ANOTHER SEAL OF APPROVAL FOR WONDERFUL ISRAEL

GREAT NEWS: PRINCE WILLIAM TO MAKE ROYAL HISTORY WITH VISIT TO ISRAEL IN SUMMER 2018

Kensington Palace announced the visit in a tweet on Thursday, saying “the Duke of Cambridge will visit Israel in the Summer.”

The visit, it said, “is at the request of Her Majesty’s Government and has been welcomed by the Israeli authorities.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately welcomed the news. “We welcome the announcement that Prince William will be coming to Israel,” Netanyahu said in a statement. “It is a historic visit, the first of its kind, and he will be received here with great enthusiasm.”

While members of the royal family have never made state visits to Israel, they have traveled widely in the Arab world. Prince Charles was in Israel twice, but only to attend funerals: Yitzhak Rabin’s in 1995 and Shimon Peres’s in 2016. During the latter trip, he also visited the grave of his grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, the mother of Prince Phillip, who is buried at the Convent of Saint Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives. The princess has been recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” for hiding a Jewish women and her two children in Athens during World War II.

Phillip came here in 1994 to attend the Yad Vashem ceremony honoring her, and visited her grave, but the Foreign Office took pains then to stress that his visit was private.

Netanyahu, who met Prince Charles on the sidelines of a climate change conference in Paris in 2015, invited him at the time to visit the country – an invitation numerous Israeli officials have extended to the royal family over the years.