The days between Yom Hoshoah, the Jewish date for Holocaust Memorial Day, and Israel’s Independence Day are always poignant.

I immediately think of my father. He came by ship from Trieste to Haifa in the autumn of 1937, fleeing Nazi Europe. Just a few days ago I found a letter giving him a place to study at the Bezalel Academy of Arts in 1936. He never was able to take up that offer. At the age of 16, in the impoverished Palestine of those years he suddenly found himself the main bread winner. His own father had managed a timber mill in Germany, not a transportable skill. He never could find serious employment in Jerusalem; it fell to my father to support his sisters, and the family. But the future Jewish state had saved their lives, as it saved millions more, from Europe, Arab lands, and later Africa and Eastern Europe. My father died on Yom Ha’Azmaut; for the first time this year I will be in Israel for his Yahrzeit.

I think too of my friend Aaron Barnea, whose son was killed by a roadside bomb near the Beaufort fortress in South Lebanon, one of so many thousands for whom Yom Hazikaron, the day of mourning which precedes Yom Ha’Atzmaut, never becomes less poignant. The Parents Circle, in whom he was active for many years, now brings together bereaved families, Israeli and Palestinian, to mourn with one another and share the pain of loss, but above all to affirm the value of life and to work for a different future.

Like so many of us, I have thought about Israel in so many ways: with love, wonder, worry, fear, dismay, frustration, appreciation and admiration. In my many tens of visits, in the times I have taught there, and the innumerable times I have learnt there, I have looked out at the country through numerous windows.

I have looked through the windows of the Egged bus as it climbed the road to Jerusalem, past the burnt-out trucks left as a reminder of the terrible losses in the siege of Jerusalem. I have seen with joy the green of the forests and fields. I have loved wandering around the campuses of the Hebrew University on Givat Ram and Har Hatsofim, taking out books in the National Library. I have watched the ringing of tiny birds on the reserve in the Hula Valley, and the passing of storks and cranes. I have looked for the different coloured anemones in the spring, and admired the wild cyclamen, Israel’s national flower.

I’ve listened to the stories and viewpoints of family and friends, of the left and of the right. I’ve been out with many groups devoted to building bridges, between rich and poor, religious and non-observant, Israeli and Arab. I’ve looked at the same landscape from the living room of Israeli friends, and, from the opposite side of the valley, through the windows of a Palestinian home. I’ve stood on the roof in an Arab village and watched the house next door being slowly demolished, and seen the school children returning home, and wondered what questions they will ask and who will answer them and how.

I’m dismayed by the reception the Israeli Ambassador received outside SOAS yesterday, the hatred, the prejudiced assumptions, the singling out of Israel for abuse. But I’m also troubled deeply by those who ignore the reality in which so many Palestinians have to live, behind the wall where our thoughts, imagination and empathy usually find it easier not to follow. A country which limits the freedom of some, risks over time compromising the freedom of all. I’m frightened by the mire of intransigence, breeding hatreds.

I’m left with affection, anxiety, hope and prayer. The hope, Hatikvah, rests in the immense courage, creativity and moral imagination with which the country was built, and in witnessing the similar courage with which so many defend the values of its founders and seek to develop it for the good of all its citizens, for justice and compassion, in spite of everything.

The prayer is that, despite the violence and hatred with which not only the Middle East but so much of the globe is riven and divided, the spirit of humanity and generosity, the spirit of God apprehended by the prophets of Israel in the very hills and valleys of this land will prevail and that there shall one day be ‘Tranquillity and harmony, and none shall be afraid’.