Kensington & Chelsea Council (RBKC) will honour Israel’s UK ambassador, Tzipi Hotovely, at a diplomatic reception even as the country she represents intensifies its campaign of genocide in the occupied Gaza Strip.

Hosted by the RBKC’s mayor Preety Hudd at Kensington Town Hall on Tuesday, February 20^th, the event – an annual reception for ambassadors based in the borough – is a fixture in the council’s calendar although scant information about it is shared with the residents who pay for it.  

RBKC dismissed our concerns about Israel’s presence and claimed the event is for ambassadors “to meet each other and learn about what is happening in the local area.” Despite the borough having the second biggest Arab community in London, the council has been careful not to criticise Israel or offer any support to those residents traumatised by the slaughter. In December, at a full council meeting that was repeatedly stopped by anti-genocide protests, independent councillor Mona Ahmed invited RBKC Leader Elizabeth Campbell to condemn Israel’s atrocities, call for a ceasefire and make public space available for vigils, as she had when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Campbell declined.

The decision to invite Hotovely, a member of Israel’s far-right Likud party who served as a government minister before being made ambassador to the UK in 2020, represents a doubling down of RBKC’s stance on the Middle East. The Conservative council has been boosted by the reluctance of the main opposition party, Labour, to represent its constituents’ views on the need to protect Palestine. 

The decision to provide cover for Israel’s crimes is a gesture of ambivalence towards anti-war residents and those with an emotional or religious connection to Palestine from a council that vowed to “change” after the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, an atrocity that RBKC was (prima facie) significantly responsible for. The most unequal, socially and economically divided council district in the country, RBKC has claimed to be changing while its northern wards have become some of the most impoverished in London.

Tzipi Hotovely has been the face of the government of Binyamin Netanyahu in Britain throughout the Gaza slaughter, drawing criticism for a series of outlandish lies uttered in her media appearances.

On LBC Radio, Hotovely declared that the whole of the Gaza Strip must be destroyed to enable Israel’s soldiers to access the tunnel network developed by Palestinians to enable them to survive and resist Israel’s illegal siege. When the presenter, Iain Dale, pushed back slightly, pointing out to the ambassador that she was calling for total destruction of Gaza and its people, Hotovely appeared incredulous and asked Dale live on British radio, “do you have another solution?”

Hotovely’s LBC appearance was classic Israeli diplomacy: a litany of lies that feckless British establishment types accept as part of the natural expiration of post-world war two international norms. She lied that “every school, every mosque and every second house has access to a tunnel” in Gaza, part of an “underground metro city” and “horrible terror city.”

With a straight face, Hotovely told Sky News “there is no humanitarian crisis” in Gaza; she called the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s investigation into her government’s genocide “absurd” and claimed that all of Hamas’s headquarters in Gaza were in hospitals, with the patients “human shields.”  

The openly racist ambassador has also claimed that United Nations schools teach Palestinian children “Nazi ideology” including that they are allowed to kill Jews. Hotovely doesn’t even bother to pretend that the UK’s preferred cover for Israel’s crimes – the long-awaited but never attempted two-state solution – is an option; she rejects it outright, yet the British government and opposition remain Zionists “without qualification.”

It is a level of hasbara that might well be admired by RBKC’s propagandists-in-chief, Campbell and her deputy, Kim Taylor-Smith, and it would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious. The lies serve the purpose of enabling the extermination of an entire people in service of a settler colonial project that the whole world – except for a few other settler colonial white European states – rejects.

We asked RBKC whether they had concerns around hosting the Israeli ambassador in light of the ICJ’s ruling that there is a basis to proceed with a case against Israel for genocide, and whether Ambassador Hotovely’s own genocidal public statements made her an inappropriate person to honour at the Town Hall.

RBKC’s press office replied with this comment: “The Mayor takes part in an enormous array of activities throughout the year, both in terms of visits, and hosting many community events to which residents, business groups, local charities and other organisations are invited. One event that takes place annually is a reception providing the opportunity to bring together people who represent countries from all around the world. With embassies across Kensington and Chelsea invited, many take up the opportunity to meet each other and learn about what is happening in the local area.”

Protests are expected.

by Tom Charles @tomhcharles

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