I’m six years old and standing on the table on my grandmother’s balcony in Tel Aviv, looking up at the starry night sky with my mother.

Air-raid sirens start wailing and in the distance we see planes and hear the scary thuds and booms of war. My mum grabs me, pushes me back into the house and we run furiously to the air-raid shelter, set deep in the bowels of the local playground. And there I sit for hours with the other children from the neighbourhood, many of them crying. “Ze beseder, ze beseder, hakol yihiye beseder,” the grown-ups keep repeating. Everything is going to be OK.

I believe them, and I’m not scared.

But I was wrong. Everything was not beseder. The year was 1973 and 2,656 Israeli soldiers were killed in what became known as the Yom Kippur War.

Fast forward half a century and we are back in Israel for my mother’s 80th birthday. She wanted to celebrate it here, on the Jewish soil where she was born and brought up.
As she and my 89-year-old father sit, hand in hand, on a bench by the glittering Mediterranean, I ask what she remembers about the day the State of Israel was founded.

“We danced on Allenby Street for three days,” she says. “People couldn’t stop hugging and kissing each other.”

My dad, so frail now, sits there quietly, nodding. “Imagine that, Dad,” I say. “On 14 May, 1948, when you were a 14-year-old boy in Aden, your future wife was dancing on the streets of Tel Aviv. I wonder what you were doing at that moment?”

My father remembers the day well, he says.

When the UN declared Israel a nation, not joy but deadly violence erupted on the streets of Aden, the capital of Yemen, as maurading mobs searched high and low for Jews to slaughter. His family barricaded themselves into their home for several days, and survived the clubs and knives of their Arab neighbours, but the Jews next door did not. The entire family, which included young children, was murdered.

As soon as they were able, Dad’s family fled Yemen, a country where they had lived for generations. Some made their way to London, others escaped to newly sovereign Israel.

Twenty-five years earlier, Mum’s family had fled Tehran for British Mandate Palestine. In Iran, they were anusim, Jews who had been forced to convert to Islam. But they had continued to practise Judaism in secret: they were living in constant, deadly danger.

How right Israel felt for my parents. For them, a virtual Jewish Statue of Liberty beamed high and luminous on its Mediterranean shores. As the poet Robert Frost wrote: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

And how right it felt for me as a little girl. On our council estate in Hackney, East London, being Jewish felt weird, wrong, shameful, even. But in Israel almost everyone was a member of the tribe. It didn’t matter if you were an Ashkenazi or Mizrahi Jew, or Sephardim, like us.

We had all reassembled from the diaspora. We revelled in unembarrassed Jewish celebrations.

We cared about each other. Back then, there was a socialist zeal to my beloved Israel, a burning sense of the common good, of equality. In fact, my young feminist self never failed to thrill at the sight of women soldiers on the streets, Uzis slung across their young backs.

Women soldiers still keep Israel safe, but what a different place it now feels in other ways.

While some former enemies queue to finally make peace and do business with us, the country is eating itself from the inside. Netanyahu has formed a risky, soul-selling alliance with the far right.

Religious zealots of all faiths are becoming more powerful and emboldened. And secular Jews, while still in the majority, are increasingly underrepresented in the Knesset. There has never been so much division, intolerance, mistrust and bigotry in the Jewish State.

Will the Knesset uphold the right of all Jews to live in their homeland? Not if the Religious Zionist party have their way. Last month they were looking to cancel a clause in the Law of Return that allows the grandchildren of Jews to be eligible for aliyah. Netanyahu did not agree, but a committee is going to be set up to discuss the issue. This is not good news.

Is it hyperbolic to say that Israel’s enemies are no longer our biggest problem? That the real existential issue is not the thuds and booms of war I heard from my mother’s balcony in south Tel Aviv, aged six, but the country’s growing extremism?

I still love Israel so, so much. But as we enter 2023, young Misha’s belief that it is a magical refuge, a place of love and acceptance for all Jews, has been tested. I fear deeply for its Jewish unity.

How I wish there were some sensible grown-ups around to reassure me that everything is going to be beseder. And how I wish that, this time, they’d be right.