https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/01/israeli-ambassador-interview-two-state-solution/
Israeli ambassador: The two-state solution is over. We are no longer willing to jeopardise our security
Amid rising international tensions, Tzipi Hotovely lays bare the suffering and turmoil of a conflict few beyond Israel fully understand
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.
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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.”
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.”
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So why are the families of hostages – and even a former hostage – protesting against Netanyahu? At a demonstration this week, Keith Siegel, who was once held prisoner by Hamas, declared: “Our families have become the victims of cheap politics at the hands of the prime minister. Instead of ending the war and bringing everyone home, his allies prefer to occupy the Gaza Strip than to save the hostages.”
Hotovely says: “I have sympathy to every hostage family for being so worried about their loved ones, I cannot put myself in their shoes.”
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As for a French-Saudi initiative, scheduled for mid-June, to discuss the recognition of Palestine as an independent state: “This is probably the worst timing ever to go this path [...] this is a pure word for terrorism and sends the wrong message to the region [...] What did October 7th prove? First of all, unfortunately what we’ve seen is big support among Palestinians towards the massacre.”
One poll, she claims, found 86 per cent of West Bank residents sympathised with the pogrom. Gaza previously voted for Hamas, “so recognition basically means Hamas” and would be a “reward for terrorism”.
I ask if this means the concept of a two-state solution is off the table and she replies in the affirmative. “It was rejected by the Palestinians again and again. Israelis had hope [in it] in the 1990s and were willing to compromise, but […] every time there was some type of negotiation, there was more terrorism […] So Israelis are no longer willing to jeopardise their security any longer.”
This is a critical point – one that many Britons don’t grasp. Governments like Labour talk about the two-state solution as if it were genuinely on the table, but the two sides gave up on it years ago. In that case, what does the Israeli government see as the future of the Palestinian community?
They must be re-educated. “It’s a good lesson to learn from the Second World War,” when Germany and Japan were beaten: fascism “didn’t end in one day, there was a whole process of denazification, a whole process of rebuilding the institutions to a democratic country. The Palestinians, when they were offered to have democratic elections” – in January 2006 – “they ended up with having an even worse dictatorship that doesn’t believe in any human rights.”
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When Palestinians are asked “what is the main problem,” she tells me, they never say the settlements but instead demand “the right of return,” which means “bringing people from all around the Arab world to move into small Israel.” I suggest that, on the contrary, they are protesting against Israelis settling on land that even Israel officially recognises as Palestinian – and Hotovely disagrees.
“Definitely not. I think that it’s clear for Israelis when we’re speaking about Judea and Samaria [better known as the West Bank], and we’re speaking about Jerusalem, we’re speaking about the Golan Heights, we’re speaking about the Jewish historic land.”
In conservative Israeli rhetoric, the term “Judea and Samaria” implies that the West Bank is Israeli as bequeathed by the Bible. “We’re talking about some places that Jewish people have been connected to for thousands of years,” says Hotovely. Yes, I reply, and Palestinians have been connected to them for a very long time, too. “We’re not denying that. That’s what’s nice about our attitude,” she says, “we never deny the rights of us to live next to our neighbours – they deny our rights.”