A Church of England priest, I shall visit the synagogue today and ask if I may be allowed to join their prayers to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

We all know what this is about, but it does no harm to remind ourselves.

Persecution of Jews began as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933. He declared: “The Jews are our misfortune.” His Nuremburg Laws banned Jews from the professions and excluded them from public life.

In January 1941, Reinhard Heydrich proposed “the final solution” and on January 16, 1942, Jews were deported from the Lodz ghetto. Then occurred the transportation, imprisonment and extermination of six million Jews. One-and-a-half million of them were children. Two thirds of all the Jews in Europe were wiped out.

Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it. Have we forgotten the Holocaust already?

Anti-Semitism is rampant again throughout the so called “democracies” of Europe. Attacks on Jewish people and their property are becoming routine and in France and Holland Jews are seriously considering packing up and leaving those countries altogether. This is shameful and mocks all our claims to be a civilised society.

Why persecute the Jews? It’s an old story, a very old story. From Old Testament times the Jewish people have been described as the scapegoat, and it is their own scriptures which so name them.

Some say that today’s Jews deserve our disapproval for their “disproportionate” incursions into Gaza.

What are the facts? Israel is a tiny country surrounded by its sworn enemies. It is attacked from the north by Hezbollah and from the south by Hamas’ rockets.

Meanwhile, courtesy of President Obama’s insane foreign policy, Israel faces the existential threat of a nuclear-armed Iran whose leaders have said over and again that they intend to obliterate the state of Israel.

Well, it is said, Israel deserves all it gets because of its atrocious treatment of the Palestinian Arabs. Why will Israel not agree to a “two states” solution with Israelis and Palestinians living side by side?

Of course, Israel would prefer to have a peace-loving Palestinian state for its next door neighbour. Indeed, it has tried to negotiate this on many occasions.

In 1998, for example, at Camp David, Bill Clinton came within an ace of achieving this happy arrangement – only for Yasser Arafat to leave the negotiating table, return to the Middle East, tear up the agreement he had just signed and start a second intifada – a terrorist uprising – against Israel.

By all accounts, Hillary Clinton’s comments on Arafat’s treachery are unprintable.

Israel is a democracy surrounded by barbarous tyrannical enemies who have tried four times since 1948 to wipe it off the map. Thus in 67 years the Israelis have been obliged to fight four defensive wars against these aggressors.

Hamas, in particular, is furious at the moment because the Egyptian president has locked up its supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood and cut off much of its weapons supply line.

Until comparatively recently, tens of thousands of Palestinians found employment in Israel, the only functioning democracy surrounded by dictatorships. It is not in Israel that weekly there are public executions and people flogged for trivial offences. Those delights are the perpetrations of such as Saudi Arabia, a vile regime which last weekend enjoyed the fawning attention of the leaders of the West, including Prince Charles and David Cameron.

Jews all over Europe are once again being victimised. Depressing to recall Lord Acton’s saying: “The only thing men learn from history is that men learn nothing from history.”