On Israel’s independence day proclamation — May 14, 1948, (5 Iyar 5708) — the remaining Jewish-Roman community that survived the deportations to Auschwitz gathered near the Arch of Titus at the Forum Romanum, the ruins of the ancient city of Rome. For 2,000 years, Rome’s Jews refrained from passing under the arch that had been erected to commemorate the Roman victory over the Judean rebellion. But on May 14, 1948, they passed under the arch, coming from the opposite direction of the Roman victory march.

Symbolizing the victory over Judea’s rebels, the engraving in the Arch of Titus depicts the march of pillage and prisoners. In its center is a relief of the pillagers carrying on their shoulders the menorah (candelabra) from the Second Temple. The triumph of the Roman Empire over the rebellious people from Judea in 70 A.D. is symbolized by the menorah taken from the Temple.

The ancient Jewish people — an elusive mixture of matter and spirit, religion and nation — are embodied in the Temple menorah engraved in the Roman arch. This is the temple whose existence some Palestinians call into question. Two thousand years went by and the same menorah was chosen as the Jewish state’s emblem. It's a sign of the renewed covenant between the people and their ancient homeland. This is a people that rose like a phoenix from the crematoria in Auschwitz, building a model state in a relentless struggle.

The Jewish people are not like all other peoples. Rather, they are a nation sustaining tension within itself between the physical and the tangible and the metaphysical and spiritual. “The Torah is the legal underpinning of Jewish freedom and nationality.” These words were said not by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, but by John Locke, the “father of classical liberalism.”