Having arrived in Palestine with the British Army in 1938, at age seventeen, Tom Derek Bowden—who died last week—served under the famed and eccentric British Zionist officer Orde Wingate. In 1941, he was dispatched to Vichy-ruled Syria, where he fought alongside Moshe Dayan. Despite being released from service due to injuries, Bowden insisted on rejoining the fight on the European front, where he was eventually captured and sent to Bergen-Belsen. He returned to the Land of Israel in 1948 to fight for the Jewish state’s independence, and then went back to England to take up farming. Stephen Daisley comments on this remarkable life and its “enduring lessons.”

Bowden’s first lesson is his simplest: always be for the Jews. When the world asks you to choose between the Jews and their enemies, or insists on your neutrality in the matter, never hesitate to choose the Jews. Your philo-Semitism will be in the minority most of the time and some Jews will regard it with suspicion, but it is a moral imperative nonetheless. The preservation of Jewish life, community, and peoplehood is a civilizational commandment. No society can be advanced whose Jews aren’t free, equal, and safe.

Another lesson from Bowden’s life is that being for the Jews often requires courage. Few are called on to show the measure of valor Bowden did and he is a useful reminder that, whatever sufferings come with philo-Semitism and Zionism, your inconveniences are minor compared to his. Bowden teaches us, too, that there is no conditional solidarity with Jews. He is no friend who is only there when it’s easy or politically palatable. Zionism and Jewish peoplehood are inextricably linked, and Bowden understood that if the modern Jewish state was strangled at birth it would indeed mean another “annihilation” of the Jews. Bowden fought for Israel for the same reason anti-Semites fight against it: Israel is the home of Jewish strength and Jewish security.

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.