JTA — Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina who was one of Israel’s staunchest supporters in Congress, has died at 71.

Graham was a paragon of an era when support for Israel and for robust US intervention overseas were emblems of bipartisanship and engineered one of the last displays of bipartisan solidarity with Israel.

In the days after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, he cobbled together a joint Republican-Democratic trip to Israel and said it typified how Americans viewed and supported the country.

“Ten percent of the United States Senate is in Israel,” Graham said at a Tel Aviv press conference on October 22, 2023. “Ten percent of the United States Senate is in Israel because we care. Five Republicans and five Democrats. If I had a bigger plane, we probably would have brought the entire Senate.”

Three years later, no one could convene such a show of solidarity, and Graham’s death means the Senate and Republican Party have lost one of its most durable pro-Israel voices at a time when anti-Israel sentiment is on the rise in both places.

In his more than three decades in Congress, first in the House and then in the Senate since 2003, Graham aggressively backed US aid to Israel, advanced a hawkish line on Iran and met repeatedly with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in both Israel and the United States.

Graham’s most recent visit to Israel was in February, ahead of the US-Israel war on Iran, which he later took credit for urging. “They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” he said of Israeli officials at the time.

Iranian media celebrated his death, which came a week after pro-regime Iranians held up placards with a target superimposed on a portrait of Graham at the funeral for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was slain in the initial joint US-Israel attacks.

Graham was a vocal backer of Israel’s military responses to attacks by Hamas, including during the 2014 Gaza War and after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that triggered the war in Gaza and augured a period of declining support for Israel. On October 8, he issued a statement calling for........

© The Times of Israel