Disgusted By The Treatment

Tzipi Hotovely was in no danger at the LSE. She was heavily protected, and in any case no threat was issued. This side of the egregious Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, then such protest remains perfectly legal, as Priti Patel will soon discover. Patel was sacked as International Development Secretary for downright treasonable dealings with the Netanyahu Government that the Israeli electorate has rejected.

And who is Hotovely? It is no wonder that her appointment as Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom was opposed by Melanie Phillips. Hotovely is linked to the church-burning anti-miscegenation activists of Lehava. She wants Israel to expand into Jordan and Syria. She denies that the Palestinians exist at all, yet somehow she wants their homes to be demolished. 

In 2017, she attacked American Jews in classically anti-Semitic terms as, "People that never send their children to fight for their country, most of the Jews don't have children serving as soldiers, going to the Marines, going to Afghanistan, or to Iraq." In 2019, she put out a video of Israel's Jewish critics exclaiming, "Oy vey! My German euros!" 

In May, she addressed a rally in London that called for Arab villages to be burned. That was a meeting of supporters of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who in 1981 the Thatcher Government had had the courage to ban from entering the United Kingdom, a ban that remained in place until his assassination in his native New York in 1990.

Although Otzma Yehudit has links to them, both Kach, the party that Kahane founded, and Kahane Chai, originally a breakaway but with little in the way of division from it these days, remain illegal in Israel because they are terrorist organisations. In Britain, however, the Israeli Ambassador addresses their rallies.

If Patel were a real Home Secretary, and if this were a real Tory Government, then she and it would deport Hotovely, declaring her persona non grata for life. Her presence is not conducive to the public good, any more than Kahane's would have been. And that point should indeed be made, as forcefully as peaceful protest will allow, wherever either Hotovely or Patel may go.