Having visited some 117 countries during her reign, Elizabeth II did not, however, travel the entire globe, and among the forgotten are Israel and the Palestinian territories. The fact remains noted in the Jewish state. The left-wing Israeli daily Ha’aretz raised the issue as early as the 1980s, during a visit by Margaret Thatcher, and ended up qualifying this absence as “boycott”.
“The sad but inevitable conclusion is that[Elizabeth] is itself part of that wicked, petty British intrigue of denying Israel the vestige of legitimation that remains in their power to grant or deny a royal visit,” wrote a decade ago David Landau, former editor of the daily.
Elizabeth II ascended the throne four years after the end of the British mandate in Palestine, conquered during the First World War from the Ottoman Empire. During this quarter of a century, the United Kingdom had favored the establishment of a “Jewish home” there, before being driven out under pressure from the Zionist movement.
The absence of Elizabeth II was all the more noted as she traveled to the Arab world many times, notably to neighboring Jordan, in 1984. Assistant to British diplomacy, the queen seems to have strictly bound by the views of the British Foreign Office, which for decades considered that such a visit depended on progress in the peace process.
In 2018, the official visit of Prince William
But several members of the family went there well. Privately first, for her husband, Prince Philip. In 1994, he received the distinction of “Righteous Among the Nations” awarded posthumously to his mother, Alice de Battenberg. This original figure of the family had hidden a Jewish family at her home in Athens during the Second World War, then founded, once widowed, an Orthodox hospital community. Died at the side of her son, at Buckingham Palace, she rests in the Russian Orthodox Church of Saint Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives, in Jerusalem.
Prince Charles, reputedly attached to his grandmother, and who regularly attends gatherings of the British Jewish community, has for his part been more assiduous in Jerusalem. He went to the funeral of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, then to those of Shimon Peres in 2016 – without these trips including diplomatic meetings. He returned to Israel in 2020, among several dozen heads of state and government, for a World Holocaust Forum.
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