Royal rejection

While she has visited numerous Arab countries, the Queen of England has never been to Israel. Does her disinterest have anything to do with what happened here in 1948?

By TAL SHALEV
Queen Elizabeth II (521) (photo credit: Reuters)
Queen Elizabeth II (521)
(photo credit: Reuters)
Last week, President Shimon Peres celebrated his 90th birthday with a host of dignitaries.
As befitted the event and Peres’s status, the President’s Office staff worked long and hard to formulate a spectacular guest list that included former US president Bill Clinton, former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev and superstar Barbra Streisand.
However, in the end, the paparazzi didn’t have to work that hard, since not all those who had been invited to the party planned to attend. The Jerusalem Post was informed that earlier in the year, Peres’s office held discreet talks with the office of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, aka Prince William – the second in line to the British throne – and his wife Princess Kate, in an attempt to convince the royal couple to join in the birthday festivities and add a bit of tone to the party.
Unfortunately the crown prince was forced to decline politely. The official reason they gave was the event’s proximity to Kate’s due date.
In any event, the longing to have the highly publicized couple make an official visit to Israel stood a pretty low chance of realization. During the 65 years of diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Kingdom, a representative of the monarchy has yet to make an official visit to the Holy Land.
Queen Elizabeth II, who will soon celebrate 60 years since her coronation, has made more official visits around the globe than any other head of state in Britain’s history – yet she has never set foot in Israel.
British royalty have made only three-and-a-half trips to Israel, and these were described as “strictly personal visits only.”
And it’s not as if they never fly anywhere. Last year alone, in honor of the queen’s diamond wedding anniversary, the total number of trips she took was published. Since she was crowned in 1952, her majesty has made 261 official visits to 116 countries. And she has visited the Middle East more than once, traveling to Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Other members of the royal family made dozens of official visits last year as well. The queen’s oldest son, Prince Charles, also travels to the Levant every few years – either by himself or with a spouses. (He visited Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia with Princess Diana in the 1980s, and more recently Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman with his second wife, Camilla.) Over the years Israeli ambassadors in London have made efforts to clarify through both overt and quiet channels whether it would be feasible for Queen Elizabeth to make an official visit to the country, or at the least for Crown Prince Charles to come.
Peres, who received honorary knighthood from the queen in a majestic ceremony at Buckingham Palace, explained then that a visit from the queen was a complicated and difficult event, requiring 24 months of preparation. But, Peres said, he hoped that Charles would make a visit to Israel in the near future.
Eric Moonman, president of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain, said last year that Charles was actually quite interested in Israel’s ecological achievements and that we could expect a visit from him within the next three years. But the truth is – and this is known in both Jerusalem and London – it’s not really up to Elizabeth, Charles, William or Kate.
In Charles’s own words, uttered in response to a question the diplomatic corps put to him in the palace a few years ago: “They just won’t let me.”
CHARLES’S ANSWER is consistent with the palace’s official version: Official visits from the royal family are only made at the behest of the government. “This is not a case of the queen boycotting Israel, but of a queen who follows the instruction of the government to a “t.” Britain is a constitutional monarchy and the queen and her family never do anything that would violate their government’s policies,” says Prof. Jeffrey Alderman, a specialist in modern British history and Jewish-British relations.
“The queen is simply following government orders,” he says. “And it’s very clear that for various political and diplomatic reasons each government since Churchill has recommended not making an official visit to Israel.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry is also aware that Windsor Palace is not involved in making the decision of when a visit to the country should take place. The official stance is that state visits from a member of the royal family would be possible only once the Israeli- Palestinian conflict is settled.
“The key issue that needs to be settled before a state visit can be made is peace,” said Simon Macdonald, the British ambassador to Israel in 2006.
However, according to senior officials involved in relations with the British, the reason behind the boycott is a little more complex and fraught with a history between the two countries that remains highly charged.
The State of Israel was created on the heels of the British Mandate, which made a hasty departure. This period was characterized by periodic military and political struggles between the British Army and the Jewish community. The first years after the new Jewish state was established were rife with resentment and suspicion in light of the political, strategic and economic connections between the oil magnates in the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf and the British royal family, as well as Britain’s restriction on the sale of British weapons to Israel.
The Foreign Ministry still believes that one of the reasons for the British boycott is the UK’s desire to avoid controversy with London’s allies.
“In general, European royalty avoid visiting areas where tensions run high, and Israel is considered a very stressful place,” says Moshe Raviv, who was Israel’s ambassador to London in the 1970s. “And how much more so British royalty, given their heritage and their history with Israel. Still today, they feel guilty about the hasty retreat of the British from Palestine, and they feel partially responsible for not having created a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one.”
Despite the reduction in tension in the 1950s, Israeli diplomats note that British diplomats still tend to be pro- Arab.
“Israel has very few friends in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. No love is being lost there,” says London Mill Hill Rabbi Yitzchak Shochet, one of Britain’s Jewish leaders.
“Since the Arab Spring, the palace has become more aware of and even appreciates the special benefits of having a democracy like Israel in the Middle East. But this is most likely going to change soon, because Israel is always turned into the perfect scapegoat in this busy region. Syria is engaged in a civil war, Egypt is overwhelmed from the uprising, and Gaza is pure chaos – so let’s just blame Israel for all of this.”
EVEN WITHOUT the queen, the Israeli- Palestinian conflict has made things complicated in the United Kingdom where public opinion has consistently opposed an Israeli presence in the territories and the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Over the past decade, the UK has become a major center for Israel delegitimization activity around the world. The latest storm broke earlier this month when scientist Stephen Hawking announced that he would not participate in the President’s Conference. Although 10 Downing Street (the British Prime Minister’s Office) is making great efforts to emphasize that this is not official government policy, the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) organizations that call for the economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel in protest of the “occupation” are gaining momentum.
Until the mid-1980s the British boycott included the prime minister.
The Iron Lady (Margaret Thatcher) was the first one to break with tradition when, in 1986, she ignored Foreign Office advice and made an official visit to Israel. (While in Israel, asked when the queen would be visiting, Thatcher answered innocently, “I’m right here.”) Thatcher’s visit, as well as the temporary thaw in relations between Israel and the Palestinians following the signing of the Oslo Accords, led to a softening in the British diplomatic position. And the first visit to Israel by blue blood came just a few years later.
“Members of the royal family always consult with the foreign office before traveling abroad,” the official Buckingham Palace statement said about the first Israel visit by Prince Philip, the queen’s husband, in October 1994. “The foreign office felt that the time was right for a visit to Israel.”
And thus Philip, invited to the country by Yad Vashem, met with then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and president Ezer Weizmann, but without the formalities associated with governmental or official visits.
Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, himself has royal roots in the British, Danish and Greek royal families, as well as a connection to the Jewish people and Israel through his mother, Princess Alice.
Alice von Battenberg, born Victoria Alice Elizabeth Julia Marie, grew up in the royal courts of London and Paris, and as befitted her status, married Andreas, the prince of Greece. During the war years, she lived in her husband’s family’s palace in Nazi-occupied Athens. She worked with the Red Cross and in soup kitchens, and during the night she would tend to six Greek Jews who were in hiding.
For over a year, Alice sheltered Chaimki Cohen and his family in the palace in the center of Athens. Cohen was a former member of parliament who had a warm relationship with the Greek royal family.
Although the Gestapo questioned her on a number of occasions, Alice protected the family and personally took care of all their needs until Greece freed itself from the Nazi occupation. After the war, Alice formed a Greek Orthodox nursing order of nuns, she spent the last years of her life at Buckingham Palace near her son until she passed away in 1969 and was buried at Windsor Castle.
Before she died, Alice had one last request: to be buried in the Church of Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, next to her aunt, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna of Russia, killed in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918. Twenty years after her death, Alice’s last wish was fulfilled.
Her bones were flown to Israel and buried in Jerusalem in a ceremony that required Israel and the UK to coordinate diplomatic and religious arrangements with the Russian and Greek Orthodox churches.
When Alice’s bones were brought to Israel in 1988 the Foreign Office advised Philip not to attend. The event, however, exposed the history behind the princess’s rescue of the Cohen family, which outweighed diplomatic considerations, and in 1994, when Yad Vashem recognized Alice, Philip came to Jerusalem to plant a tree in her honor and to visit her grave.
“The Holocaust was the greatest tragedy in the history of the Jewish People, and it will forever remain in the Jewish collective memory. For this reason, this is a most meaningful tribute to the many thousands of non-Jews as well who, like my mother, identified with your suffering and did what little they could to ease the horrors,” Philip said at the ceremony.
About a year later, a representative of the Windsor family paid a visit to Israel: Queen Elizabeth sent Prince Charles to be present at the funeral of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. In the same year the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, also took a short vacation near the Kinneret during a private trip to Jordan.
Another decade passed with no royal visits until September 2007, when Elizabeth’s younger son, Prince Edward, came to Israel for a four-day visit. Edward, the Earl of Wessex, was invited by a Jewish-Arab youth organization, and his busy schedule included an unveiling at the University of Haifa, a fundraising evening with businessman Nochi Dankner, Shabbat dinner with Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger, and of course a tour of Yad Vashem and the tree planted in memory of his grandmother. But it did not include a meeting with either the prime minister or the president.
Buckingham Palace emphasized that it was purely “a private visit. Official visits are carried out at the request of the Foreign Office.”
In November 2007, just two months after the visit, it became clear that Israel should not expect another one following the embarrassing email exchange between two of Charles’s senior aides, which was leaked to the press. Earlier in the year, Israeli ambassador Zvi Hefetz invited the prince’s personal secretary Michael Pate and his deputy, Clive Alderton, for a four-day trip in Israel as guests of the Knesset. Apparently the two accepted the invitation, but the leaked email message that the British Jewish Chronicle published exposed a slightly different picture.
“Is it reasonable to assume that there is no chance that this visit would actually take place?” wrote the deputy secretary to his superior, and then complained about the Israeli minister’s overly insistent requests for the visit, saying that the purpose of the trip would be to prepare the groundwork for a visit from the crown prince.
“Accepting this invitation will make it difficult to prevent Israel from using their relationship with Charles to improve their international image. Anyway, let’s find a way to lower their expectations,” the email said.
The office of the prince did not deny that they had authored this email message, and just repeated the same response: “All of the Prince of Wales’ visits are arranged at the behest of the government.”
And what is known about the queen’s private views? Very little. During her six decades at court, Elizabeth has almost never expressed her own views on political and public issues, and she rarely gives interviews.
The other family members also tend to stay away from expressing their views in public. The queen, who prefers to spend her time watching horse races and attending to her corgi dogs, maintains relative stability in British public opinion, and as a result has enjoyed the support of Jewish community leaders who throughout history have kept close ties with the royal family.
Every Shabbat in the UK, worshipers in the synagogue pray for the well-being of the queen. Members of the royal family frequently participate in Jewish events and conferences and many of them have warm relationships with prominent community members.
The elegant way Elizabeth ignores requests for her to visit Israel is the only issue that draws criticism, but according to Jonathan Cummings, who until recently headed the organization Bayakum, the Jewish community is not inclined to pry into the royal visit issue.
“Just as the queen does not express her own private views, neither does the Jewish community,” he said. “In the past, a few times representatives of the community discreetly looked into the possibility of making an official visit, but this was done in complete secrecy.”
Similarly the royal visit is never included in routine diplomatic discourse between Israel and the UK, the Israeli Foreign Ministry says, since they are quite skeptical that an official visit will take place in the foreseeable future.
“This doesn’t affect the relationship between the two countries at all,” says Raviv, currently the chairman of the Yedid Lachinuch organization. According to him, “the bilateral diplomatic and commercial relations have continued as usual.”
The royal boycott, however, is discussed periodically by those who believe that if she really wanted to, the queen could have accepted one of the many invitations she has received to visit Israel.
“I’ve asked British officials many times about the refusal of the queen to visit Israel, and their answer, ’When there will be peace,’ is absolutely unacceptable,” says David Landau, the former editor of Haaretz, who also happens to be British.
“I am sure that this is not the full story, because they have made quite an effort to avoid making an official visit. There must be remnants of Britain’s hostility toward Israel since they insist on refraining from making this symbolic act of recognition and legitimacy,” he says.
In an article last year Landau wrote that “the wonderful, amazing and dedicated 86-year-old queen is not anyone’s puppet.
If she wanted to visit the Jewish state, or if one of her family members were to visit Israel, she would insist, and everything would happen just as she wanted them to.”
He called on her to “throw away these fetid delays and bring an end to the boycott.”
Landau believes that a visit by the royal family would significantly strengthen the struggle against the boycotts and the delegitimization in the UK. “The queen herself would not need to come. One of the crown princes, Charles or William, would also be warmly welcomed here.”
But as Peres’s people realized, even the best party in town could not tempt the Windsor family to make an exception. ■ Translated by Hannah Hochner.