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Israel woke on Sunday to a death notice from Washington.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, 71, died Saturday evening after what his office described only as a brief and sudden illness. No further explanation has been offered. Days earlier he had been in Kyiv with Volodymyr Zelensky, who says the two of them met twice last week.
On Sunday morning, he was booked on NBC’s Meet the Press. The prime minister went in his place to talk about him.
The tributes out of Jerusalem came fast, and they came from everyone at once, which is not what normally happens when a foreign legislator dies. Netanyahu said Israel had lost one of its greatest friends, and that he personally had lost a beloved one. Herzog called him a true friend of Israel. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called him the best senator and the best friend.
Graham co-authored the Taylor Force Act. He was among the loudest American voices arguing for Washington to join Israel’s campaign against Iran. He kept coming back here after October 7, again and again.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel gave The Jerusalem Post eighteen minutes on Sunday afternoon, a few hours after the news broke. I asked her what, concretely, Israel had lost overnight.
“We lost a real friend,” she said. “It would be very, very difficult to describe the friendship and the deep relationship and the commitment and the love that Senator Lindsey Graham had towards Israel. We owe a great debt to him.”
Twice she stopped mid-answer to reframe it the way she thought he would have wanted it framed. “First and foremost, his love and dedication was to America and the American people,” she told the Post. He simply understood, she said, that American strength meant keeping allies upright where they were already fighting America’s enemies, so that those enemies never reached American soil.
She kept coming back to two words. Moral clarity. Whatever the political price, she said, “he would always stand by what’s right.”
‘The vacuum of such a fearless voice’
Graham has died at an inconvenient hour. The Iran ceasefire is fraying and American strikes have resumed. Gaza is stuck: Hamas says it has dissolved its government but has not disarmed, and the ceasefire has not moved to its next phase.
So does his absence change where America stands?
Haskel did not say yes. She did not quite say no, either.
“I don’t know if it’s changed,” she said. “But in many difficult situations where there’s so much pressure and so much danger, it is so important to have these people who set the record straight, who no matter how much pressure there is, they know what’s right… and they’re not afraid to say it out loud. That’s very rare.”
Then, more plainly: “I don’t think things are going to necessarily change. But the vacuum of such a clear and strong voice, fearless voice, would be very, very missed.”
That was as close as she came to naming a gap.
I pressed her on the Taylor Force Act. The State Department found last year that the Palestinian Authority paid more than $200 million to terrorists and their families. The PA says the practice has ended. This paper’s reporting says it has not. Who in Washington enforces the law now?
She did not offer a name.
“It will be very, very difficult, whether it will be impossible literally, to replace him,” she said.
What she offered instead was Graham’s own argument, secondhand. Money is never neutral. “When America is investing in radical Islamism, in terrorists, they invest literally in the hatred towards America and in the enemies of America.” Money spent on allies, by contrast, comes back with a return. Israel supplied the proof during the Iran campaign, she said, standing with Washington “even when people turned away and did not help out.”
The officer
On Gaza, and on the wider question of how much military latitude Israel can still expect from Washington, Haskel reached for Graham’s biography.
He was a military man, she said. He was, in fact, Air Force: a colonel in the Air National Guard who reportedly spent his annual training stints in Afghanistan. That, she argued, gave him a realistic view of peace and security, and of war.
He knew war was ugly and worth avoiding. He also knew that a country facing an attempt at its annihilation has, in her words, “no other choice but to defend yourself.”
That realism is what she thinks is draining out of Western politics. In its place: populists who describe war “in somewhat of a romantic way,” and a younger generation she says weighs feeling over fact.
Both flanks
Then the harder question. Democratic support for Israel has been sliding for years. Now parts of the Republican base are drifting too, with Tucker Carlson and others openly attacking the Christian Zionism Graham built much of his career on. Is Israel losing ground on both sides at once?
Haskel refused the frame. She did not back away, either.
“I’m worried that the world is losing its tradition, its democratic nature, and its freedom,” she said. “That’s what I’m really afraid of.”
She named Carlson, and called him and others like him antisemites. “You hear how they demonize Jews, how they spread propaganda against Jews. It’s not about Israel, but about their hatred towards the Jewish minority.”
The left has travelled its own distance, she said, abandoning the minorities it claims to defend in order to chase “a trend and a fashion that was indoctrinated by media, social media, on university campuses.”
Her verdict on both flanks was identical, and she said it more than once: “It’s not dangerous to Israel. It is dangerous to American society, to the European society, to any democracy that respects itself.”
She would not be drawn into pessimism. “I do believe that the truth and the good will prevail,” she said. “We don’t have any other choice.”
The message
Finally: what does Jerusalem want to say to Washington today?
She started with the family, then widened it out. “This is a tragedy for the American people and the American nation,” she said. “And it is also a huge tragedy for us in Israel and for the entire world.”
“Lindsey Graham stood beside Israel, he stood beside Ukraine, he stood beside the Iranian people,” she said. “He was a beacon of light to us all.”
“He’ll be missed. May his memory be a blessing.”
She never said who picks up the file. But she probably didn’t need to. Washington, just like Jerusalem, today, is still digesting the shocking news.
