Does Nikki Haley’s road to the White House start in Jerusalem?

Tears had swelled up in both their eyes as she wrapped him in her arms outside his rubble-strewn home.

Haley arrived in the country last Friday as part of a solidarity mission organized by Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which has 10 million members and is considered the largest pro-Israel Christian organization in the United States.

The mission was arranged in the aftermath of the recent Gaza war, known as Operation Guardian of the Walls, which killed 12 people in Israel – including two children – to help send a message to Israelis that they have friends who love them and care.

“We represent 10 million-plus people in America and these people very much want to say to you, Israel, we have your back,” said Pastor John Hagee, the 81-year-old founder and chairman of CUFI, as he explained the importance of the mission.

Haley is the fourth Republican political leader to arrive in the country since the Hamas ceasefire at the end of last month. The others include former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (South Carolina).

Speculation is high that the Holy Land is an early campaign stop on the way to the White House for those who may be eyeing a 2024 run. 

Out of the pack, Haley is one of the most viable and high-profile candidates, although she has made no formal announcement of plans to run nor was she willing to make any comment on the subject while she was in Israel. 

Haley left her post at the UN in December 2018, before the 2020 election and long before the January 8 Capitol riot. She has largely been careful to show support for former president Donald Trump but her early departure makes her the least associated candidate with his administration.

Trump turned Israel, which had historically been a bipartisan issue, into a focus of the 2016 Republican campaign, hiring a team on the ground and focusing his messaging on Jerusalem with an eye toward the Christians who pray for the peace of the Holy City every day.

During his tenure, he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, relocated the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognized the country’s eventual right to apply limited sovereignty over Judea and Samaria – the Biblical Heartland for Christians. 

Those moves were made as much if not more to attract and keep close his evangelical Christian supporters as they were to support the Jews and the Jewish state. 

It is not unusual for US presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle to campaign in Israel. In 2008 as a Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama traveled to Israel, visited war-torn families in the South and put his hand on the Western Wall. 

Both former senators John McCain and Mitt Romney, who ran for president against Obama in his first and second election, respectively, took trips to the Jewish state as part of their election campaigns.

It is presumed that likewise, Haley came to Israel both as a show of solidarity and to shore up her credentials with the evangelicals.

She said during her visit that not having a formal position should not stop her from coming to Israel and fighting for the Jewish state and people.

“I promised the people of Israel that I would never stop fighting for Israel as long as I was taking a breath. I think what is really important is coming back here, after what has been a horrific conflict, one that was unwarranted and unnecessary, and one that happens all too often, to come here and make sure that we let the Israeli people know we are standing with you,” Haley said. “We will fight with you.”

Haley, who had been a strong advocate for Israel at the United Nations, minced no words in condemning Hamas for its launch of nearly 4,500 rockets and mortars against Israel during the May conflagration.

“Israelis deserve to be safe in their homes,” she said.

As she spoke, she stared into the lens of the camera of a videographer who balanced precariously on a pile of rubble, now the floor of an Ashkelon home that was destroyed by one of the rockets. In a pair of white cotton jeans, her sunglasses perched on top of her head, Haley scolded the world for turning a blind eye to the Jewish state in the same powerful way she used to address the UN General Assembly during her tenure from 2017 to 2018.

“Hamas is trying to kill civilians. Israelis are trying to defend themselves,” Haley said. “The idea that the [Hamas] terrorist organization is running free being able to attack innocent civilians… is unthinkable and unacceptable.

“Where is the [UN] Security Council? Where is every government that believes in democracy and freedom?” she continued. “The world has to respond. Israel should not be fighting alone.”

THE MISSION came only two weeks after one evangelical leader, who claimed to represent 77 million devout Christians, threatened to withdraw support for the Jewish state after Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid ousted prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu from power.

But Hagee said the comments were nonsense because “Bible believers are committed to supporting whoever the duly elected representatives of this nation happen to be.

“It all boils down to your commitment to the written scripture,” he explained. “The people who are committed to written scripture will be supportive of Israel because Israel is not a political issue. It is a Bible issue.”

The words of Psalm 122:6 state, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee,” the pastor said. “That is not a recommendation. That is a command.”

During the short trip, Haley and Hagee met with Lapid and Netanyahu. The group did not meet with Bennett, according to CUFI, due to scheduling challenges. However, a source close to Bennett revealed that another consideration was that it might look bad to President Joe Biden’s administration if the new prime minister’s first meeting with an international figure was with a leading Republican figure, and Bennett wanted to start out on the right foot with Israel’s closest ally.

“Israelis have been through a lot politically, and I am very thankful for prime minister Netanyahu and all that he did for the people of Israel,” Haley told the Post. “The way he strengthened Israel through economic, diplomatic and security ties has been one for the history books and we owe him a great debt of gratitude.

“We obviously want to congratulate Prime Minister Bennett and let him know it does not matter who the leader of Israel is, it matters that America stands with her regardless.”

HAGEE ORGANIZED the mini-mission with his wife, Diana – who is also co-executive director of CUFI – and co-executive director Shari Dollinger. Haley’s husband, Michael, and the pastor’s daughter, Sandra, were also part of the group.

“We brought our television cameras to take pictures of the war that has been committed against Israel,” Hagee told The Jerusalem Post in a closed briefing on Monday night. “We saw houses with six-inch concrete walls shattered by rocket fire. We saw houses 50 yards away from the blast center where the roof had been ripped off. We saw human hair plastered to the wall by the blast of those rockets.”

He said they came to Israel to “comfort the victims of the war and to inform the American people about Iran’s maniacal dream of destroying the Jewish state.”

As such, on Sunday, Haley spent the morning meeting with residents of Ashkelon and Sderot whose homes had been destroyed by Hamas’s rocket attacks. In the afternoon, she visited an Iron Dome anti-missile battery where she was briefed by top IDF officials, traveled to a strategic outlook near the Gaza border and visited a military base there.

Ashkelon was among the hardest hit during the 11-day war. Some 900 rockets battered the city. Some days, more than 100 rockets fell in five minutes, the equivalent of nearly one rocket per second. While the majority of the city’s more than 130,000 residents have bomb shelters, an estimated 40,000 do not. They were thus forced to live in community shelters during the duration of the terror campaign.

Sigal Ariely’s home was directly hit by a missile on the last day of the campaign. When the rocket fell, she was in her safe room, which is directly outside her home. But her 26-year-old son was in the house. He sheltered under the stairs, saved only by the grace of God, Ariely said.

“My family knows when you hear a siren, whoever is in the house needs to run – you don’t wait for anyone, you just run,” Ariely told Haley and Hagee. “During this specific siren, my son was upstairs and my dog was inside. As I ran, I screamed for him, but I was not sure what he was doing.”

Her son had stopped to grab the dog, which slowed him down, “so he stood under there,” she said as she pointed at a concrete staircase, pockmarked and scarred by shrapnel.

“When I heard the boom, it felt like the sky was falling. I knew it was close, but I could not imagine how close,” she recounted.

Ariely works for the Jewish Federation of Greater Baltimore as their representative in Israel. She said she is always telling the story of the people of Ashkelon, but “it is different when it is your story.”

Yet after screaming and crying for a few minutes, as the police, IDF and reporters began arriving at her home she did an about-face, she recalled.

“I said to myself, you have to pull yourself together and give a message that we are strong,” Ariely said. “This is not a joke. This could literally kill you. What we lost is property. But if God forbid something happened to my son, I don’t even know how I could continue. You cannot just switch back to normal life after going through something like that. At home you should be safe, but really you’re not.”

Haley also visited the home of an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor who was seriously injured in a direct assault. The woman’s caregiver, 32-year-old Soumya Santosh, was killed in the attack.

The house lay covered in loose boards, the woman’s belongings buried in the rubble, making it difficult to stand.

“All you have to do is look at this damage and tell me where there is a government office here,” Haley said while standing in the center of the home. “Tell me where there are any government offices here. This wasn’t them [Hamas] trying to hurt the government of Israel. This was them trying to go after the heart of Israel, which they know is the people.”

She expressed frustration with Biden’s effort at a balanced response to the situation, which she said is grossly one-sided. Hamas, she stressed, is a terrorist organization.

“If you had 4,500 rockets that went into [Washington] DC, if any of our allies said they think we need to see restraint on both sides, I don’t think we would be very appreciative.”

Haley said that when she was at the UN, she would “look at China, I would look at Russia, I would look at the Security Council and I would say, ‘If you had thousands of rockets going into your homes, tell me that you wouldn’t defend yourselves, tell me that you wouldn’t do everything you needed to do to make sure your people were safe.’ The UN hasn’t done enough.”

As the mission left the survivor’s home, they came upon her next-door neighbor, Penina, whose home was also severely damaged by the aftershock of the rocket. Penina recognized Haley and carefully made her way over the broken stones to the ambassador to tell her story.

When the missile fell, she had nine people in her home, including her 18-month-old grandson, who was resting in one of the bedrooms. When the siren went off, she swooped him into her arms and ran for the shelter, but a missile struck en route.

“Shrapnel slammed through the roof and I was running and a rock fell on my head, but I told myself, ‘Just save your grandson,’” Penina recalled. The blast was riveting, knocking her off her feet and slamming her head against the wall, where strands of her hair are still stuck from the pressure.

“I fell down, but I did not leave him,” Penina remembered. “I held him so tightly. It was a miracle.”

HALEY SAID she is “angry,” knowing that what happened last month during the security escalation with Hamas pales in comparison to the threat posed to Israel by Hezbollah.

Haley spent time on the Lebanese-Israeli border during her tenure as UN ambassador.

“You have Hezbollah waiting in the wings – and Hezbollah makes Hamas look like child’s play,” Haley said. “Hezbollah is going to be the next issue” for Israel.

This while also knowing that America is considering re-entering the Iranian nuclear deal – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – which she said is a “death wish” to Israel and the world.

“The idea right now that you have multiple countries around the world, including the United States, looking to figure out how to redo this Iran deal is nothing more than a death wish for Israel, and eventually a death wish for the world,” she stated during a conversation Monday evening with a select group of reporters at Jerusalem’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, where she stayed.

Haley lashed out at the Biden administration’s recent efforts to engage with the Islamic Republic, saying the fact that Biden is “falling over himself to get back into the Iran deal is pretty disgusting.

“Iran is never going to change its ways,” she warned. “It is never going to stop saying, ‘Death to Israel.’ It is never going to stop saying, ‘Death to America.’ And the only way we can effect change is to pull the money back and pull the purse strings back.”

She cautioned that when Iranians receive funding they do not go and feed the Iranian people. Instead, they give money to Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. They cause trouble in Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and Afghanistan.

“Their tentacles go far and wide,” Haley said. “If you fund Iran, you are funding terrorists that want to kill Israel.”

She also condemned Biden for failing to “thank” the Arab countries, such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, who normalized ties with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords under president Trump. Haley accused Biden of “slapping them in the face” by engaging in talks with Tehran.

“You cannot be friends with Israel, and you cannot say thank you to the people who want to be friends with Israel, by getting back into the Iran deal,” Haley said.

Hagee, too, used the mission to confirm his organization’s unequivocal stance against rejoining the nuclear deal and warned the American people, “We need to be very cautious about our relationship with Iran and we need to stand by Israel in a more definitive way, a more forceful way, so this nation [Israel] can have free borders and the freedom to do as they like to protect their citizens from the evil empire of Iran.”

HALEY ALSO spoke during the briefing about the need to fight antisemitism, which she said is “unfortunately on the rise in the US,” and her “extreme disappointment with how hate speech toward Israel has risen on the Democratic side.”

She noted, “Certainly not all Democrats are against Israel, but it seems like it is growing. Whether it is [Minnesota Congresswoman] Ilhan Omar or [Vermont Senator] Bernie Sanders, their voices are getting louder.”

Last week, Omar tweeted that “we have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the US, Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan and the Taliban,” which her critics said implied a moral equivalence.

“Why is it okay for her to sit there and equate the US and Israel with Hamas, with a terrorist organization?” Haley asked. “If she did that to any other segment of the population, we would all be appalled and everybody would be asking for her resignation.”

She added, “When you see some of these Democrats calling to stop the funding agreements with Israel, when you see them start to criticize Israel as having something to do with this conflict and not saying anything about the terrorist organizations that cost innocent lives – that is a big burden for the Democrats to carry.

“For President Biden not to say something about it means he accepts the statements as being valid,” she asserted. “And I think that is unfortunate.”