” He prized democracy and equal rights under the law. Trump prioritized Israel’s security.

“Hello, friends and colleagues, or maybe being in Austin I could say, ‘Hody, partners.’ Did I say it correct?” Adelson said, in her thick Israeli accent, at the Texas Association of Business Policy Conference. “Hody? Hooody? Howdy? Howdy, partners! For partners we truly are: Christians and Jews, conservatives and liberals, coming together to advance the special relationship between the State of Texas and the State of Israel … Like Texans, Israelis cherish their roots and their religion and their rights. Like Texans, Israelis defend their sovereignty. Like Texans, Israelis stick to their guns and stand up for their principles and don’t give a damn if that means standing alone.”

October 7 had been Adelson’s nightmare — the event itself, of course, but also the world’s response to it. The attack confirmed the existential burden placed on every Jewish person of Adelson’s generation: No one could be counted on to care about the Jewish people; the duty to protect and safeguard Israel rested on them alone. On November 21, 2023, Adelson published an essay in Israel Hayom, a free Israeli newspaper she and Sheldon launched in 2007. In the piece, entitled “Dead to Us,” she discussed the “ghastly gatherings of radical Muslim and BLM activists, ultra-progressives, and career agitators” who, in the aftermath of 10/7, sprinted right past Israel’s grief and sympathized with Hamas. “These people are not our critics. They are our enemies. And, as such, they should be dead to us,” she wrote. “Indeed, we must disavow and shame them, deny them employment and public office, and defund their colleges and political parties. Doing all this will be easy, because the stakes in Israel’s war of survival have never been so clear … If you quibble about how many babies were beheaded, or how many women were violated, in the October 7 pogrom, you’re dead to us … We Israelis, we Jews love life. And we are done with meekly counting our dead.”

In the months that followed — the end of 2023, the beginning of 2024 — Adelson sat out the Republican primary. She focused instead on projects like Maccabee Task Force, a group she helped create in 2015 to counterattack the boycott, divest, and sanction Israel movement that had started taking root on college campuses and is erupting now. Adelson and others use the word Maccabee to describe the select individuals chosen by fate or history or God to defend the Jewish people. MTF, to which Adelson donated $10.9 million in 2022, is explicit about its mission: “We maintain that BDS is an Antisemitic movement that crosses the line from legitimate criticism of Israel into the dangerous demonization of Israel and its supporters. We are determined to help students combat this hate by bringing them the strategies and resources they need to tell the truth about Israel.” The primary MTF tactic is the “Fact Finders” trip to Israel. MTF sends groups of mostly non-Jewish student leaders from 75 “core” — in other words, prestigious — campuses to see firsthand that “the Israel narrative that dominates the progressive left, dominates campus political conversations, that narrative is false,” David Brog, executive director of MTF, tells me. MTF also supports pro-Israel students in “taking back the quad” — by which he means wrestling campus culture away from groups like Student for Justice in Palestine.

This winter, in her heightened distress, Adelson wrote another Israel Hayom editorial. This one, “The Women of Iron,” was frantic and creative. The article argued that the Israel-Hamas war was not just a battle over Israel’s right to exist. The war, Adelson wrote, was part of a feminist mission, “a war against the very essence of violent patriarchy: against the armed and Islamist embodiment of the fear and hatred that certain insecure men have harbored since time immemorial toward........

© Daily Intelligencer