The Hebrew date was Iyar 5, 5709; May 14, 1948 on our “Christian calendar.” It was a Friday afternoon and Shabbat was looming as David Ben Gurion proclaimed to his people and to the world “the establishment of a Jewish state inEretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.”

What the Jews were realising, even as Egyptian bombers began to appear over Tel Aviv (for Israel was restored both out of war — the Holocaust, and in war — the War of Independence), was what former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren called “one of the most remarkable and inspiring achievements in human history.”

“A people which had been exiled from its homeland two thousand years before, which had endured countless pogroms, expulsions, and persecutions, but which had refused to relinquish its identity—which had, on the contrary, substantially strengthened that identity; a people which only a few years before had been the victim of mankind’s largest single act of mass murder, killing a third of the world’s Jews,...

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