Lindsey Graham’s last moments were emblematic of the way he lived: in service. On his final Friday, he stood in Kyiv beside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and announced that the White House had agreed to advance his Russia sanctions bill. The next night, an aortic dissection killed him at 71. After the funeral on Tuesday, now that the eulogies have been delivered and the flags lowered, the question he would have posed is the one the rest of us must answer: How can we carry this legacy forward?
Graham understood duty because he had lived it long before he entered politics. He was commissioned as a judge advocate general officer in the United States Air Force in 1982 and served on active duty for more than six years, including a posting as the Air Force’s chief prosecutor in Europe at Rhein-Main Air Base in Germany. After leaving active duty, he joined the South Carolina Air National Guard and later the Air Force Reserve, where he continued serving for decades. Even after winning his Senate seat, he deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan during congressional recesses, working on detainee policy and rule-of-law issues in active conflict zones. He earned a Bronze Star for meritorious service and retired as a colonel in 2015, after 33 years in uniform. Most senators talk about supporting the troops. Graham was the troops.
That instinct to serve did not begin with a commission, but began with loss. Graham’s mother died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma when he was 21; his father suffered a fatal heart attack 15 months later. Graham, still in college, became the legal guardian of his 13-year-old sister. He described the experience as forcing him to grow up almost overnight and gave him a framework that shaped everything that followed: When people depend on you, you show up.
That framework explains why Graham’s record on Israel was structural rather than performative. He authored the Taylor Force Act, the law that cut American aid to the Palestinian Authority until it stops paying monthly stipends to the families of terrorists. He co-sponsored legislation targeting the “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” movement. He supported relocating the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. After Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, he organized a bipartisan congressional delegation to Israel within weeks and called for Hamas to be defeated “by any and all means necessary.” In his final weeks, he was brokering a Trump-backed push for Saudi-Israel normalization. These were not the actions of a man merely performing allyship; they were the actions of a man who believed that defending Israel is defending the principle that democracies deserve to survive.
The same conviction drove his work on Ukraine. Graham has visited the country 10 times since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Zelensky said Graham “was here with our people when it was most needed.” His Russia sanctions bill, which attracted 85 co-sponsors, would target countries helping Moscow evade Western sanctions. He championed maximum pressure on Iran, including crippling sanctions and credible military deterrence against its nuclear program. Graham saw Iran, Russia, and their proxies as a single interconnected threat, and he legislated accordingly because he understood that weakness in one theater invites aggression in every other.
As a Palestinian human rights activist, I have watched what happens when America retreats. I was born in the Old City of Jerusalem under Jordanian rule. My family was relocated to the Shuafat refugee camp in 1966 by the Jordanian government, not by Israel. The forces that made me a refugee were Arab. I have argued that ordinary Palestinians are trapped not by Israeli policy but by their own leaders: Hamas, which governs Gaza as a theocratic dictatorship; the Palestinian Authority, whose president is now serving the 21st year of a four-year term.
LINDSEY GRAHAM’S FUNERAL REAFFIRMED THE NATIONAL CATHEDRAL AS AMERICA’S WESTMINSTER ABBEY
When America is present, engaged, and willing to hold these actors accountable, ordinary Palestinians benefit. When America withdraws, the vacuum is filled by Iran, Qatar, and perpetual conflict that profits from Palestinian suffering. Graham understood that the world needs American leadership, not because America is perfect but because the alternative is a world shaped by Tehran, Moscow, and the men who turned Gaza into rubble and called it resistance.
Graham devoted his life to the proposition that American power, deployed in defense of allies, is a force for peace. The best way to honor that life is not with flags at half-staff but with action. The world Graham served is more dangerous without him, and it falls to the rest of us to prove that his example is a legacy, not an epitaph.
Bassem Eid is a Palestinian human rights activist. He lives in the West Bank.