Paragon of a bygone era? With death of Lindsey Graham, Israel loses a stalwart ally

Republican senator organized a bipartisan trip to Israel shortly after October 7, saying at the time: ‘If I had a bigger plane, we probably would have brought the entire Senate’

JTA — Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina who was one of Israel’s staunchest supporters in Congress, has died at 71.

Graham was a paragon of an era when support for Israel and for robust US intervention overseas were emblems of bipartisanship and engineered one of the last displays of bipartisan solidarity with Israel.

In the days after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, he cobbled together a joint Republican-Democratic trip to Israel and said it typified how Americans viewed and supported the country.

“Ten percent of the United States Senate is in Israel,” Graham said at a Tel Aviv press conference on October 22, 2023. “Ten percent of the United States Senate is in Israel because we care. Five Republicans and five Democrats. If I had a bigger plane, we probably would have brought the entire Senate.”

Three years later, no one could convene such a show of solidarity, and Graham’s death means the Senate and Republican Party have lost one of its most durable pro-Israel voices at a time when anti-Israel sentiment is on the rise in both places.

In his more than three decades in Congress, first in the House and then in the Senate since 2003, Graham aggressively backed US aid to Israel, advanced a hawkish line on Iran and met repeatedly with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in both Israel and the United States.

Graham’s most recent visit to Israel was in February, ahead of the US-Israel war on Iran, which he later took credit for urging. “They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” he said of Israeli officials at the time.

Iranian media celebrated his death, which came a week after pro-regime Iranians held up placards with a target superimposed on a portrait of Graham at the funeral for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was slain in the initial joint US-Israel attacks.

Graham was a vocal backer of Israel’s military responses to attacks by Hamas, including during the 2014 Gaza War and after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that triggered the war in Gaza and augured a period of declining support for Israel. On October 8, he issued a statement calling for Israel to defeat Hamas “by any and all means necessary” and in the subsequent weeks drew attention for calling on Israel to “flatten the place.”

Graham continued to promote a two-state solution as it receded as a US priority, but he also adjusted to reflect the mounting isolationist and anti-Israel streaks in his party. Last year, he made news for embracing Netanyahu’s announcement of a plan to “taper” US aid to Israel, saying it should be done sooner than Netanyahu’s 10-year timeline. This spring, he publicly urged Israel to refrain from bombing Iran’s oil refineries.

In doing so, Graham was threading the needle between two allies in Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump, who was feeling heat over rising gas prices. The senator had initially opposed Trump’s rise, even running against him in 2015 ahead of the Republican primaries that year, but later became one of his closest confidants and supporters.

Graham represented the kind of Republican who appealed to Jews who were not among the majority who vote for Democrats, and even among some of those who did: a moderate who sought comity with Democrats, proposing compromise on abortion and immigration. Graham and other Republican moderates became relics with the ascent of Trump.

In recent years, he became an agent of reassurance to Republican Jews rattled by rising antisemitism in their own party and appalled at the apparent leaps and gains of the far right.

“I’m in the ‘Hitler sucks’ wing of the Republican Party,” he said last year at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference, to cheers.

“We will beat you politically,” he said, directing his comments to anti-Israel Republicans. “I want the world to know: Antisemitism, anti-Israel rhetoric, anti-Israel thought is not the road to being elected a Republican. You will lose.”

Graham initially excoriated Trump as disastrous for the party, even after his 2016 nomination was assured. “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed… and we will deserve it,” he said in a May 2016 tweet, even as a major Graham backer, the pro-Israel philanthropist Sheldon Adelson, was set to advise Republicans to rally behind Trump.

He soon embraced Trump, becoming a close adviser and a perpetual golf buddy. “It’s evolved because he is president of the United States, he beat me like a drum and I want to help him where I can because there’s a lot on this man’s plate,” Graham said in 2018 on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Still, there were lines Graham would not cross: He continued to support robust US backing for Ukraine in its war to repel Russia’s 2022 invasion, against Trump’s preference for the Putin regime. Just hours before his death, Graham was in Kyiv coordinating congressional sanctions against Russia.

Graham, who never married and had no children, was up for reelection in November. His outlook on Israel fit into a broad portfolio that included helming the Senate Budget Committee, pushing for a stronger US response to Russia and broadly advancing an interventionist foreign policy.

In the early 2000s, Graham joined with Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Jewish Democrat, in the early 2000s to promote a robust interventionist foreign policy. Dubbing themselves the “Three Amigos,” the trio traveled to war zones and tried to pitch US intervention in foreign conflicts as bipartisan at a time that Democrats — and much of the country — were souring on them. Graham was the last survivor of the group, following McCain’s death in 2018 and Lieberman’s in 2024.

The men were “an inseparable trio, and the best friends Israel and lovers of freedom ever had in the US Senate,” the Republican Jewish Coalition said in a statement responding to Graham’s death. “We are sure they are welcoming him at Heaven’s gate — but like all of us, thinking it tragic to join them now when he had so much more to accomplish here on earth.”