Benjamin Netanyahu pays tribute to Lindsey Graham, "a great friend of Israel" • FRANCE 24 English

One of the leaders that have paid tribute to Lindsay Graham is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. We can get more on that now with our correspondent Nogatana Polsky, who's standing by for us in Jerusalem. Good afternoon to you, Nogatana.

So we're hearing that Israel is, quote, stunned by the news. And there are even reports circulating that Benjamin Netanyahu is weighing attending the funeral. That's right, Jenny.

There are different reports, none of them completely official. Israel right now has entered a very particular political week, the last week before the summer session of the parliament ends. And therefore, Israel will enter an electoral footing.

So it might be difficult for the prime minister to travel. On the other hand, Prime Minister Netanyahu has been angling publicly for a meeting with Donald Trump now for several weeks. And so he might see this as an opportunity.

But as you said, Lindsay Graham was an extremely frequent visitor to Israel. He was very often seen here in Jerusalem. Sometimes, you know, he had barely left and there was a notification that he was back in town.

He was very, very active. And so Israel is stunned. And I would say almost like any other entity or country that he worked with so closely would be stunned at his unexpected death.

Yeah, he really was one of Israel's strongest U.S. Senate allies, wasn't he?

So tell us more about his ties, his relationship, if you will, with Israel. I think his relationship with Israel was multilevel and he always described it as starting with church in his home state of South Carolina. He was very fond of repeating the phrase that anyone who blessed Israel would be blessed and anyone who cursed Israel would be cursed.

But I think then his decades in the Air Force and the Air Force Reserves really imprinted on him a policy of an interventionist United States, especially interventionists on behalf of allies. And Israel really did fit into that Graham kind of point of view about what the United States should do in the world. It is an attitude, an interventionist attitude from the American right wing that is fading from U.S. political life.

But it should be noted that some of Donald Trump's switch, some of his what seems to be an about face, for example, regarding Ukraine, that he began attacking so forcefully and now seems to have come around on. Some of that really is attributed to Lindsey Graham's efforts to persuade Trump. So until the very end, I think we can say he was hugely influential and he was still exerting that influence on behalf of the U.S.-Israel relationship really until these very last days.

No, thank you.