I have walked the halls of Congress with NORPAC four times, in 2008, in 2009, in 2015, and again this year. Eleven years separated the 2015 trip from this one, and Congress does not have the same vibe it did in the past.
But Graham's death is not the full story. The story is what his absence reveals about a coalition that was already thinning before he died.
On my earlier trips, meeting with Democrats required no special strategy. Support for Israel was the default position, so consistently that the handful of members who opposed it would not even take the meeting. NORPAC could walk into any Democratic office in 2008, in 2009, or in 2015 and talk about Israel on its own terms. This year the briefings were different: NORPAC had us orient many of our conversations with Democrats around a bill against antisemitism rather than around Israel itself, because that was the framing likeliest to get a sympathetic hearing. The shift in strategy is itself the data point. When an advocacy organization has to downplay Israel to reach half the aisle, the automatic bipartisan consensus that defined this mission for two decades has already broken.
Republicans have not made that shift, at least not yet. Every Republican I met this year was still overwhelmingly pro-Israel, Graham foremost among them. But the enthusiasm behind that support felt generational in a way it hadn't before, concentrated among members old enough to remember 1967, 1973, Entebbe, and the Osirak strike as lived history rather than as book history. Graham belonged to that cohort, a lawmaker whose support for Israel was built on decades of direct experience with the region rather than on inherited talking points. Losing him means losing not just a vote but a repository of institutional memory, and the members coming up behind him did not grow up with the same reference points.
None of this is uniform, of course. Richie Torres and John Fetterman remain as forceful on Israel as any Democrat in Washington, and lawmakers like them are critical because they show the default can still be resisted. But a default is still a default, and shifting a party's baseline takes years, not a single election cycle or a single strong voice pushing against the current.
What made Graham valuable was not simply that he voted the right way. It was that he could argue the case with the fluency of someone who had spent decades studying it, and that he did so with a passion that is increasingly rare on either side of the aisle. Replacing a vote is a matter of arithmetic. Replacing that combination of knowledge, credibility, and appetite for the fight is a lot more difficult.
We need to rethink how to support and defend Israel. Pro-Israel advocacy built its strategy for forty years on the assumption that new Grahams would keep arriving to replace the old ones. This year's trip was the clearest sign yet that the pipeline has slowed, and mourning the man without reckoning with what's drying up behind him would waste the one clarifying thing his death has handed us.
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Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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