Nship between Israel and UK’
Charles only had one full day in Israel but tried to make sure that he got a broad picture of the country.
He went to meetings with technology innovators, including Hossam Haick of the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), where he is developing an “electronic nose” that can detect diseases including cancer. By the evening he was so impressed by Israeli brainpower that he remarked: “It seems to me like Israeli genius is maintaining the entire structure of the NHS.”
Charles expressed an interest in Jewish history. Before leaving the museum he went to see two Diaspora synagogues that have been reconstructed there and spent far longer than scheduled in the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit.
Adolfo Roitman, the academic who guided him around the scrolls, said: “The Prince was fascinated to see an original document, especially when I dated it to 100 years before Jesus.”
They discussed the importance of ancient Judaism to Christianity. “I said that John the Baptist and Peter and Paul were part of Second Temple Judaism and this makes the scrolls very important to Christianity,” Dr Roitman reported.
Prince Charles and Israeli President Reuven Rivlin planting a tree at the presidential residence.
Prince Charles laughed when Dr Roitman used a modern media analogy to explain how the Dead Sea Scrolls challenged some of the assumptions about Jewish history that came from the Talmud.
“I said it’s like we only had CNN before we had the scrolls, and now we have the CNN version and the Fox News version.”
By the end of the day, when Charles arrived at a reception at the Ramat Gan home of British ambassador Neil Wigan, some well-known Brits were elated that his first official visit had ticked so many boxes. Lord Polak has spent years calling for a royal visit and said that the fact both Charles and Prince William have now come “cements the relationship.”
Lord Polak commented: “I said it was a slur on the relationship between the two communities [that they had not visited]. Everybody talks about a positive relationship but royals never acknowledged this by coming here. I’d always said it was a stain.”
The guest-list for the reception captured the ethos of coexistence that Charles had promoted during the day. Shortly before he arrived, Yusef Matta, Archbishop of the Greek Catholic Church in Holy Land was chatting at a table with a rabbi and a Druze leader.
Mr Matta said he saw the reception and Charles’ visit as a “symbol of fraternity and humanity.” The Druze leader Mofaq Tarif echoed his comments — and said he was excited to see Charles as his community has maintained ties with the British since the Mandate era,
Charles has not commented on why an official visit was so long coming — but he did amuse guests at the reception with a risqué line, saying he had heard it said that perhaps some things about the British Mandate “weren’t so bad after all.”
Charles made it clear that the visit was meaningful personally, as well as diplomatically. “For me, this is a very significant experience,” he told President Rivlin when he visited his residence and planted a tree in the garden. “Many of my teachers at school were Holocaust survivors and we are all deeply committed to combating antisemitism.”
The tree is an English Oak, a tribute to Charles’ grandmother Princess Alice, a Righteous Among the Nations for saving the lives of Jews during the Holocaust. A plaque next to the tree has a verse from Genesis in English, Hebrew and Arabic. Charles made a brief visit to his grandmother’s Jerusalem grave just before he left Israel and paid tribute to her during his Yad Vashem speech, saying he has “long drawn inspiration” from her “selfless actions.”
President Rivlin told him: “We will always remember how your grandmother, Princess Alice, who is buried here on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, saved the lives of many Jews during the Holocaust.” Linking past and present, President Rivlin said: “Britain stood firm against the Nazi threat. Many British servicemen and women fought with great bravery and liberated many concentration and death camps.
“And today British forces are on the front line in the war on terror in the Middle East, and we are together in this just war.”
John, Peter and Paul were part of Second Temple Judaism’
Israel and Britain are together in this just war’