I’ve been planning for a while to put down my thoughts on the 75th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel.

I’ve got an awful lot of views on that gorgeous, frustrating and very necessary country (I could happily write long pieces about the quality of sunlight in Jerusalem, for example, or Israel’s Eurovision entries of the 1980s).

But remarkably, just about the time those celebrations were going on, I found myself making my first full visit to the site at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

It was a trip that focused and intensified my feelings about Israel in ways I never imagined.

I’d been to Auschwitz before with my mum and brother in 1998. It came after we’d spent time with my late zayde Moishe, revisiting the places he’d grown up in Poland.

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The stall was set up outside the former concentration camp (Photo: Getty Images)

We said a small kaddish in Auschwitz 1, but didn’t feel able to enter the grounds of Birkenau. It was too much, it was too immense, it was too soon.

But last week, along with my friend, the brilliant actress Louisa Clein (whose Dutch mother was hidden and survived the war in Holland), I finally went.

I don’t believe that anyone – any human being – is equipped to relate the experience of standing on that earth. There’s just no vocabulary that fits. Language fails.

But unbelievably, in that place built for death, I had the most overpowering sense of life. My thoughts turned to trees and how, after they’re felled, their seeds disperse and appear elsewhere, bursting with growth and possibility. I thought then of the strength and vibrancy of the Jewish communities I know and love all across Europe and the world.

There was another moment that conveyed that extraordinary feeling, and which felt all the more incredible, happening 75 years after the foundation of Israel.

We’d been in a room in Auschwitz 1 that memorialised Jewish lives before the rise of fascism.

The walls were crowded with images and voices of that lost world, brimming with learning and art, overflowing with love and community, of Jews gifting their brilliance to hostile nations.

Seeing those faces, the horrors of what happened outside that room became almost unbearable.

But as we stepped out, I saw something glorious: a visiting group cloaked in Israeli flags, wearing them – young and old – a little like tallits, a little like banners.

It wasn’t just defiance. It was, in that place, a proud declaration that we Jews now have a land that’s ours. That group’s pride in Israel and in their Judaism were answers to the obscenity of the Final Solution.

Israel is, and always has been, somewhere that flicks the “on switch” in the “let’s have a big argument” section of people’s brains (then cranks it up to around 200 per cent).

Only a day after my trip, I was at a synagogue where I was politely accosted (in the nicest, most English way) about the documentary I’d made about it (The Holy Land and Us: Our Untold Stories.) I was delighted to engage. It’s part of being Jewish. Though I might call out Israel’s imperfections, it does not stop me being a proud Zionist. It is part of my Zionism.

One thing that recent events there have shown (especially the astonishing demonstrations) is at the heart of that country, deep in its constitution and national soul, lives an intense recognition of the importance of democracy under the rule of law.

My trip to Auschwitz made me reflect on how the barbarities of the Shoah arose in seemingly “liberal democracies” and how that was something that could have made Jewish people sceptical about such high-minded ideals.

Yet (wonderful to recall) when the new state was built, it too was constructed as a liberal democracy under law. Despite watching “civilisation” fail, we wanted to uphold the highest principles of civilised nations. It’s something we must never forget.

When I’ve spoken to survivors, I’ve learned from them that the three things that they had in common were mazel (luck); davka (that special brand of contrariness when someone won’t let others tell their story for them); and tikvah, hope.

It’s a truly beautiful thing that “Hatikvah” should be Israel’s national anthem because it speaks so exquisitely of the hope Israel should bring to the world. The truth is that everybody has their own vision of what Israel is and can be.

Mine is probably different from yours (and my friends’ and my late grandfather’s), but at heart I believe we all know just how essential its democracy and freedoms are.

One thing I hope is that in its 75th year, we can all come together to celebrate and protect those things that make it so precious.

To guarantee our liberty and safety as Jews, our strongest safeguard is in providing freedom, for everyone, under law. That, above all, is the sacred promise woven deep into our history. L’Chaim!