Queen Elizabeth ‘saw all Israelis as terrorists’ claims former president Reuven Rivlin
Reuven Rivlin claimed Queen Elizabeth never invited Israeli officials to private meetings at Buckingham Palace but described King Charles as ‘so friendly’.
A former Israeli president has accused Queen Elizabeth of being anti-Israel, claiming she believed “every one of us was either a terrorist or a son of a terrorist.”
Reuven Rivlin, Israel’s 10th president, made the extraordinary claim at an event in London where he was being publicly honoured.
Mr Rivlin, 89, who was Israel’s president from 2014 – 2021, said he had a frosty relationship with the Queen and was never invited to meet her privately at Buckingham Palace.
“The relationship between us and Queen Elizabeth was a little bit difficult because she believed that every one of us was either a terrorist or a son of a terrorist,” Mr Rivlin told the audience of 300, Israel’s Jewish News reports.
“She refused to accept any Israeli official into [Buckingham] Palace, apart from international occasions,” he added.
Mr Rivlin made the comments at a gala event commemorating 100 years of Haifa’s Technion Institute of Technology, a leading research institute, where he received the 2024 Churchill Award, whose former winners include former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev and King Hussein of Jordan.
He compared the Queen with King Charles III whom he said was always “so friendly” when they met.
Asked later by Jewish News to clarify his remarks, he reportedly said: “These are my words, this is what I said.”
The Queen did not ever visit Israel during her 70 years on the throne, but had a strong relationship with Britain’s Jewish community. She elevated both Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits and his successor, the late Jonathan Sacks, to the peerage and conferred knighthoods on a number of other British Jews.
She also received several Israeli presidents during their visits to the UK, including Ephraim Katzir, who had tea with her at Windsor Castle in 1976, Chaim Herzog and Ezer Weizman.
On her death in 2022, current Israeli President Isaac Herzog remembered his father Chaim’s warm relationship with the Queen, saying his father and mother Aura Herzog met Queen Elizabeth several times.
“Her fond welcome and warm hospitality left a profound impression down the generations,” he said.
During a community breakfast event in London in November, Mr Herzog also joked that when his father met the Queen they both discussed being direct descendants of King David.
Prince William became the first senior royal to make an official visit to the country in 2018 when he attended the 70th anniversary of Israel’s independence. The Duke of Cambridge visited Tel Aviv, and Ramallah in the West Bank during a time of heightened tensions in the region after the US moved its embassy to Jerusalem.
In 2020 King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, made his first official trip to Israel, after twice visiting unofficially for the funerals of former prime ministers Shimon Peres in 2016 and Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.
During the 2020 visit, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, the King met Mr Rivlin who noted that he and other Israelis of his generation were born as subjects of Charles’ grandfather King George VI.
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