My relatives moved to Israel in the 1950s and are still not safe

“My relatives moved to Israel in the 1950s and are still not safe after all these years,” she says. “Israel is the victim and I’ve lost faith in a moderate solution.” So Stella sides with the hard men now, opposing Palestinian autonomy. “Let someone sit in a tree and they’ll throw coconuts at you,” she says. “I will be at the rally because it is important to make a stand Look at what is happening in France. I don’t want what happened to Jews in the 1930s to happen again.” Peddlers of Zionist conspiracy theory meet their match in Stella, who is wildly suspicious of Islam.

“Britain is now a refuge for all the Islamic countries and it is affecting government policy,” she insists “And the whole point of Islam is to convert. In south London, they are converting cats and dogs on the street.”Coming out of Golders Green library, schoolboy Elchanan, 18, from an Orthodox family, is similarly bullish “If I could fight in the Israeli army, I would,” he says “But I can’t even go to Israel because I’m sitting my exams. But I will be at the rally.” He says his parents have stopped taking The Times newspaper, partly because they decided its smutty news coverage no longer had a place in their home, but also because of British media bias against Israel.Not all British Jews, however, plan to be in Trafalgar Square. Lucie Russell, 40, a mother of two, will not risk appearing to side with the Israeli government “I could never support what it is doing,” she says. The problem with being Jewish, she continues, is that you always feel defensive in discussions about the Middle East. “You are always waiting for them to slide towards anti-Semitism,” she says.

“And your hackles just rise.”Russell has visited Israel many times and she says that Israeli Jews come from an entirely different culture from British Jews She has been appalled by the Israeli military offensive. “I read in the paper that when the Israeli army left Jenin it left behind a sign saying, ‘Fucking Arabs – don’t mess with us again’. It is just so awful you feel embarrassed.”But she wishes that the logic applied to analysis of Palestinian violence would be used with as much generosity towards Israeli actions. “You have to understand how threatened Israeli Jews feel,” she says. “The six million [killed in the Holocaust] has to have had some psychological impact on the people who created that country You have to understand that they are paranoid.