Nikki Haley: 'If America won’t (stop Iran) then Israel must – and we should help them'

The Abraham Accords and Iran topped the agenda this week at the Christians United for Israel’s (CUFI) 17th annual Washington Summit, which also featured a presidential hint by former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.

“Iran will keep cheating to get what it wants. Anything (President) Joe Biden signs will all but guarantee that Iran gets the bomb. No deal is better than a bad deal – and if this president signs any sort of deal, I’ll make you a promise,” Haley continued, “the next president will shred it on her first day in office.”

After raucous applause she added, “Just sayin’ – sometimes it takes a woman.”

Haley also expressed full support for Israel doing what it must to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.

“If America won’t then Israel must – and we should help them,” she said. “These threats are real and they are serious. But my faith tells me that Israel will survive.”

CUFI is the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States, with 7.1 million members, according to its website. This week, at “A Night to Honor Israel” – which is part of the annual CUFI summit – CUFI Founder and Chairman John Hagee said that “Jews and Israel are synonymous.”

“You cannot love one without loving the other. Anti-Zionism is anti-Israel, it is anti-Semitic,” he said.

Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Michael Herzog echoed these sentiments saying that he considers it part of his mission “to combat these dangerous trends here in America.”

Anti-Semitism, he said, has found a home among anti-Zionists in the U.S.

“These anti-Zionists imply, and often openly state, that the Jewish people do not have a right to a state of their own – a blanket denial in Israel’s right to exist.”

Herzog also emphasized the importance of “a coordinated strategy… to push back against Iran’s malign activities.”

“Israel will not tolerate Iran as a nuclear threshold state. We will maintain our freedom of action to block Iran from realizing its malign goals,” he said.

One of the weapons against Iran is the expansion of the Abraham Accords.

“Relations between Israel and the U.S. as well as relations between Jews and Christians specifically...will push back against those forces threatening us.”

In a pre-recorded address, Bahrain’s Ambassador to the U.S. Sheikh Abdullah bin Rashid Al-Khalifa said his nation and CUFI “share enough ideals and priorities to make it obvious that we should work more closely together.”

Even with some disagreements, he said, the “children of Abraham are able to sit together with respect even if not in true agreement.”

We have “common principles that steer our moral compass,” he said, and nothing today can “justify such toxic, Neanderthal behavior such as anti-Semitism.”

He also said that the Abraham Accords “were a public proclamation as opposed to a starting point” to warming relations between Bahrain and Israel.

“Our dialogue with the Jewish people goes back much further,” he said. “Our communications with Tel Aviv have merely been brought into the spotlight.”

In her keynote address, Haley outlined a scathing critique of Biden’s foreign policy and correlated America’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and threats from North Korea and Iran. These nations, she said, drew strength from perceived U.S. weakness and its lack of presence in the region.


“When Bagram fell, the ayatollahs celebrated,” she said referring to the U.S. military base in Afghanistan.

She also said Biden’s approach toward Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been misguided.

“The crown prince is in his 30s – he will outlast most leaders in the world. We need to work with him not insult him,” she said. “The truth is, (Biden) has been tougher on Saudi Arabia than he’s been on Iran.”

"No wonder the Saudis are making friends with Russia and China instead,” she said. “The ayatollahs’ No. 1 defeat is America, Saudi Arabia and Israel working together.”

In an interview with Israel’s i24NEWS on Monday, Haley said that the drop in support for Israel among American Christians concerned her. 

“I want everybody to love Israel as much as I love Israel, I want everyone to see that it’s a bright spot in a tough neighborhood that represents democracy and freedom and all that is great and so yes, it concerns me but I don’t think we can’t recover from it,” she noted. “We have to remind everyone why Israel matters, why the American-Israeli alliance is so strong and why it needs to continue to be strong.”