The journalists’ more deferential counterparts back in the UK would never ask such questions, she sternly told us.
We were treated to a litany of the protocols we would have to observe.
Questions were strictly not to be raised with Prince Philip about Charles and Camilla. Nor should there be questions about Philip’s sister, Princess George of Hanover, who was accompanying him on his visit and who rather unfortunately had been married to a Luftwaffe pilot.
All the British hacks, to my amusement, left the briefing kicking and sulking.
We had a saying in those days — “You know you’ve been in Israel too long when…” — and it felt appropriate here: I had just witnessed the Israelification of a large chunk of the British press.
But what was Prince Philip doing in Israel in the first place? The answer lay in the dark days of the Second World War and the heroic, wholly unexpected actions of his late mother, Princess Alice of Greece.
In 1943, she made a life-changing and potentially life-threatening decision: to take a Greek Jewish woman, Rachel Cohen, and two of her five children into the royal apartments to hide them from the Nazis. She sheltered them for a year until liberation.
For that action, Alice was to be honoured as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. Prince Philip and his elder sister, Princess George of Hanover, were visiting Israel in 1994 to accept the award.
It was claimed Princess Alice suffered from severe mental health problems after the Second World War but, as she was profoundly deaf, she may very well have been misdiagnosed.
For the last 20 years of her life she lived as a nun whose dying wish was to be buried in Jerusalem.
She died in 1969 but burying her in the city did not prove possible until 1988, following prolonged negotiations between Israel and the Greek and Russian Orthodox Church authorities. Eventually her coffin was brought to the ornate onion-domed Russian Orthodox church of St Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives and interned in a space in the doorway of the church.
At her wish, she was laid to rest near the body of her aunt Elizabeth, cousin of the last Tsar of imperial Russia.
Advice from the Foreign Office had prevented Philip from attending that ceremony, meaning the 1994 visit was to be the first time he saw his mother’s new grave.
Her son, journalists were instructed, would arrive at the church with his sister, but only one reporter would be allowed inside to take notes on behalf of the rest of the press.
This pool arrangement is standard FPA practice for big press events; and it was none other than the Jewish Chronicle that would be the eyes and ears of the international journalists.
That was why I later found myself explaining the Russian Orthodox order of service to the Daily Mail’s hotshot foreign correspondent, Dame Ann Leslie, who flew out especially for the occasion.
I told a Haaretz reporter how Prince Philip walked through the church and the throngs of monks and nuns, characteristically with his hands behind his back.
“Did he show any emotion?” the reporter asked and I had to explain that in those days prior to Princess Diana’s death, no member of the Royal family showed emotion about anything.
The travelling circus then moved onto the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery at Ramle, where the “bad behaviour” of the British press really caught fire.
I remember journalists shouting questions towards Philip about the state of Charles and Diana’s marriage as he strode among the graves, pretending he couldn’t hear what was being said.
Those days of presumed deference are long over now but Prince William’s much-anticipated visit is likely to be just as tightly stage-managed by Kensington Palace and the Foreign Office.
How I would love to be there.
