Unsupported encoding error message in R when parsing XML file

I have a pretty large xml file that seems to be encoded in a format that R does not recognize. This is my code:

xmlfile <- xmlParse("file.xml")

And this is the error I get:

Error: 1: Unsupported encoding iso-8859-8-i

What can I do to change the encoding in order to make the parsing to work? I must say that this file is pretty big on records so opening it in other softwares like Excel or Notepad for example is not possible. I cannot use the iconv function because this xml file wont even load because of this error..

Any suggestions?