In her 70-year reign, the late Queen Elizabeth never visited Israel. After her death, Reuven Rivlin was quoted as saying that 'our relations with the Queen were a little bit difficult because Her Majesty believed Israelis were terrorists'. The former president told an audience in London at an event commemorating the centenary of the Haifa Technology Institute that she refused to accept Israeli officials at Buckingham Palace unless it was an official international occasion.
According to the New York Times, the Queen once 'made sympathetic comments about the plight of the Palestinians'.
Her Majesty was old enough to remember the massacres carried out by the Lehi paramilitaries, terrorists by their own definition, who were to become, along with similar groups, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). She remembered the attack at the King David Hotel and the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948 in Israel by a Lehi posing as a soldier.
The Swedish monarchy has had similarly cool relations with Israel. Count Folke Bernadotte, was a member of the Swedish royal family and a diplomat who had negotiated with the Nazi Heinrich Himmler for the release of thousands of Jewish refugees.
Prince Charles made his first official royal visit to Israel in 2020 when he visited the grave of his paternal grandmother, Princess Alice, who had also helped Jewish refugees and had been recognised as a 'righteous of the nations'.
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