Ron DeSantis highlights Disney fight in Jerusalem

Gov. Ron DeSantis returned to Israel Thursday, speaking at the Jerusalem Post’s Museum of Tolerance event.

But despite the aspirational setting, his remarks against one in-state company stopped somewhat short of tolerance.

The Governor brought the domestic fight against one company to the Celebrate the Faces of Israel Conference, where he denounced Disney in his first remarks since the company filed a lawsuit against Florida Wednesday.

“That arrangement was not good for the state of Florida. We did not think that that should continue. So we now have brought accountability. And so the idea that somehow being pro business means giving companies their own governments, that is not what a free market is all about,” DeSantis said, in footage shown on Fox and Friends Thursday.

“They’ve been treated much different than Universal, Sea World and all these other places. They don’t want to have to pay the same taxes as everybody else and they want to be able to control things without proper oversight,” DeSantis lamented.

The Disney/DeSantis beef is headed toward federal court, with the company seeking legal recourse for the state’s moves to invalidate its development deal struck in the final days of the Reedy Creek Improvement District that governed the park’s business from 1967 until this year. The company calls it a “targeted campaign of government retaliation.”

Beyond the Disney diversion, DeSantis offered a faithful and uncritical overview of Israeli history and “maintaining a democracy in the Middle East” in formal remarks.

He referenced “challenges” from neighbors in the region, “Palestinian Arab terrorism,” the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement (“DOA” in Florida), and “the Islamic regime in” Iran.

DeSantis lauded Jerusalem as the “eternal and indivisible capital of the Jewish people,” reminding those in attendance of their history, touching on the Balfour Declaration, David Ben-Gurion and Winston Churchill in delineating the country’s struggle against “powerful Arab armies who wanted to snuff out the country in its infancy” to become a “national homeland for the Jewish people.”

DeSantis compared the city of St. Augustine’s history, which seemed ancient to him in Congress, to Israel’s history which extends millennia back before that. And he offered familiar anecdotes, including his story of how baptismal water from the Sea of Galilee was lost when he moved into the Governor’s Mansion.

“There’s people that come clean up after .. and all they saw was a half used bottle, they didn’t know the difference,” DeSantis lamented.

Luckily, once DeSantis mentioned that at a Boca Raton synagogue, “within 24 hours there were people digging into the Sea of Galilee,” which faciliated young Mamie’s baptism.

DeSantis also stressed his own role in “trying to cajole” the Donald Trump administration into moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, including participation with a “small delegation” of Congress members to scout sites.

“I chaired a major Congressional hearing in 2017 leading up to the decision,” DeSantis noted, citing the importance of “religious sites” amid “Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem,” which he said allows for free worship among faiths.

The Governor stressed common enmity for Iran as something the U.S. and Israel “share,” warning of their “pursuit of nuclear weapons” and “apocalyptic ideology” as an “existential threat” to Israel and a “threat” to the U.S. itself.

DeSantis also noted that in 2019 he put a prayer in the Western Wall during his trip, which preceded a catastrophic hurricane that turned away from Florida.

“I’m chalking it up to the prayer I put in the Western Wall,” DeSantis said to applause.