Birthdays, for the most part, are about celebrations.
But sometimes, they coincide with gloomy occasions that temper the revelry.
So is the 60th birthday of Israel, as it is also the 60th anniversary of Al Naqba, or the catastrophe, the Palestinian exodus from what is today Israel. Not to forget that the celebrations also came on the heels of Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed on May 1 this year.
Israel is nothing less than a miracle - as miraculous as a rose blooming in a desert. It has a strong economy, is at the cutting edge of technology, has developed strong administrative institutions and has all the makings of a modern state. It has survived crippling wars only to emerge as a strong actor in the Middle East.
But it is also a contradiction of sorts. The conflict that engendered the birth of the nation continues to this day, and its specter continues to haunt the national imagination.
Rather than engage in an active cultural exchange with the inhabitants of the land they settled in, the founding fathers of Israel conceived of the new nation as a satellite state for Europe, or what many scholars have since termed the "last white settler colonial outpost."
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As Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery notes, Theodor Herzl wrote 102 years ago in his oeuvre, Der Judenstaat, a founding text of the Zionist movement, "For Europe we shall constitute there (in Palestine) a sector of the wall against Asia, we shall serve as the vanguard of culture against barbarianism."
This effectively made Israel a perennial outsider in the region and a country more in sync with the West than the Arab world.
But for a handful of powerful allies in the West, notably the U.S. and European nations that side by it out of the Holocaust guilt, Israel has few friends, especially in the Muslim world. Its immediate neighbors are its trenchant enemies, forcing Israel to live by the sword.
Israel as a state is highly militarized. It practices conscription - three years for men and two for women - which blurs the distinction between the army and civil society, as all citizens, including journalists, are forced to serve in the military with few exceptions. Though this is understandable considering the historical circumstances under which Israel evolved, it nevertheless does not augur well for democracy in the long run.
And then there is the problem of the Occupied Territories. Though Israel relinquished control of Gaza in 2006, it maintains a major presence in the West Bank and controls every aspect of the lives of Palestinians there.
Internally, Israel's positioning as a Jewish democracy pits it against one-sixth of its own citizens of Arab heritage. If a concrete wall runs across Israel's border with the West Bank, an invisible wall separates its own citizens from each other.
Israeli-Arabs suffer what's akin to institutional racism in the U.S. - they live in improvised neighborhoods, face several barriers in moving up the social ladder and rank consistently low on socioeconomic indicators. There are few exchanges between the two populations, and the fact that the state has done little to encourage people-to-people relationship hardly helps.
A rough birthday, indeed. So, is all lost?
Not really, as long as Israel reinvents itself. And that requires a more inclusive democracy that does not alienate a significant section of population, a people who privilege the local cultural moorings over European ethos, and a nation that recognizes the trials and tribulations of a colonized people and works to alleviate it.
And until then, the party is going to be muted.
Santhosh Chandrashekar is the Daily Lobo opinion editor and a graduate student at the Communication and Journalism Department.
