Judging by his appearance in the accompanying archival photo, it does not seem that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, had much occasion or experience wearing, let alone fashioning, a formal dress tie. However, nor did it appear that the sure-sighted, steely-eyed visionary  much cared, either.

His heart, his soul and all his strength had been focused for many years on far weightier matters: securing and building a national homeland for the Jewish people.

Standing beside the prime minister is Chaim Weizmann, the legendary first president of the Jewish state. Beside Weizmann, who was nearly blind at this stage in his life, is the country’s first chief of staff, Yigael Yadin, a man who would ultimately become known as much for his eye-opening archeology as for his courage and bravery in battle.

The three men are standing in the fore on the dais for a military review in Jerusalem. Indeed, they are standing in the fore of Jewish history itself, celebrating Israel’s second year of free, independent existence as a sovereign Jewish state.

The date was the fifth day of Iyar, 1950. O what a great and glorious day it was! This week on the fifth day of Iyar, we celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary. O what a great and glorious day it is.

Some 18 months prior to that military review in Jerusalem, fighting had stopped in what historians called Israel’s War of Independence. The nascent Jewish state had withstood the onslaught of the five armies of the neighbouring Arab states along with, of course, the local irregular Arab forces who fought under the command of various absentee warlords, landowners and tribal chiefs.

Some 600,000 people, among whom were many tortured, starved and abused who had not long ago landed on Israel’s shores from the death camps of Europe, stood against the military strength of the 45 million people of those five Arab states.

In the words of the United Kingdom’s chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, “after almost 2,000 years of homelessness, the Jewish people had come home.”

“It is a story without parallel in history,” the chief rabbi tells us in his magnificently conceived double CD, Israel Home of Hope.

And it is a story that deserves to be celebrated loud, clear and proud in the hearts of all humanity. For as Rabbi Sacks also tells us, “Israel’s existence and achievements are living testimony to one of Judaisms’ greatest messages to humankind: the principled defeat of tragedy by the power of hope.”

Yet many are the people today with malice in their hearts toward the Jewish state who distort the story,  revise it, who try to sever the present and ancient tie between the Jewish people and the land of Israel.

Editors, commentators and reporters of print and television slyly suggest that the Jewish state will not survive into the future. Teachers and academics organize boycotts of their Israeli counterparts. Union leaders line up their membership behind Israel’s enemies to join in the calumny against the Jewish state. Even anthropologists cast doubt on the work of Israeli archeologists, accusing them of subordinating science to nationalism. But no amount of distortion and falsification can win out against the truth that is the irreducible centre of a faith, and indeed of a civilization.

As Rabbi Sacks says: “Judaism was born in the hope of a land. Israel is the Jewish land of hope.”

There are 82 Christian nations on earth and 56 Muslim ones. Israel occupies less than one-quarter of one per cent of the entire land mass of the Arab world. The Jews are begrudged even this tiny sliver of land, even though time and again, they have shown – as they do even today – the willingness to share it with the Palestinians and even though time and again, they have fought for it and died for it and won the right to call it home.

The Jews in Israel are not colonialists, usurpers or occupiers. They are home in the land of their forebears, in the land that is at the centre of the Jewish faith and the Jewish soul.

As Ben-Gurion, Weizmann and Yadin did on Israel’s second anniversary, we too, metaphorically at least, must all stand this week on the dais of celebration. We must sing, dance, laugh, tell stories, recite poetry. We must raise a glass in unabashed happiness. We must remember the generations who could only dream of a sovereign Jewish state. We must hug our children and tell them with unequalled delight and everlasting love that we are privileged to live in a day and an age alongside the Jewish State of Israel.

The 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence “is a day that God has made. Let us be glad and rejoice in it.”

Am Yisrael Chai.

Od loh avdah tikvateinu.