Day four of a saga I keep saying I'll stop covering. Quick recap for anyone joining late: Macklemore said "Free Palestine" at two MetLife shows, got dropped from Ed Sheeran's tour after Robert Kraft barred him from Gillette Stadium, Macklemore pledged his $1M tour paycheck to six Palestinian aid groups and dared Kraft to match it, Kraft said Sheeran had already asked him to commit $2M "to aid in the region," and WSJ named three more NFL owners (Tepper, Blank, Lurie) as having joined the ultimatum — none of whom have said a word about it since.
That's where things stood yesterday. Today the open question I've been flagging since day one — where does Kraft's money actually go? — got its first real answer. Not from Kraft. From tax forms.
What The Intercept found
The Intercept's analysis of the Kraft Family Foundation's filings since 2006 documents:
- $196,000 to Friends of the IDF, across seven separate donations, each earmarked "promote education for young Jewish soldiers" — funding the group's lone-soldier program, which supports Americans and others without family in Israel serving in its reserve forces.
- $123,000 to Brothers for Life and Friends of Israel Disabled Veterans, two more organizations that directly support Israeli military personnel.
- $3 million since 2022 from the Kraft Group (his LLC, not the foundation) to the United Democracy Project, AIPAC's super PAC — including $1M this midterm cycle alone.
- $20 million in 2019 to found the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism (now the Blue Square Alliance), which explicitly opposes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
- Smaller sums to CAMERA ($63,500), MEMRI ($150,000 over a decade), and the Investigative Project on Terrorism ($50,000) — three groups that monitor and, per The Intercept's sourcing, pressure critics of Israel.
What the story does not establish: that any of this is where the new $2M pledge is headed. Kraft still hasn't named a recipient for that money, and The Intercept says so directly — "it's not clear whether these entities were the ones Kraft claims have created jobs and spurred dialogues between Palestinians and Israelis." The finding is about the eighteen-year pattern of where his giving has demonstrably gone, not about tracing this specific pledge.
The gap between the finding and the framing
That distinction matters because the headline version circulating today — "Kraft is funding his friends in the IDF" — is doing more work than the documented facts support on their own. What's actually itemized is a nonprofit education stipend program for volunteer soldiers, a PAC that funds election spending, and advocacy groups — not, say, weapons procurement. The through-line The Intercept draws (a man who says he's "decades" invested in Palestinian opportunity has an eighteen-year paper trail of donations to pro-Israel military-adjacent and advocacy causes, and zero disclosed donations to anything Palestinian) is a fair and well-sourced one. But it's a claim about pattern and omission, and it's worth keeping that separate from a cruder "funding the IDF directly" gloss — the same move I made on day one, when "Kraft is in the Epstein files" turned out to be technically true and doing more implying than the underlying email actually supported. Same method, same saga, two days apart.
Still open
- The $2M's actual destination. Nobody's named one.
- Tepper, Blank, and Lurie's silence continues into a third day since WSJ named them.
- Sheeran plays Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia tonight — his first show since Macklemore was cut, no opener announced, start time pushed from 5:30 to 8pm, and CAIR-Philadelphia leading a coalition protest outside.
Previously: Robert Kraft Is "In the Epstein Files." Here's What That Actually Says. · Kraft Matched the Donation. He Didn't Answer the Question. · The Owners Have Names Now, and So Does the Broken Promise