Lindsey Graham died Saturday night the way he lived: mid-flight between crises that mattered to him. He had just returned from Kyiv, where he sat with Volodymyr Zelensky. Days before that, he was in Jerusalem, telling Prime Minister Netanyahu that Israel’s fight was America’s fight. He was 71. He was not supposed to go this soon, and Washington, Jerusalem, and the small circle of people who actually do the hard work of keeping this alliance intact are all poorer for it this morning.
I knew Lindsey for years, across multiple administrations and more crises than either of us could count. What set him apart was not that he supported Israel – plenty of senators say they support Israel. It was that he never let it be theoretical. When Hamas massacred 1,200 people on October 7, Graham did not wait for consensus to form. He said, immediately and without hedging, that Israel should be given everything it needed to finish the job. When European allies wavered, when parts of his own party began drifting toward isolationism, when a foreign sovereign wealth fund moved to divest from companies tied to Israel, Graham picked up the phone. He made himself unpopular in rooms where popularity would have been easier. That was the whole point of him.
He was blunt in a way official Washington rarely allows itself to be. “Israel does more for us than anyone in the region,” he said – not as a talking point, but as a settled fact he had reached after decades of watching the Middle East up close. He understood, long before it was fashionable, that a strong Israel is a strategic asset to the United States, not a liability to be managed. He backed the embassy move to Jerusalem before it happened. He fought for security assistance without the conditions some in his own government wanted to attach. He pushed, relentlessly, for an Israeli-Saudi defense treaty, believing – correctly – that formal Arab-Israeli alignment against Iran was the only durable path to regional stability.
And he never let Iran off the hook. Not after the 2015 nuclear deal he opposed from the start, not during this year’s confrontation, not ever. He called the regime in Tehran what it was and said plainly that its collapse would be a gift to the region’s future. He was one of the very few in the Senate willing to say that out loud, on the record, year after year.
I will remember him as someone who treated the US-Israel relationship as a living obligation, not an inherited slogan. He showed up. He went to Israel again and again, including in the darkest weeks after October 7, when a visit from an American senator meant something beyond the photograph. He picked fights he did not need to pick because he thought they were right. In a Washington that increasingly treats support for Israel as negotiable, Lindsey Graham never negotiated.
South Carolina has lost its senator. America has lost a patriot. And Israel has lost one of the very few people in that building who never made it feel alone. My condolences to his family, his staff, and everyone in Jerusalem and Washington who counted on him – and who now have to carry that work forward without him.
Yehi zichro baruch. May his memory be a blessing.
Harley Lippman is a businessman and philanthropist who has been appointed to a diplomatic role by every president since George W. Bush, advancing US interests around the globe.