For decades, at every high-level meeting between Israeli and British leaders, there would come the moment where the Israeli side would bring up the long-standing invitation to the Queen to visit Israel.
The British side would mumble some empty formality in response and the meeting would continue. No one on either side expected matters to change. But as one Israeli diplomat said this week: “Of course we had to keep mentioning the invitation. It was a matter of national pride.”
The invitation came up again, as usual, when the new foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, arrived in March 2017. One participant in his meeting with President Rivlin — the then diplomatic advisor to the president, David Saranga — describes Mr Johnson as acting surprised that there had never been such a visit.
“He looked at his aides and just said, ‘What’s the problem? We’ll send someone’.”
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Meirav Michaeli
Israeli diplomats at the meeting have different theories as to whether Mr Johnson was truly taken aback (which would mean he was either not briefed properly or had failed to read his briefing papers) or was just feigning surprise and the change in policy had already been planned. Either way, the royal purdah ended at that moment.
Preparation began for what would become the first official royal visit to Israel, when Prince William arrived in June 2018. The next year, his father made his first official visit.
Mark Regev, then Israel’s ambassador to Britain, was also present. He says: “You can’t detach it from what was happening in the Israel-UK relationship.
Not just the fact of the pro-Israel approach of successive Conservative governments but also what I call ‘the Abraham Accords before the Abraham Accords’.
British ambassadors in Arab countries with which Britain has strong relations, especially in the Gulf, were already then hearing that they were growing much closer to Israel and that more openly warm ties between the UK and Israel wouldn’t harm British interests in the Arab world.”
Israeli officials involved in the relationship with the royal household over the years also ascribe a human factor to the change of tone. “Our engagements with Buckingham Palace were always very formal and proper,” says one former senior official in the president’s office in Jerusalem.
“When it came to congratulations on appointments and birthdays or condolences, there was always a very polite letter. But any attempt to go beyond that was almost always met with coolness.”
However, a change was immediately felt when the Queen, due to her age, began to travel abroad much less and the international face of the royal family became Prince Charles.
“Working with the Clarence House team was very different,” says one official who was involved in organising the two royal visits. “They were much more out-going and open to ideas.”
A former senior British civil servant agrees: “The change is partly to do with British foreign policy but there’s also a generational change. The royal courtiers used to be much more archaic when it came to Israel.
“Many of them would have come from the Foreign Office in the days when being ambassador in Tel Aviv was seen as a dead-end job, not like in recent decades when you’ve had high-flyers destined for the top getting the job.
“The same goes for those who come from the armed forces. Back in the day they would have been on training assignments to the Arab Legion.
"Nowadays they’re more likely to have been on exercises with the IDF and used Israeli weapons systems. The same goes for more courtiers who are coming nowadays from the private sector; for them, being friendly to Israel is perfectly instinctive.”
Welcome any time
The Israeli who probably spent the most time with Queen Elizabeth was the late President Chaim Herzog, who during his ten-year term met her on three separate visits to Britain.
While their conversations were convivial, one of the meetings was slightly fraught. It took place not long after the controversial royal trip to Jordan in 1984 where the Queen was reported to have called the sight of Israeli fighter-jets across the border “frightening” and a map showing Israeli settlements in the West Bank “depressing.”
In his diaries, President Herzog wrote that before his audience, he was asked by the Queen’s Private Secretary, Philip Moore, not to bring up the standard invitation to Israel.
The president refused but agreed to mention it in a less formal manner, saying she was “welcome any time in Israel”.
PM appointments
One thing Israel and Britain have in common is that it is assumed that while the Head of State formally appoints the Prime Minister, they have no say on the matter. For the Queen, this remained true last Tuesday.
In Israeli political history, which is just a bit longer than Queen Elizabeth’s reign, it has usually been as simple.
The president as head of state meets the party representatives and gives the mandate to form a new government to whichever candidate has been endorsed by a majority of MKs.
In the first 70 years, the only president who was forced to work behind the scenes was Chaim Herzog in 1984. Faced with a stalemate between Labour and Likud, he urged Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir to agree to a national unity government, where they would split the PM’s term.
His son, current President Isaac Herzog, may be required to do some deft manoeuvering of his own once the Israeli election is over.
This time round, it’s not just the continuing stalemate between the Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu camps. Assuming, as many of the polls suggest, that Benjamin Netanyahu gets most endorsements but fails again to form a majority, the question of who gets the mandate next from the president could be a thorny one.
At the time of writing, with just one more day to go until the Thursday deadline for filing candidate lists with the Central Election Commission, it seemed all attempts to convince the leaders of Labour and Meretz to merge their lists had failed.
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Zehava Galon
PM Yair Lapid had urged party leaders Meirav Michaeli and Zehava Galon to do so, rather than risk their parties falling beneath the threshold of 3.25 per cent. He even offered to add Labour and Meretz candidates to his own list. Ms Galon seemed amenable but Ms Michaeli refused, accusing Mr Lapid of trying to grow his party at Yesh Atid’s expense.
If Labour and Meretz do cross the threshold and Mr Netanyahu misses out on his majority yet again, there will still be a lot of bad blood on the centre-left.
Ms Galon has already said that Meretz will endorse Mr Lapid as the next prime minister after the election but Ms Michaeli’s support is far from secure.
She’s not going to announce Labour’s endorsement before the election as her strategy is to continue to pretend, at least for appearances, that Labour will become a party of power under her leadership.
After the election, she could choose to endorse another centrist, Benny Gantz, though his party, National Unity, is currently on course to receive only half the votes of Yesh Atid.
There is no law saying that the President needs to give the mandate to whomever has the most votes. Political convention is that they get the first crack but Mr Herzog could decide that the second chance goes to whoever has a better chance of actually forming a coalition.
Mr Gantz has been gearing up for such an eventuality, claiming that only he can get the strictly Orthodox parties to split with the Netanyahu bloc and even get some Likud MKs to defect.
President Herzog, who will be attending the Queen’s funeral on Monday, may well be reflecting that as far as appointing prime ministers goes, the British monarch has a much easier task.
