Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu sat on the same row in Washington National Cathedral this week to bid farewell to Republican US senator Lindsey Graham. But, for the two leaders, Graham’s funeral was also an opportunity for private talks at the White House with Donald Trump.

Graham was a passionate supporter of both Ukraine and Israel. A notable foreign policy hawk when it came to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Graham was instrumental in pushing through the latest round of sanctions, which the Senate passed in his honour on the day of the funeral.

If he was hawkish on Russia he was positively militant in his support for Israel. “I’ll stand with Israel until the day I die. It is our greatest ally,” Graham told the Jerusalem Post in an interview just a few months before his death. Video footage released this week showed him reacting rapturously to the bombardment of Iran on February 28. “Look what we’ve done here,” he said. “I almost cried. I mean, how long have we been pushing this?”

As David Dunn and Stefan Wolff, international affairs experts at the University of Birmingham, put it: “Summit meetings on the fringes of funerals … have a long and useful tradition.” It was a meeting on the sidelines of Pope Francis’ funeral in April 2025 that enabled Zelensky to reset his relationship with Donald Trump, just two months after their notorious Oval Office confrontation.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the two leaders’ meetings with the US president were “positive and productive”. But, as Dunn and Wolff observe, the atmosphere in the Oval Office was likely to be far chillier for Netanyahu than for Zelensky.

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