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Last Friday, we heard David Mencer, an official Israeli spokesman, defending the Israeli government on the BBC Today programme, after increasing settler violence in the West Bank had been condemned by the British Foreign Office.

It was put to him that failure to protect the West Bank Palestinians was a breach of Israel’s legal obligation to protect people in territory where they were the occupying force. Mencer denied that Israel was failing to protect the Palestinians from violence, but went on to say that although he thought the violent settlers were a minority (a few juvenile delinquents), the invading settlers were in effect the true owners of the West Bank, because Abraham had lived and died in Hebron many thousands of years ago, and that conferred on all Jews ownership of Judea and Samaria for all eternity.

I accept, as an atheist, that there are people with very deep belief in the divine intervention in human affairs described in the Bible, and there are no doubt many Israelis who think the way David Mencer seems to. However, it does seem surprising that God intended such open-ended support to people like the Russian immigrants to Israel and the West Bank, who are converts, not descendants of biblical Jews, and are unrelated to Abraham.

Given that the other strand of Israeli thought about the Palestinians – that they are born terrorists, whose only purpose in life is to destroy Israel – has absolutely nothing to do with any God-given property rights, we have to wonder if the innate paranoia engendered by the way Israeli children are educated isn’t simply finding an excuse for what they are doing.

One of the many ironies in the Israeli desire to attack and destroy all its near neighbours is that they claim they want to get people away from their borders who they deem dangerous, and therefore will tolerate no Palestinians or Palestinian state, no-one in Lebanon who objects to Israel, the same in Syria, and the same in Iran. It never seems to occur to the Israeli leadership that the best way to ensure that you are loved rather than hated by your neighbours is to stop treating them like vermin, and to start treating them as people who have their own rights to existence. Pushing back the borders in places like Lebanon simply moves the danger zone to another place.

Paranoia isn’t cured by eliminating the people you are scared of, it’s cured by embracing the real world, in which there are things a militaristic state can’t tolerate, like love. All of us who support the Palestinian people who are living in fear in the West Bank and in squalor in Gaza would like to embrace the scared people of Israel, and say we can love you too. Why not let us do that?

* Andy Daer is a member of the Liberal Democrats in South Gloucestershire.