Just wondering, has the Queen ever visited Israel ?
No. There are only two incidents of British royal family visiting Israel over the past 64 years – Prince Philip at a ceremony honoring his mother, and Prince Charles attending the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin. Both times the British were careful to emphasize that these were private, non-official visits.
Reasons have been speculated on by some historians and professors:
"The reason for this, in Prof. Wistrich’s [of the Hebrew University] opinion, is an unwarranted fear that a visit by the Queen in Israel would hurt the British Empire's business in Arab countries. As for the possibility that the Queen does not wish to visit Israel because it chose to reject the British Mandate and establish an independent state in 1948, Wistrich said that in his opinion the Queen’s refusal to visit Israel definitely contains an element of de-legitimization and there is no doubt that if she would choose to visit Israel, it would be seen as a clearly symbolic act. He emphasized, however, the Queen's positive attitude to the Jewish people. “She displays no anti-Semitism or prejudice,” said Wistrich, noting that the British palace has a long-standing tradition that every son who is born there undergoes a circumcision by a mohel. Recently it was reported that Prince Charles is likely to visit Israel within the next three years."
"The eminent historian Andrew Roberts has said that the British government had a de facto ban in place on state visits by Queen Elizabeth II to Israel. "The true reason of course, is that the FO [Foreign Office] has a ban on official royal visits to Israel, which is even more powerful for its being unwritten and unacknowledged. As an act of delegitimization of Israel, this effective boycott is quite as serious as other similar acts, such as the academic boycott, and is the direct fault of the Foreign Office Arabists. It is, therefore, no coincidence that although the queen has made over 250 official overseas visits to 129 different countries during her reign, neither she nor one single member of the British royal family has ever been to Israel on an official visit,” Roberts told a gala dinner in London... "Perhaps her majesty hasn't been on the throne long enough, at 57 years, for the Foreign Office to get round to allowing her to visit one of the only democracies in the Middle East. At least she could be certain of a warm welcome in Israel, unlike in Morocco, where she was kept waiting by the king for three hours in 90-degree heat, or at the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Uganda the time before last, where they hadn't even finished building her hotel,” Roberts remarked. "
