

Adelson

Politico is saying that Sheldon Adelson, the ultra-Zionist casino owner reported by Forbes to be the third-richest person in the U.S., may have committed $20 million to pro-Gingrich groups outside the official campaign. This ties in with the great reporting on Republican competition for Jewish donors by Josh Nathan-Kazis and Nathan Guttman at the Forward; they also said that Gingrich’s big Jewish backer is Sheldon Adelson, and the two have a mutual friend in Netanyahu.

This piece underlines what I’ve reported, and repeated again and again, about Adelson: that at the same time that he gave the Republican National State Elections Committee $100,000 in 2000 (after $200,000 in the two years before that), president-elect George Bush was giving neocon Douglas Feith a job, and Feith brought the One-Jerusalem/freeze-the-peace-process agenda into the Bush administration. Along with Iraq-war-architect David Wurmser, who comes up again here, in Gingrich’s wake. Notice all the neocons floating around the Romney and Gingrich campaigns in the Forward report:

In the battle for the Republican pro-Israel vote, Newt Gingrich lacks Mitt Romney’s broad base of prominent Jewish donors. But he has something potentially more powerful: the support of one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s most significant American backers, and a relationship with the Israeli prime minister himself that stretches back decades. Billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, one of the wealthiest men in the world and a major donor to Jewish and conservative causes, is widely known as a Netanyahu stalwart. Less well known are his equally close ties to Gingrich, to whom he has been a major giver in recent years… Ties between Gingrich and Netanyahu date back to the mid 1990s, when both shared a goal of countering a drive by then-president Bill Clinton to advance the peace process. Netanyahu, as leader of the opposition, maintained close relations with Gingrich and the Republican leadership. “At the time, Bibi used him [Gingrich] to pressure the president when it came to issues relating to the peace process,” recalled Itamar Rabinovich, Israel’s ambassador to Washington from 1993 to 1996…. Gingrich’s foreign policy team, announced in late November, may also billboard an attempt to appeal to Jews. It includes Middle East hawks like onetime Dick Cheney adviser David Wurmser and Iran expert Ilan Berman, editor of a journal published by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a right-wing Israel-focused think tank. Gingrich hasn’t cornered the market on right-wing, pro-Israel supporters. Philip Rosen, former national chairman of American Friends of Likud, hosted a $10,000-per-head fundraiser for Romney in September. And Romney’s foreign policy team includes such neoconservative stalwarts as former defense policy advisory board member Eliot Cohen and Dan Senor, former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

(h/t Voskamp via Sullivan)