This year sees many 75th anniversaries relating to the final year of World War II, including that of the Anglo-American air raids on the city of Dresden, a major industrial and transportation center of the Nazi war machine. In February, a commemorative ceremony was held in Germany, attended by that country’s president as well as a member of the British royal family. Michael Pinto-Duschinsky found the event itself to be “dignified,” but is disturbed by the way so many now discuss the bombing:

Dresden has become a powerful symbol of the suffering of ordinary Germans. Many consider it a war crime committed by the Allies, in particular by Winston Churchill.

On the merits of the decision to bomb Dresden in 1945, and more broadly on the British policy of “area bombing” at a time when targeting technologies were still poor, I have not considered this narrow question closely enough to reach a conclusion. Though Germany was under extreme pressure by early 1945, it had mounted a serious offensive against U.S. forces in the Ardennes, was still bombing the UK with rockets, and was developing weapons and equipment, such as jet engines, possibly capable of turning the tide. Even after the defeat of Germany, the Allies faced the potentially daunting task of invading Japan. Even if the continuing sufferings of slave laborers and POWs in Germany are to be discounted, there were pressing reasons to force a German surrender at the earliest possible moment.

Yet all these arguments, in my view, pale into relative insignificance. The amount of coverage of the destruction of Dresden lacks proportion and is diversionary.

[First], Dresden is being used by some to justify pacifism, an approach which for all its nobility may partly have been responsible for the weakness which led to the outbreak of the World War II. Further, . . . the subtext of much, though not all, of the Dresden debate is to divert attention from the deeds of the Nazi state, especially but not exclusively towards Jews. The implication that Churchill was as bad as Hitler is grotesque, as has been the tendency among parts of the German population to focus excessively on their status as victims. The further result is to “contextualize”— that is, minimize—the Holocaust.

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.