Steven Woodhead 🇨🇦

In 1995, an American president needed two Hebrew words to bury an Israeli prime minister. In 2026, Israel needs the same two for a Baptist son of a South Carolina pool hall: Shalom, chaver. Israel has lost its greatest friend on Capitol Hill, Senator Lindsey Graham. That isn’t an exaggeration; it’s the consensus of the Israeli opposition and coalition, who rose in unison this morning to eulogize the beloved senator. Born and raised in his beloved South Carolina, Graham grew up living in a cramped room behind his parents’ combined pool hall, bar and liquor store. Later becoming a lawyer and enlisting in the U.S. military, he entered Congress in 1995, becoming the first Republican to represent South Carolina’s 3rd District since Reconstruction. In 2003, he moved up to the Senate, where he and John McCain became a trio with Joe Lieberman—dubbed the “Three Amigos” by Gen. David Petraeus on one of their endless trips to Iraq and Afghanistan. Hawks, travelers and crossers of aisles for wars worth fighting. Especially Israel’s. Sander Gerber, his partner on the Taylor Force Act, once quipped that the senator was “more pro-Israel than AIPAC,” while Christians United for Israel counted him among Israel’s most stalwart allies in Congress. His evangelical base—a pillar of both South Carolina politics and American Zionism—wasn’t a constituency he courted so much as one he belonged to. Addressing AIPAC’s annual dinner on March 22, 2010, he told the room the evening was about “our best friend in the world, the State of Israel”—and had every member of Congress present stand while he pledged that Congress had Israel’s back and would not let it down. In the same speech, he declared Jerusalem the undivided capital of Israel and the eternal home of the Jewish faith, said it was sometimes better to go to war than to allow a second Holocaust to develop, and closed with “never again.” He more than lived up to the commitment. From Obama’s JCPOA—which he fought—to Donald Trump’s short-lived rapprochement with Tehran this past month, through the Taylor Force Act, the anti-BDS legislation, the embassy move and the Golan recognition he personally championed, Graham operated on a single axiom, the one the Hebrew press identified this morning as his signature line: Israel’s security is America’s security. He applied it without exception. In 2013, he threatened to sink Chuck Hagel’s nomination as the most anti-Israel defense secretary in American history; in December 2014, standing in Jerusalem beside Netanyahu, he promised on Iran sanctions that “the Congress will follow your lead”—a sentence no other American senator would say to a foreign leader, and Graham said it on camera. Just 15 days after the October 7 massacre, Graham was in Tel Aviv leading a bipartisan delegation—noting that “10 percent of the United States Senate is in Israel.” Destroying Hamas, he made clear, was nonnegotiable, and he had stark words for Tehran: “We’re here today to tell Iran, we’re watching you”—if the war grew, it was coming to their backyard: “There won’t be two fronts, there will be three.” He told the room exactly why it had happened, insisting no one would ever convince him the massacre was about anything but stopping reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Israel—the very normalization project he had spent the preceding months building. He wasn’t shy about Biden’s flip-flopping either. When the administration threatened to withhold weapons over Rafah, Graham hauled Lloyd Austin before the Armed Services Committee and asked whether he’d have supported Hiroshima and Nagasaki—then demanded to know how Washington could dictate terms to a country whose neighbors want to kill all the Jews. He called Biden’s approach “ass-backwards.” When the ICC prosecutor moved on Israeli leaders, his warning was five words of pure Graham: “If they do this to Israel, we’re next.” When Israel launched Operation Rising Lion on June 13, 2025, his reaction was five words: “Game on. Pray for Israel.” The tweet drew fury from all directions—including from Meghan McCain, his late best friend’s daughter, who informed him it was not a game—but it was, in its way, the most honest sentence of the war: the fight he had demanded since at least 2010 had finally arrived, and he was not going to pretend otherwise. By August, he was telling South Carolina Republicans that if America pulls the plug on Israel, God will pull the plug on us. By 2026, per The Wall Street Journal, he was shuttling to Jerusalem to coach Netanyahu on making the case for war to Trump. In January, no sooner had he disembarked than he posted: “I just landed in Israel, the one and only Jewish State, and America’s strongest ally and friend since its founding.” He returned once more in February 2026—Netanyahu, Defense Minister Katz, the General Staff—the final visit of several dozen across the decades. In March, amid the MAGA backlash over the Iran war, he gave the line that now reads as a valediction: “I will be with Israel until our dying day.” Far too soon, that day arrived. It found him the same as always: back from an ally’s capital, stalwartly defending a country’s right to freedom and safety, and scheduled for Sunday television to explain why.