The prophets of Israel were among its fiercest critics. They infuriated kings and ministers with their constant demand for justice. Fearlessly outspoken, they refused to be gagged, often risking their lives.

But they never separated themselves from their people, to whom they remained attached heart and soul, often lovingly, sometimes angrily, and frequently amid anguish and frustration.

In this sense, they set the standard for the critical friend of Israel. For diaspora Jewry the question is not to my mind, therefore, whether but how we commit ourselves to Israel. Israeli friends have repeatedly appealed: “Don’t forsake us now.”

Israel will mark its 75th birthday amid a crisis as deep and potentially dangerous as the War of Independence, the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War.

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Rabbi Wittenberg

But present ills mustn’t make us forget the country’s achievements. My father, who served in the Haganah during the Battle of Jerusalem and whose uncle was killed in the ill-fated convoy to Mount Scopus in 1948, once told me, “Were it not for the music we wouldn’t have made it through.”

I take that music as symbolic of all Israel’s extraordinary attainments in the arts, literature, sciences, high tech, medicine, Jewish studies and more. The country has not only rescued millions of Jews. NGOs like IsraAID save lives around the world; I saw them on Lesbos’ shores, helping refugees from flimsy dinghies.

The cost in lives of establishing and protecting the state despite attacks from all sides has been brought home here in Britain by the tragedy that has overtaken Rabbi Dee’s family, with the brutal killing of his wife Lucy and their daughters Maia and Rina. All our hearts are heavy on Yom Hazikaron.

Yet we must also face up to what is wrong in the state of Israel. We must do so not from hostility or rejection, but from commitment to the very values of justice and equality eloquently expressed in Israel’s remarkable Declaration of Independence and re-emphasised in President Herzog’s emergency address to the nation last month: “Our democracy is a supreme value. An independent, strong, judiciary is a supreme value.

The preservation of human rights, for men and women alike, with a stress on minorities… are a supreme value.”

A Jewish state is not just about demographics, but principles. From the Torah onwards, Judaism has abhorred corruption, particularly among leaders and judges, and given primacy to truth, integrity, justice and compassion.

Alongside chants of “De-mo-krat-yah” at the demonstrations in Israel and London, we need to keep hearing the words of Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, who led the Jewish people in the second century during its existential conflict with Rome: “The world depends on three things: truth, justice and peace.” This is the moral core of Judaism.

Etgar Israel 2022

School schildren celebrating Yom Ha'atzmaut

Furthermore, the Jewish people knows from bitter experience what it means to be denied rights, exiled and persecuted. “Beware,” wrote the great 19th-century Orthodox rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, “lest in your state you make the rights of anyone dependent on anything other than the simple fact of their humanity… With any diminution of this human right the door is thrown wide open to … the wilful mistreatment of other people.”

“This is connected to the occupation,” a once right-of-centre colleague said as we discussed the current crisis. Inequality and injustice don’t stay on the far side of partition walls, however high. Arab and Palestinian leaders bear their great share of responsibility for the failure to find a pathway to coexistence.

But 55 troubled years of controlling another people, with all the surveillance and humiliation this inevitably entails, have infiltrated all aspects of Israeli life.

I’ve stood on the rooftop of an East Jerusalem Palestinian home and watched the neighbouring house being demolished. I’ve witnessed the appropriation of Palestinian farming land.

"We need your voices,” stressed the Israeli rabbi I was accompanying.

Critics of diaspora critics say, “You can’t criticise Israel unless you’ve risked your blood for the country.” It’s an important and humbling caution. We who live abroad are also deeply conscious of wanting to do nothing to strengthen the hand of those who hate Israel and deny its legitimacy.

But, rightly or wrongly, Israel’s actions and the moral reputation of Judaism are bound together in the eyes of the world. Diaspora Jews therefore have more at stake in Israel than seeing it as their ultimate refuge. Indifference is not a Jewish option.

Furthermore, Israel’s current crisis, epitomised by the administration’s plans to make the judiciary subservient to governmental will, is not only political but theological. Is God the god of the settlers who believe that Eretz Yisrael Shelemah belongs by divine right within the borders of the Jewish state, irrespective of its present population?

“I thought God was Jewish,” a scholar raised in a settler community told me, “until I read Abraham Joshua Heschel: ‘What is an idol? Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you.’”

Similarly, is Orthodoxy, especially ultra-Orthodoxy, the only form of Judaism deserving of state recognition and funding, to the detriment of other streams and contrary to the demands of equality, especially of women and people who are gay?

Israel’s present struggle is not only about the preservation of true democracy, including the supremacy of justice, equal rights for all and the protection of minorities, as if that were not enough. It concerns the very nature of Judaism and Judaism’s moral reputation.

Therefore, far from turning our backs on Israel in this hour of emergency, we must commit ourselves more deeply.

But we need to choose how we show that support. To my mind it must be directed to all who truly uphold Judaism’s core values: justice, integrity, the dignity of all human beings, and — despite all the setbacks — the elusive search for peace.

Jonathan Wittenberg is senior rabbi of Masorti Judaism