Jewish tradition notices when a person leaves the world on Shabbat. Every Shabbat afternoon at Mincha, we recite Tzidkatcha, three verses accepting God's judgment, in memory of the three righteous men who, tradition teaches, died on Shabbat: Joseph, Moses, and King David. The Midrash tells that the Angel of Death could not touch David so long as words of Torah were in his mouth. The Zohar teaches that even Gehinnom rests on Shabbat. I am not in the business of handing out Jewish honors to a Southern Baptist from South Carolina. But a man whose entire foreign policy came out of the Book of Genesis left this world on the day Genesis calls blessed and holy, and I noticed.
In Israel we know maybe five American senators by name. Lindsey Graham was one of them, and for a reason. He came here in wartime, repeatedly, when the airport was half empty. He went to Beirut to tell the Lebanese to their faces to disarm Hezbollah. He said things about our enemies that our own officials only say off the record. Israelis treated him the way we treat American support in general: as weather. Something that is simply there.
The last time I sat with him was on a Friday in Las Vegas last fall, at the Republican Jewish Coalition summit. His team put us in a small room off the main hall. Senators at these events give you eight minutes and a handshake. Graham gave me as much time as I needed, and his office later wrote that he had sincerely enjoyed the conversation. I believed it. He argued like a man having fun.
He also looked worried and tired.
The worry surprised me. I assumed that in that crowd, the most pro-Israel Republican gathering in America, he would back annexation or at least shrug that it was coming. Instead: "If you want to marginalize the Jewish state, go down that road. It will do more damage to Israel's future than any bomb Iran could ever build." Then he said, "To be pro-Israel, you need to be honest with Israel."
Days earlier, a very senior Israeli official, a man of the Right, had told me privately that pushing sovereignty in parts of the West Bank right now was simply not feasible. Graham said the same thing without being asked. When Israel's fiercest friend in the Senate and a senior figure on the Israeli Right land in the same place, that is worth reporting.
None of it made him soft. In the same conversation, he compared Hamas to a tiger that cannot change its nature and said that if no international force showed up to disarm it, "it will fall on Israel." On the Israel-skeptics rising in his own party: "Seventy-five beats twenty-five." It is one thing, he said, to flirt with white nationalists on a podcast in a basement. It is another to sell that to voters in South Carolina.
Where did Graham's love for Israel come from?
Where did all of it come from? Graham was a Southern Baptist, a member of Corinth Baptist Church in Seneca, South Carolina. By his own admission, he got to services about three times a year, and congregants knew him for slipping in after the opening hymn and out before the last prayer. He did not preach, and he said he would tolerate no national religion in America even though he was a Christian.
His support for Israel was not end-times prophecy. It was Genesis, read the way it is read in a South Carolina pew: I will bless those who bless you. At a Christians United for Israel summit two years ago, he said it in one sentence: "God blesses those who bless Israel, and that's my foreign policy." Not complicated, he added. As far back as 2014, he was warning that if America turns its back on Israel, God will turn His back on America.
By last summer it was the version everyone knows: "If America pulls the plug on Israel, God will pull the plug on us." That is diplomacy through faith, and it moved real weapons, real vetoes, and real money for decades. Israelis have never properly studied it, and we have certainly never properly said thank you for it.
He said these things to this newspaper for years. In June 2024, he told the Post's Tovah Lazaroff that Iran must be held accountable for Hezbollah's attacks, warning that American hesitation would read in Tehran as "weakness and timidity" and end in a nuclear breakout. This past December, he told our correspondent Amichai Stein in Washington that Mohammed bin Salman would not recognize Israel without a better outcome for the Palestinians, "or he will get killed." In February, days after a quarter of a million Israelis rallied against the Iranian regime, he was in Tel Aviv telling the Post the regime was at its weakest point since 1979.
Will there be another Lindsey Graham?
So here is the question I have been unable to shake since Motzaei Shabbat: will there be another Lindsey Graham?
I doubt it, and that should worry Israelis far more than it currently does. Graham came from the generation of his closest friend, John McCain, Christian Reaganites for whom standing with Israel required no argument. McCain is gone. Now Graham is gone, mid-campaign, still arguing.
The young Right replacing them is the one Graham himself described: the podcast Right, the basement Right, the one that thinks the Jews get America into trouble. Seventy-five still beats twenty-five, but seventy-five is the harvest of pews like the one in Seneca, and those pews are emptying. The pro-Israel America we rely on is not infrastructure. It is people, and the people are dying.
Israelis are raised to believe we depend on no one, and on our worst days we half believe American support is owed to us. It is not. It was built, senator by senator, pastor by pastor, and it can be unbuilt by nothing more dramatic than a generation failing to replace itself. If there is an Israeli lesson in Graham's death, it is this: the evangelical Christians who carried this alliance deserve more from us than a handshake at conferences. They deserve investment, relationships, and gratitude, in their churches and in our schools, before the last of them leaves the stage.
Graham gave his whole life to public work. A boy from a pool hall in Central, South Carolina, orphaned in his twenties, raising his 13-year-old sister alone. He never married. His family was his sister, his state, and, as I saw up close in a small room in Las Vegas, this country too.