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Tzipi Hotovely

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Tzipi Hotovely

Tzipura "Tzipi" Hotovely (Hebrew: צפורה "ציפי" חוטובלי; born 2 December 1978) is an Israeli diplomat and former politician who was the Ambassador of Israel to the United Kingdom between 2020 and 2025. She previously served as Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Diaspora Affairs, Minister of Settlement Affairs, and as a member of the Knesset for the Likud party.

Hotovely was born and raised in Rehovot, Israel, in a religious Jewish family. Her parents, Gabriel and Roziko Hotovely, were Georgian Jews who immigrated to Israel from the Georgian SSR before her birth. Hotovely was a doctoral student at the Faculty of Law in Tel Aviv University.

On 11 November 2008, Hotovely announced that she was joining Likud, and would compete in the party's primaries for the 2009 Knesset elections. She won 18th place on the party's list, and became a member of the Knesset when Likud won 27 seats. In 2009, she was the 18th Knesset's youngest member. She chaired the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women in the 18th Knesset, before joining the government at the beginning of the 19th Knesset in 2013.

While a member of the Knesset's Committee on the State of Women and Gender Equality in 2011, she invited representatives from Lehava (Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land), an anti-miscegenation group whose primary objective is to oppose assimilation of Jews and which objects to any personal or business relationships between Jews and non-Jews, to a discussion of the tactics used by the organization to prevent romantic relationships between Jews and Arabs. Hotovely defended her decision at the time, saying, "it is important to me to check systems to prevent mixed marriages, and Lehava are the most suitable for this."

In March 2011, she wrote that Israeli author Amos Oz was naive, after he sent a Hamas leader a copy of his autobiography, writing that Oz would lack even the instinct to distinguish between Mordechai and Haman. In fact, Oz had sent his novel, A Tale of Love and Darkness, a work of fiction inspired by his childhood memories and not an autobiography, to the imprisoned former Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti, Tanzim being an offshoot of Fatah, not Hamas, with a personal dedication reading: "This story is our story, I hope you read it and understand us as we understand you, hoping to see you outside and in peace, yours, Amos Oz".

In December 2011, Hotovely gained media attention by sitting at the front of a Mehadrin bus used by some Haredim, where women are asked to sit at the back of the bus.

She was re-elected in the 2013 elections, after winning fifteenth place on the joint Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu list, and was appointed Deputy Minister of Transportation and Road Safety in the new government. She was also appointed Deputy Minister of Minister of Science and Technology in December 2014, after Yaakov Peri quit as the minister. Following the 2015 elections, in which she was re-elected in twentieth place on the Likud list, she was appointed Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs in the new government.

In July 2017, following the declaration of the Old City of Hebron as a Palestinian World Heritage Site by UNESCO, Hotovely addressed the Arab members of Knesset in a speech, holding up the book of the Tanach (The Old Testament) in one hand and the book A History of the Palestinian People in the other, saying: "I recommend to UNESCO and to the Arab Knesset members to read these two books, the Bible which tells the story of the Jewish people, and Assaf Voll's new best-seller, A History of the Palestinian People: From Ancient Times to the Modern Era. It will captivate you because it is empty. Because the Palestinians don't have kings, and they don't have heritage sites."

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