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!

I did security outside shul last Shabbat. This is an experience which is very new to me since in Radlett I am regarded as being “otherwise engaged” and not liable for such duties.

To begin with I wondered whether it was not an unnecessary knee-jerk reaction. Unlike Jerusalem, Netanya and its areas are almost exclusively Jewish and the nearest Arab towns are either on the Green Line (the pre-1967 borders) or even across it in places like Tulkarem. There are Arabs who work in Netanya – my pharmacist is one – but they are a relative rarity.

Then I remembered the Park Hotel bombing on Seder night 2002. The hotel stands at the corner of the street where I live and the events of that night are a very vivid memory. If that could happen in Netanya then it could happen anywhere and I went to do my security very willingly.

In any case security is common everywhere in Israel. There are armed guards outside my grandchildren’s schools, and having to pass security before you go into the local supermarket is normal.

My friends in Jerusalem say that they no longer go to supermarkets where the butchers are Arabs. No matter how long they have worked there, they would rather that the cleavers were wielded by Jews.

Their daughter, who used to opt for her groceries to be delivered at home as this saved her time and trouble with small children, no longer does so. The delivery boys are Arabs and she would rather not have them in her house especially when her husband isn’t home.

The trouble is of course that if we are ever to achieve peace we will have to be able to deal comfortably with Arabs, and the actions of an Arab minority are making this increasingly difficult.

Israel is beginning to get nervous about the actions of both extremist Arabs and extremist Jews in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Arab terrorism and’s Jewish settler response are not going to go away so long as there is no peace treaty (and perhaps not even afterwards) but their ability to destroy the fragile modus vivendi that exists for most of the time is worrying.

Very early this morning Wednesday 12^th November a mosque was torched in Ramallah. Instant retaliation has of course been threatened, and presumably something may happen. At the same time there is a worrying trend in knife attacks from lone terrorists. An air force sergeant was stabbed to death at the Hagana railway station in Tel Aviv on Monday, and on the same day a young woman was attacked and killed at a bus stop in the West Bank settlement of Gush Etzion. Such attacks are difficult to predict and very difficult to stop, and receive considerable publicity. Although there is more knife crime in London, Jews are news.

There is a very worrying Bill before the Knesset which aims to close down a free newspaper called Yisrael Hayom. This is funded by the American Sheldon Adelson who also contributes heavily to Republican funds. The newspaper is generally regarded as Netanyahu’s mouthpiece (terms used in the Knesset were considerably less reasoned) and because its advertising rates are kept very low it is alleged to be driving other newspapers close to insolvency. The bill passed first reading in the Knesset by a clear majority but will hopefully fail in committee. Opposition to the bill came from a wide cross-section of parties including one Arab MK said that closing a newspaper “is disrespectful to Israeli democracy”.