All five of the candidates onstage at the third Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night urged Israel to “finish the job once and for all with these butchers of Hamas,” as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis put it.
“They’re terrorists. They’re massacring innocent people. They would wipe every Jew off the globe if they could,” DeSantis said.
The Florida governor said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “cannot live with that threat right by his country.” He called on Hamas to “unconditionally release every hostage” and surrender.
“I’m sick of hearing the media; I’m sick of hearing other people blame Israel just for defending itself,” DeSantis said. “We will stand with Israel in word and in deed, in public and in private.”
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DeSantis talked about his own effort to bring Americans home from Israel, contrasting his actions with “atrocious” neglect from President Joe Biden:
We had Floridians that were over there after the attack. He left them stranded. They couldn’t get flights out. So I scrambled resources in Florida, I sent planes over to Israel, and I brought back over 700 people to safety. There could have been more hostages had we not acted.
Former South Carolina governor and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley had the same advice for Netanyahu as DeSantis: “Finish them.”
“I worked on this every day when I was at the United Nations,” Haley said. “We have to remember that they have to, one, eliminate Hamas; two, support Israel with whatever they need, whenever they need it; and three, make sure we bring our hostages home.”
Haley stressed that Iran is the malign mastermind of terrorism in the region:
There would be no Hamas without Iran. There would be no Hezbollah without Iran. There would not be the Houthis without Iran. And there wouldn’t be the Iranian militias in Syria and Iraq that are trying to hit our military men and women if it hadn’t been for Iran.
“And who is funding Iran right now? China is buying oil from Iran. Russia is getting drones and missiles from Iran. There is an unholy alliance,” she said.
Haley said the United States should support Israel’s effort to eliminate Hamas without trying to manage it.
“It is not that Israel needs America. America needs Israel,” she argued. “They are the tip of the spear when it comes to this Islamic terrorism. We need to make sure we have their backs in that process.”
Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy also said Israel should deal with Hamas without restraint from the U.S. government, noting that Israel’s “founding vision” was to defend itself without depending on other nations.
Ramaswamy said he would tell Netanyahu to “smoke those terrorists on his southern border — and then as president of the United States, I’ll be smoking the terrorists on our southern border.”
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Ramaswamy said he would avoid the “mistakes from the neocon establishment of the past,” a group he aggressively lumped Haley into:
Corrupt politicians in both parties spent trillions, killed millions, made billions for themselves in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting wars that sent thousands of our sons and daughters — people my age — to die in wars that did not advance anyone’s interests, adding $7 trillion to our national debt.
“Joe Biden sold off our foreign policy,” he continued. “Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, got a $5 million bribe from Ukraine. That’s why we’re sending $200 billion back to that same country.”
Ramaswamy said the Republicans are “not that much better,” pointing to Haley as an example because she became a “multi-millionaire” by parlaying her job as U.N. ambassador into lucrative work as a military contractor and a board member at Boeing.
“I think that’s wrong when Republicans do it, or Democrats do it,” Ramaswamy said. “That’s the choice we face. Do you want a leader from a different generation who’s going to put this country first, or do you want Dick Cheney in three-inch heels? Because we’ve got two of them on stage here tonight.”
The latter comment was a jab at DeSantis for allegedly wearing lifts in his boots to appear taller. Haley later clarified that she was wearing five-inch heels, not three, and could use them as deadly weapons if provoked.
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott agreed that Netanyahu has “the responsibility and the right to wipe Hamas off of the map,” saying America should “stand shoulder-to-shoulder” with Israel in the effort.
Scott said Biden’s “diplomacy-only” approach was “a weak strategy.”
“Appeasement leads to war,” Scott said.
“From President Obama to President Biden – Obama sent millions to Iran. Frankly, President Biden has sent billions to Iran. That is why I’ve said there is blood dripping from the hands of President Obama and President Biden.”
Scott continued:
I would tell President Biden, with great clarity: If you want to stop the forty-plus attacks on military personnel in the Middle East, you have to strike at Iran. If you want to make a difference, you cannot just continue to have strikes in Syria on warehouses. You actually have to cut off the head of the snake. The head of the snake Is Iran, and not strictly the proxies
“As president of the United States, my foreign policy is simple: you cannot negotiate with evil. You have to destroy it,” Scott said.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also offered unqualified support to Israel. He said the aggression of groups like Hamas, which wants nothing less than to “get Israel off the map,” is a major source of “unrest in the entire region.”
Christie said the Israeli military and intelligence communities clearly “failed the people of the state of Israel” by allowing Hamas to perpetrate the atrocities of October 7.
“We need to work closely, and better, together to ensure one, that they’re degraded, and two, that we know everything that’s going on inside the Gaza Strip, when it’s going on, so that something like this can’t happen to kill 1,200 individuals again,” he advised.
Christie said it was essential to “isolate Iran” by “working with the reasonable nations in the Middle East,” leaving Iran with no friends except “the Evil Foursome: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.”
Editor’s Note: This story was updated to reflect a revised number on the death toll from the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel. The Israeli government estimate of 1,400 was revised to around 1,200, according to Reuters.
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