Miriam Adelson was namechecked by Donald Trump at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in a shoutout to the Republican megadonor who has been central to the U.S. president’s Israel policy. 

Trump told Israeli lawmakers on Monday that Adelson had equivocated when asked whether she loved the United States or Israel more and paid tribute to her role in his Middle East strategy. 

Why It Matters 

The widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, Miriam Adelson spent millions on her super PAC Preserve America, which helped Trump win last year’s election. She and her late husband have been credited by U.S. president for her role in shaping his administration’s Middle East policy.

What To Know 

Miriam Adelson was born in Tel Aviv in 1945 after her parents immigrated from Poland and trained as a physician specializing in addiction treatment. 

In 1991, she married Sheldon Adelson, a casino billionaire who had built the Las Vegas Sands Corporation into a global gambling empire that the family sold for $6.25bn in 2022. 

Sheldon died in 2021, and the couple were one of the top GOP donors over the last decade, giving over $600m to support Trump’s three presidential campaigns and back other Republican candidates since 2015.  

After the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, she wrote a column in the paper she owns, Israel Hayom, which took aim at Israel’s critics across the world, calling “foreign fans of Hamas… our enemies.” 

Her backing for Trump got her connections with the White House, which the U.S. president referred to in his speech on Monday, in which he said the couple would demand pro-Israel policies during their visits to the White House during his first term. 

The couple pushed Trump to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2017 and endorse Israeli control over Syria’s occupied Golan Heights in 2019. 

Trump awarded Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018 for her work in addiction research. She also founded medical centers with her late husband and helped launch the Adelson Medical Research Foundation.  

According to Al Jazeera, she told Jewish voters at an event in September they had a “sacred duty” to back Trump. 

A senior U.S. official told Reuters she had urged Trump to keep trying for the return of hostages that Hamas abducted, as the last of the survivors returned on Monday. 

What People Are Saying 

President Donald Trump to the Knesset on Monday: “Miriam and Sheldon would come into the [Oval] Office. They’d call me. I think they had more trips to the White House than anybody else.” 

Trump added: “I actually asked her once, ‘So Miriam: I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer.”

Miriam Adelson, wrote in an op-ed in Israel Hayom in October 2023: “Foreign fans of Hamas are our enemies, the ideological enablers in the West of those who would go to any length to eradicate us from the Middle East.” 

What Happens Next 

Trump’s address to the Knesset closed a chapter on the two-year war, but Uriel Abulof, professor of politics at Tel-Aviv University, told Newsweek that what was agreed between Israel and Hamas should not be confused for a peace deal.  

Abulof called it a “survival pact for leaders who thrive on conflict”, adding that the agreement, forced upon them by external patrons like the U.S. and Qatar, is deliberately vague on core issues, allowing both to claim a win.