The world of pop culture is ablaze with fury, as billionaire plutocrat Robert Kraft successfully pressured Ed Sheeran into dropping Macklemore from his North American tour over the rapper’s pro-Palestine statements.

The incident has ignited widespread outrage, and blown up in the Israel Lobby’s face, and caused all of his supporting artists to quit in protest, and brought worldwide attention to both Israel’s crimes and its attempts to silence dissent across the world.

But who is Robert Kraft? MintPress exposes the American oligarch’s funding of the pro-Israel Lobby, the network of organizations he has built to shut down pro-Palestine activism, and his extremely close personal, political, and financial relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

Netanyahu’s Right-Hand Man

“Israel does not have a more loyal friend than Robert Kraft,” Benjamin Netanyahu stated at the 2019 Genesis Prizes, an Israeli government-backed ceremony that honors prominent individuals (such as Kraft) that have advanced Jewish or Israeli interests with a $1 million prize.

Netanyahu is right. The 85-year-old American businessman and owner of the New England Patriots NFL franchise has dedicated his entire life to advancing the Zionist cause. Kraft married his wife in Israel in 1962 and has made well over 100 trips to the country since, including leading dozens of P.R. missions there, bringing a host of celebrities and sports stars with him.

Kraft not only maintains a close personal friendship with Netanyahu, he very likely funded his political rise. His name appears on the “Netanyahu’s Millionaires” document – a leaked, handwritten list penned by the prime minister himself, detailing his wealthiest patrons and those he could most steadfastly rely on to bankroll his political career. Ninety-eight percent of Netanyahu’s funding came from abroad.

When it comes to American politics, Kraft is no less influential, using his monetary power to push the Israeli agenda in Washington. In addition to directly funding Donald Trump, he has spent vast sums bankrolling virtually every group constituting the U.S. Israel Lobby, including:

The American Friends of the Israel Museum
The American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC)
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA)
The Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces
The Israel Project
The Jewish Agency for Israel
The Jewish National Fund
StandWithUs

Robert Kraft, in other words, is the Israel Lobby.

Israel’s Big Money Backer

He also personally created the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism (FCAS), an extremely well-funded group that purports to be an anti-racist non-profit fighting prejudice across the country. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the FCAS is simply another pro-Israel group using the language of anti-racism to crush grassroots opposition to Israeli actions abroad.

Firstly, many of its key figures are former Israeli officials or lobbyists. For example, the organization’s Director of Partnerships and Strategy, Clara Schwartz, previously served as a secretary to multiple Israeli Ambassadors to the United States. Meanwhile, Maya Buki Dabby, FCAS’ Chief Philanthropy Officer, is the former director of AIPAC, the principal Israel lobbying institution in the United States.

Secondly, the FCAS equates anti-Zionism as in the same bracket as support for or denial of the Holocaust, one of the many reasons why its in-house “antisemitism tracker” notes a massive spike in incidents in recent years.

It is difficult to overstate how well-funded and polished this operation is. In one December 2023 pledge alone, Kraft donated $100 million to the organization. Today, Kraft’s Gillette Stadium – which was to host the Sheeran/Macklemore concert until he personally intervened – is home to an enormous command center where vast numbers of staff track anti-Israel, pro-Palestine sentiment across the world and on social media. Critics have dubbed the institution a “massive Zionist surveillance and propaganda center inside Gillette Stadium.”

The FCAS has spent enormous amounts of money on high-profile pro-Israel advertising campaigns, including producing numerous ads played during successive Super Bowls. One 2024 commercial features Clarence B. Jones, the former advisor to Martin Luther King, who drafted his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Jones’ message is that there is a growing tidal wave of racist intolerance in America. Not from the likes of Trump (who Kraft donated $1 million to in 2017), but against Jews. The commercial ends by telling viewers to reject anti-Semitism and visit the FCAS project, StandUpToJewishHate.com.

The next year, it was back with another Super Bowl ad, this time featuring Snoop Dogg bemoaning the rise in “hatred,” which, in context, is a reference to opposition to the State of Israel’s policies in West Asia. Numerous commenters quipped that this was the most embarrassing thing the celebrity rapper has ever done for money.

As their content suggests, the commercials were part of a wider FCAS attempt to target black Americans, who are, according to polls, far less likely to support Israel’s genocide and more likely to side with Palestine than th...

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