Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) vowed to attendees of the Christians United for Israel summit on Monday that “Not one dime of your money is going to [the U.N. Relief and Works Agency] as long as I’m in the U.S. Senate,” days after the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to extend the freeze on the U.N. agency with ties to Hamas and Oct. 7 perpetrators.

“I want to stand up to Iran before it’s too late,” Graham said in his keynote address at CUFI’s “Night to Honor Israel” event. 

The Republican lawmaker said that he plans to “introduce legislation that would say that any country who buys oil from Iran, we’re gonna put tariffs on your products if you sell them to us.”  Graham also intends to “introduce authorization to use military force to stop the Iranians from getting [a] nuclear weapon,” which he warned “they are close” to. 

“I am tired of just sitting on the sidelines and watching the Iranian regime run wild. … Let’s not only have Israel’s backs, but our own backs,” Graham said. 

“As a young man in South Carolina, I was raised to understand that God blesses those who bless Israel,” Graham said to applause from the more than 1,000 attendees, many of them evangelical Christians. “That’s my foreign policy.” 

Dr. Miriam Adelson, a mega donor to the Republican Party and widow of philanthropist Sheldon Adelson who also keynoted the event, said that Oct. 7 was the first time she “got a glimpse” of what it was like to be Jewish in Europe leading up to the Holocaust. “The Holocaust seemed distant, a reality I could never experience myself. And then came the Hamas atrocities,” she said. “What was not as shocking was the quiet complicity of much of the west [including] anti-war demonstrations that were really vessels of hate for the Jewish state.” 

Other speakers at the Night to Honor Israel — which concluded the panel portion of the conference before Christian attendees head to Capitol Hill to lobby on Israel’s behalf on Tuesday — included CUFI founder and chairman Pastor John Hagee. Orna and Ronen Neutra led a prayer for the return of their son, Omer Neutra, a 22-year-old from Long Island who remains in Hamas captivity.