Texas Senator Ted Cruz, one of the most pro-Israel members of the U.S. Senate, is set to announce his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President in the 2016 elections, the Houston Chronicle reported Sunday. According to the paper, the Tea Party favorite is ready for the fray, and will be the first candidate to announce, hoping to sew up conservative Republican support and receive the party's nomination as its presidential candidate.
Although media pundits have consistently downplayed his chances, calling Cruz an outlier for his conservative views on a wide array of social issues, the report said that Cruz had done a great deal of exploratory work, including internal polling, and believes that he can garner votes from both economic and social conservatives and achieve the nomination.
Cruz is set to speak at a Virginia college Monday, and it is there he is expected to make his announcement, sources in his camp said.
Cruz has emerged as a strong supporter of Israel in recent years. Speaking earlier in March before Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's Congressional speech on the Iranian nuclear program, Cruz said that the deal the U.S. was negotiating with Iran on its nuclear program “would be a historic mistake on the same order as Munich. To allow the theocratic extreme mullahs in Iran to have nuclear weapon capability increases dramatically the likelihood that those weapons of great destruction will be used to murder billions," he said, panning U.S. President Barack H. Obama for refusing to meet with Netanyahu on the matter.
Speaking to Arutz Sheva at an Israel Day event in New York City last June, Cruz said that “"the friendship between Israel and America is and should be unbreakable," and branding "the prospect of Iran gaining nuclear weapons capability" as "the gravest threat to both" countries.
Cruz also branded the Palestinian Authority unity pact between Fatah and Hamas as "highly highly disturbing" and "a serious impediment to any lasting peace." Peace would only be reached when there were "two parties who will negotiate in good faith", he asserted, but added that Mahmoud Abbas's decision to embrace Hamas - which calls for the destruction of Israel and a genocide against Jews - clearly meant that was not the case.