I am writing this on Wednesday 31st December. Last Thursday was 25th December, a day which part in this part of Israel, at least, is without any special significance.This is something that those of us who come from outside Israel, especially Europe and the English speaking countries (Anglo-Saxononim in local dialect) find very unusual.

On one of the days of Chanukah I went to Jerusalem with my grandsons, and we walked around the Old City. Outside many of the Jewish houses there was a box to hold a lit Chanukiah, and outside some doorways leading onto four or five apartments there was a glass box with shelves on which the individual flats had placed their Chanukiot. I even found one house that had built a Chanukiah from Lego! This is an interesting a new way of “publicising the miracle”.

In a society that is so closely defined by religion as Israel, it is quite logical to me that Xmas would be unmarked in Jewish areas, although like all my English friends I pine for some of the eatable traditions! When I did see one small girl in Tel Aviv holding a piece of greenery which obviously had Christmas overtones, I found it quite startling until I remembered the cosmopolitan nature of the city and the fact that she could very well not be Jewish.

New Year’s Eve is a different problem. In England we regard it as a purely secular celebration. Within the Catholic Church however 31^st of December is designated as the feast of St Sylvester, who was Pope in the fourth century. The overzealous Rabbanut in the major cities attempted some years ago to ban New Year’s Eve parties on the basis that they were a Christian religious festival. I shall be at the Dead Sea for New Year’s Eve this year, and I am quite curious to know what is going to happen this evening.

Chanukah has arrived in Israel and with it all the joys of this midwinter festival. Chanukiot abound in all places, and the custom to light seems to be universal and not restricted to the observant.

The schools are off, more or less, although as with England not every school keeps to the same dates for holidays and parents have to cover the gap. All over the country, on all major public buildings, you can find a Menorah spreading a message of freedom and the defeat of enemies which resonates with the Israelis. It is not difficult to reset the defeat of the Hellenistic Syrians by the numerically inferior Maccabees into a modern context.

All Jewish festivals are a challenge to the waistline, but Chanukah particularly so! I can clearly remember as a child grating potatoes so that my Bobba (grandmother) could make latkes. I actually read somewhere the other day a theory that doughnuts were a popular meal in the time of the Maccabees but this really beggars belief!

And yet the story of Chanukah has a worldwide significance that goes far beyond Judaism. We all know how the Maccabees defeated their enemies who were numerically and militarily much stronger. We all know the story of the one day supply of oil that miraculously lasted for eight days. What we fail to consider is the important position that Chanukah holds in the history of Christianity and Islam, as well as Judaism.

If the Maccabees had not been victorious, then Judaism might well have disappeared. There was virtually no Jewish Diaspora in those days and the extinction of the Jewish community in the land of Israel would have been final. Christianity could not have developed as an offshoot of Judaism, nor would Islam have come into being. The world would be very different, a Hellenistic and possibly idolatrous society. Quite a lot to come from a little cruse of oil!

Israel today is a sober sad and angry place. The conflict between Israelis and Arabs, Jews and Palestinians, appears to be escalating and becoming uglier every day. The attack on the synagogue in Har Nof plumbs new depths of savagery.

Political commentators are attempting to ascribe this latest round of attacks to Muslim reactions to Jews visiting the Temple Mount. There are no leaders in the Arab world who admit Jewish rights to this holiest of places, and no one in the Western world is prepared to stand up and state Israel’s position. The Temple Mount was Jewish one and a half millennia before Islam began.

The position has not been helped by the rabbinical ruling telling Jews that they could not go there in case they accidentally strayed into an area that required a state of ritual purity. In 1967, with the consent of the rabbinate, Moshe Dayan handed the Temple Mount back to the Waqf, the Muslim religious Council, without attempting to establish Jewish rights of access.

President Abbas, after two phone calls from John Kerry, issued a condemnation of yesterday’s murders while his followers rejoiced. The idea that this was a spontaneous attack is somewhat diminished by the fact that pictures of the two attackers appeared very rapidly at the mob celebrations.

The Israeli public is nervous, enraged, and exasperated. Despite assurances from the Prime Minister the government does not seem to be in control of the situation and the world community yet again refrained from telling the Arabs that if they want a state they have to show that they are capable of controlling extremists.

At the same time recent events have led some Israeli commentators to claim that there is no possibility of compromise with the Palestinians, that Arab democracy is a pipe dream (Abbas is now in the tenth year of his four-year term as president), and that the only way forward is to put guards on everything and fight the Palestinians.

One of the most amazing things about being Jewish is the recurrent examples of the indestructibility of the human spirit that one encounters. Last Shabbat I had the privilege – and it really was a privilege – to be involved in the second bar mitzvah of someone who had missed his first bar mitzvah because he had been in the Lodz Ghetto. Zigi has lived life to the full, and was surrounded on this amazing occasion by his wife of 60 years, his daughters, his six grandchildren, and his great grandson. With a degree of energy that would do credit to a man half his age he speaks to schools and adult groups internationally about the Holocaust.

I mentioned that to see a great grandfather present at a great grandson’s bar mitzvah was not impossible. This was the first occasions when I had seen a great grandson present at what was really his great grandfather’s first bar mitzvah.

What is it about our people that has enabled us throughout our history to continuously bounce back? Anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews are nothing new, and yet every empire throughout history, however great and mighty, however wealthy and influential, has crumbled into dust. The small Jewish people, almost never more than one half of one percent of any nation that for a while has been its home, has managed nevertheless to survive and flourish. Perhaps most amazingly of all; it was just over three years after the discovery of the Holocaust and its immeasurable depredations of Jewish life, that the State of Israel arose.

The doctrine of a Chosen People, the idea that there is a direct connection between the Jews and God and that we are under his particular protection, is often rejected as being racist and elitist. The famous couplet “How odd of God/ to choose the Jews” has produced a number of responses of which my two favourites are “But not so odd/As those who choose/A Jewish God/But spurn the Jews” and the rather pithier “Not so odd/The Jews chose God”.

And yet without some direct divine protection it is impossible to account for our survival.

Sometimes we forget the land of Israel has a long history with other faiths who have contributed to its development, and also that some of the most undesirable features of the 20th century found their way into this country.

Last week I was in the Galil, and visited two Templar villages. The Templars were a sect of German Protestants who came to Palestine towards the end of the 19th century in order to become farmers. They built very solid stone buildings most of which survive to this day. The German colonies in Jerusalem and Haifa, the Sarona district and parts of Neve Tzedek in Tel Aviv, all testify to their solid industriousness. Much of the early development of Haifa as a modern city was due to the Templars, and the vineyards that they laid out are now the Baha’i Gardens.

At the beginning of the 20th century a group of young Templars established two small villages in the Galilee. One is Bethlehem of the Galilee (a village that is mentioned in the book of Joshua) and the other was called Waldheim. Visiting the latter, it is quite startling to suddenly come across a beautiful small church in the middle of what is now a Jewish village, but that testifies to its history.

But there was a darker side. While the older Templars pleaded with Nazi Germany not to display the swastika in the land of Israel, and not to boycott Jewish businesses in Germany, the Nazi ideology increasingly poisoned the minds of the younger members of the group. One of the most startling things I found were photographs of Nazi party rallies which took place in Bet Lehem Haglilit in the 1930s, and with the outbreak of war the whole group were interned and ultimately deported. After the war they were refused permission to remain in Israel, and many of them moved to Australia.

The property that they left behind however has become very expensive and highly desirable!