Israeli ambassador: The two-state solution is over. We are no longer willing to jeopardise our security. (Part 1)
Contrary to her combative image, Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, is softly spoken and seems slightly anxious. The night before this interview, she appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, where the host shouted at her about the body count in Gaza. The embassy is wary of a rematch.
So I put her at ease by calling Piers “history’s greatest monster”, causing her to laugh and relax. The problem with coverage of Gaza is that emotions run so high, every discussion ends up feeling like an interrogation – and the Israelis push back with force. What outsiders often forget is that beneath the rhetorical fireworks lies a deep pain.
Speaking at her embassy, flanked by UK and Israeli flags, with a bust of Golda Meir (the fourth prime minister of Israel) watching in the corner, Hotovely tells me “everyone in Israel is traumatised” by the events of Oct 7 2023. On that date, Hamas – which controls Gaza – invaded southern Israel, murdering and kidnapping more than a thousand people.
“We, as Israelis, have been through terror attacks in our coffee shops, on our buses, on our streets, but never in the past did we feel like our houses were not safe.” This is their new “vulnerability: the feeling that you cannot protect your own children”.
But foreign governments – even allies like Britain – are concerned about the safety of Palestinian children too: used as human shields by Hamas, and some killed in Israeli airstrikes.
How do you fight a terror group that rejects all the accepted rules of war?
‘October 7 was a watershed moment’
Hotovely, 46, wears regal purple and leans forward as she speaks, injecting urgency into the conversation. Her parents, Gabriel and Roziko, migrated to Israel from the former USSR and raised Tzipi in Rehovot, an attractive city south of Tel Aviv. Conservative and religious, she studied and practised law before gaining attention as a pundit. In 2009, she was elected to the Knesset – its youngest deputy at the time – as a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, and went on to serve as minister for transport, science, foreign affairs and settlements. She lives with her husband, Or Alon, and their three daughters.
When she was appointed ambassador to London in 2020, some British Jews objected, labelling Hotovely too controversial for such a sensitive role. But perhaps that was the idea. Many states are shifting their diplomatic style from emollience to advocacy. Since October 7th, Hotovely has become a formidable presence in the media and on campuses , vigorously defending her government against accusations she often describes as “a blood libel” – against Jews as well as Israelis.
I begin by asking the mood of her citizens 19 months on from the Hamas pogrom. “I think that October 7th was a watershed moment… all across Israel. No one can say in Israel that he’s the same person after.” She sometimes finds “less sympathy among people around the world” – some governments still live in the mentality of “October 6th” – but Israelis have been shown “that if you have a jihadi, Islamist terrorist group that wants to destroy you on your doorstep, at the end of the day, it’ll end up in a massacre.” Think of it as living next-door to the “Third Reich”.
“Just this morning, we heard about […] a 15-day-old baby who died in a terror attack”: Israeli Ravid Haim, born by emergency C-section after his mother, Tzeela Fez, was shot and killed. Around 58 hostages remain in Hamas’s hands. To recover them, the Israeli army has launched “Operation Gideon’s Chariots” – aiming to seize control of the Gaza Strip, push the population south and cripple the enemy’s military.
“The aims of the war are very clear to Israel,” explains Hotovely, “Hamas shouldn’t exist as a political leadership and with military power after we finish.” Hamas “doesn’t care about human life […] doesn’t care about their own people’s life”.
Hence it has embedded its fighters in a network of tunnels “six floors down […] bigger than the London Tube”, and deliberately located beneath civilian areas. “They wanted to make sure Israel will be blamed” when civilians are killed during Israeli attacks. “We don’t call it collateral damage. We really care about human life. We don’t want anyone who’s innocent to get killed. That’s why we make sure that all Palestinians can move to a safe zone.”
But the UK Government has condemned the civilian impact of “Gideon’s Chariots”. Israel imposed a blockade on humanitarian aid and commercial supplies on March 2 – now lifted – that Foreign Secretary David Lammy called “morally unjustifiable, wholly disproportionate and counterproductive”; he cancelled talks on a trade deal and summoned Hotovely to the ministry to explain her government’s actions.
Lammy, she says, was wrong: “Israel’s policy from the beginning of the war was to deliver aid to Gaza.” Some “25,000 trucks of aid got into Gaza. This is not a starvation programme, this is actually a flooding Gaza with aid programme […] The reason why it had to stop was because it was being looted only to feed the terrorists” or “to sell the aid that people were supposed to get for free”.
I ask whether this is an example of Israel alienating its friends with such brutal logic. Hamas steals food – that’s bad; anyone would want to stop it. But if Israel cuts off food altogether, isn’t the outcome even worse for innocent civilians?
“If there is lack of food,” Hotovely replies, “I can understand your argument”, but the Israelis calculated that there was enough aid already within the Gaza Strip to pause deliveries while they build a “new mechanism” for distribution, not overseen by the UN. This would be the American-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, now operating in Gaza – accused of being partisan and insufficient, and there have been riots at its deliveries. “That was just the first day,” she corrects, “it’s been improving and I keep on monitoring it as ambassador.”
‘A clash of civilisations’
What about Labour’s other charge – that “Gideon’s Chariots” has driven up the death toll? I cite the case of Dr Alaa al-Najjar, a Palestinian doctor whose home was hit in an Israeli strike, killing nine of her 10 children. “How does that make you feel?”
“I’ll tell you how it makes me feel. It makes me feel how tragic the situation is that Hamas built this infrastructure that is hurting his own children. I have a lot of sympathy to human life. As a Jew, as an Israeli, we value life very much. Unfortunately, our enemies don’t […] I think it’s a clash of civilisations [...] I find that Western people find it very hard to believe that on the other side, there are people who are using their own children as human shields,” but they do.
Dr al-Najjar wasn’t using her own children as a shield though, was she? “No, I didn’t say that, but I said Hamas built all its terrible infrastructure within the population, in the schools, in the hospitals... Are we doing our best to make sure that population civilians will be out of harm? Yes, we are. We give them messaging before we strike… Now, think about it. Do you think the UK would have continued living next to a terror organisation that is a threat to your children in Kent? Or in London or in Liverpool? I don’t think so.”
I point out that it isn’t just non-Israelis who are turning against the war. Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister of Israel, and member of Likud, is now at odds with Netanyhu, writing that the conflict is one of “devastation, indiscriminate, limitless, cruel, and criminal killing of civilians.” He has concluded that his country “is committing war crimes”. What does Hotovely say to him?
“It is a lie. Yes, it is. It is a pure lie.” The Israeli Defence Forces “work with all the mechanisms of our international law experts” and the country is “fighting with one hand tied behind our back” because it always defers to lawyers. “Olmert is completely doing a political statement to hurt the government… It’s coming from very political reasons, not to do with what’s happening on the ground.”
Contrary to her combative image, Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, is softly spoken and seems slightly anxious. The night before this interview, she appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, where the host shouted at her about the body count in Gaza. The embassy is wary of a rematch.
So I put her at ease by calling Piers “history’s greatest monster”, causing her to laugh and relax. The problem with coverage of Gaza is that emotions run so high, every discussion ends up feeling like an interrogation – and the Israelis push back with force. What outsiders often forget is that beneath the rhetorical fireworks lies a deep pain.
Speaking at her embassy, flanked by UK and Israeli flags, with a bust of Golda Meir (the fourth prime minister of Israel) watching in the corner, Hotovely tells me “everyone in Israel is traumatised” by the events of Oct 7 2023. On that date, Hamas – which controls Gaza – invaded southern Israel, murdering and kidnapping more than a thousand people.
“We, as Israelis, have been through terror attacks in our coffee shops, on our buses, on our streets, but never in the past did we feel like our houses were not safe.” This is their new “vulnerability: the feeling that you cannot protect your own children”.
But foreign governments – even allies like Britain – are concerned about the safety of Palestinian children too: used as human shields by Hamas, and some killed in Israeli airstrikes.
How do you fight a terror group that rejects all the accepted rules of war?
‘October 7 was a watershed moment’
Hotovely, 46, wears regal purple and leans forward as she speaks, injecting urgency into the conversation. Her parents, Gabriel and Roziko, migrated to Israel from the former USSR and raised Tzipi in Rehovot, an attractive city south of Tel Aviv. Conservative and religious, she studied and practised law before gaining attention as a pundit. In 2009, she was elected to the Knesset – its youngest deputy at the time – as a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, and went on to serve as minister for transport, science, foreign affairs and settlements. She lives with her husband, Or Alon, and their three daughters.
When she was appointed ambassador to London in 2020, some British Jews objected, labelling Hotovely too controversial for such a sensitive role. But perhaps that was the idea. Many states are shifting their diplomatic style from emollience to advocacy. Since October 7th, Hotovely has become a formidable presence in the media and on campuses , vigorously defending her government against accusations she often describes as “a blood libel” – against Jews as well as Israelis.
I begin by asking the mood of her citizens 19 months on from the Hamas pogrom. “I think that October 7th was a watershed moment… all across Israel. No one can say in Israel that he’s the same person after.” She sometimes finds “less sympathy among people around the world” – some governments still live in the mentality of “October 6th” – but Israelis have been shown “that if you have a jihadi, Islamist terrorist group that wants to destroy you on your doorstep, at the end of the day, it’ll end up in a massacre.” Think of it as living next-door to the “Third Reich”.
“Just this morning, we heard about […] a 15-day-old baby who died in a terror attack”: Israeli Ravid Haim, born by emergency C-section after his mother, Tzeela Fez, was shot and killed. Around 58 hostages remain in Hamas’s hands. To recover them, the Israeli army has launched “Operation Gideon’s Chariots” – aiming to seize control of the Gaza Strip, push the population south and cripple the enemy’s military.
“The aims of the war are very clear to Israel,” explains Hotovely, “Hamas shouldn’t exist as a political leadership and with military power after we finish.” Hamas “doesn’t care about human life […] doesn’t care about their own people’s life”.
Hence it has embedded its fighters in a network of tunnels “six floors down […] bigger than the London Tube”, and deliberately located beneath civilian areas. “They wanted to make sure Israel will be blamed” when civilians are killed during Israeli attacks. “We don’t call it collateral damage. We really care about human life. We don’t want anyone who’s innocent to get killed. That’s why we make sure that all Palestinians can move to a safe zone.”
But the UK Government has condemned the civilian impact of “Gideon’s Chariots”. Israel imposed a blockade on humanitarian aid and commercial supplies on March 2 – now lifted – that Foreign Secretary David Lammy called “morally unjustifiable, wholly disproportionate and counterproductive”; he cancelled talks on a trade deal and summoned Hotovely to the ministry to explain her government’s actions.
Lammy, she says, was wrong: “Israel’s policy from the beginning of the war was to deliver aid to Gaza.” Some “25,000 trucks of aid got into Gaza. This is not a starvation programme, this is actually a flooding Gaza with aid programme […] The reason why it had to stop was because it was being looted only to feed the terrorists” or “to sell the aid that people were supposed to get for free”.
I ask whether this is an example of Israel alienating its friends with such brutal logic. Hamas steals food – that’s bad; anyone would want to stop it. But if Israel cuts off food altogether, isn’t the outcome even worse for innocent civilians?
“If there is lack of food,” Hotovely replies, “I can understand your argument”, but the Israelis calculated that there was enough aid already within the Gaza Strip to pause deliveries while they build a “new mechanism” for distribution, not overseen by the UN. This would be the American-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, now operating in Gaza – accused of being partisan and insufficient, and there have been riots at its deliveries. “That was just the first day,” she corrects, “it’s been improving and I keep on monitoring it as ambassador.”
‘A clash of civilisations’
What about Labour’s other charge – that “Gideon’s Chariots” has driven up the death toll? I cite the case of Dr Alaa al-Najjar, a Palestinian doctor whose home was hit in an Israeli strike, killing nine of her 10 children. “How does that make you feel?”
“I’ll tell you how it makes me feel. It makes me feel how tragic the situation is that Hamas built this infrastructure that is hurting his own children. I have a lot of sympathy to human life. As a Jew, as an Israeli, we value life very much. Unfortunately, our enemies don’t […] I think it’s a clash of civilisations [...] I find that Western people find it very hard to believe that on the other side, there are people who are using their own children as human shields,” but they do.
Dr al-Najjar wasn’t using her own children as a shield though, was she? “No, I didn’t say that, but I said Hamas built all its terrible infrastructure within the population, in the schools, in the hospitals... Are we doing our best to make sure that population civilians will be out of harm? Yes, we are. We give them messaging before we strike… Now, think about it. Do you think the UK would have continued living next to a terror organisation that is a threat to your children in Kent? Or in London or in Liverpool? I don’t think so.”
I point out that it isn’t just non-Israelis who are turning against the war. Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister of Israel, and member of Likud, is now at odds with Netanyhu, writing that the conflict is one of “devastation, indiscriminate, limitless, cruel, and criminal killing of civilians.” He has concluded that his country “is committing war crimes”. What does Hotovely say to him?
“It is a lie. Yes, it is. It is a pure lie.” The Israeli Defence Forces “work with all the mechanisms of our international law experts” and the country is “fighting with one hand tied behind our back” because it always defers to lawyers. “Olmert is completely doing a political statement to hurt the government… It’s coming from very political reasons, not to do with what’s happening on the ground.”
3 months ago
