When Daniel Polisar first became aware of the archaeologist Eilat Mazar’s theory about where King David’s Jerusalem palace was located, he was immediately enthralled, and helped to raise the funds that enabled one of the most important excavations into the city’s ancient past. Mazar, who died this week at the age of sixty-four, eventually located a structure from King David’s time that fit the biblical description of the palace, in the place she had predicted. In a tribute to her, Polisar writes:

Though born a decade after the Jewish state was established, Mazar is seen by those privileged to know her as being among the country’s founders because she had that rare and unmistakable character of the generation of leaders who brought the state into being against all odds. She was driven by an instinctive love for the Land of Israel, felt deeply connected to the Bible without being traditionally religious, and embraced archaeology, with its alluring combination of the spiritual and the earthly.

Like [other members of] Israel’s “Greatest Generation,” Eilat was supremely confident and touchingly modest, naturally charming, and exasperatingly stubborn, totally committed to the national cause but even more devoted to her family, and undoubtedly crazy—in a good way, in the best way, what we Israelis refer to with admiration as a m’shuga l’davar [literally, crazy for one thing], someone who will do whatever it takes to achieve an impossible dream—not just once, but as a way of life.

Today, a decade and a half [after Eilat began the Jerusalem excavation], archaeologists debate whether the structure [she identified] better fits the Bible’s description of David’s Citadel or David’s Palace, but it is widely (though not entirely) accepted among scholars that the Mazar excavation provided compelling proof for a significant Israelite kingdom governed in the 10th century BCE from precisely that part of Jerusalem the Bible describes as the seat of King David’s rule.

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.