Lindsey Graham

Lindsey Graham has represented South Carolina in the U.S. Senate since 2003, bringing to Israel advocacy something most of his colleagues cannot: two decades of military service. Born in Seneca, South Carolina, in 1955, Graham earned his law degree from the University of South Carolina and served in the U.S. Air Force from 1982 to 1988, continuing in the Air National Guard until 1995 and retiring as a Colonel. He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal in 2014. That military background — combined with his senior position on the Senate Armed Services and Appropriations committees — has given Graham unique institutional authority to shape U.S.-Israel defense cooperation at both the policy and funding levels. He was the first person in South Carolina history to receive more than one million votes in a general election, in 2008.

Graham's pro-Israel legislative record is extensive and bipartisan. He co-sponsored the Taylor Force Act, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, and the Combating BDS Act; supported the Jerusalem embassy move; and in 2024 organized a coalition of twelve Republican senators to formally condemn the Biden administration for withholding weapons deliveries to Israel, calling the restriction a betrayal of a wartime ally. Graham has traveled to Israel multiple times since October 7, 2023, and has delivered some of the most quoted statements in American-Israeli relations — among them, "I will be with Israel until our dying day," delivered from the Senate floor in 2024.

In April 2026, Graham used his South Carolina reelection primary campaign as a platform to make antisemitism a disqualifying test for Republican candidates, publicly demanding that two primary challengers fire staffers with documented antisemitic records. "One anti-Israel party is enough in America," he told a Greenville rally, signaling that he views pro-Israel commitment not as a niche foreign policy position but as a defining marker of the Republican mainstream. His willingness to take on his own party's isolationist wing — while facing a primary — cements his rank as one of the most consequential pro-Israel voices in the Senate and in the Iron 100.