Tuesday, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, weighed in on the ongoing Israeli-Hamas conflict.
DeSantis called it Israel’s “darkest hour,” noting that Israel’s adversaries wanted it eliminated. He also said Hamas had to be eliminated after the terrorist organization’s attack.
“And I want to ask you, first of all, if you heard any of what Bari Weiss said or Jonathan Greenblatt said, I know you visited Israel many times,” “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough said. “Give us your thoughts about the people of Israel right now and what the United States needs to do to support them.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Joe, I’m actually down in Bal Harbour. We just did an event at the Shul here. And it’s raw for our community down in South Florida. We have the second-biggest Israeli-American community in the country. We have a large Jewish population that’s really expanded a lot in the last few years, particularly with the Orthodox Jews. So everybody knows somebody who’s been over there. People know people that are missing. And, unfortunately, people know people that have been killed. This is, perhaps, Israel’s darkest hour. This is a country that had to fight for its inception in the late 1940s.
The Arab armies wanted to extinguish it in the crib. Then, they were going to get invaded in ’67, and they preempted that in the six-day war. Then they did get invaded with the Yom Kippur War, and they were able to win that. And then they face intifada after intifada. And then this, the level of barbarity, it’s hard to comprehend. The images and the videos are absolutely disgusting. And I just think it’s important as Americans that we all come together. Israel has a right to defend itself, and that means do that to the hilt.
You have to uproot the terrorist infrastructure, these networks. And Hamas needs to be no more. I fear what happens in these situations is you have people say Israel can respond, then a week later, then two weeks later, then people start to blame Israel. There’s no moral equivalence between a Hamas terrorist and an Israeli civilian, and they have every right to see this through to the hilt.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
