On Monday, Benjamin Netanyahu visited Uganda for the second time during his premiership, and discussed with the country’s president a full restoration of diplomatic ties. While there, the Israeli prime minister also met with the leader of Sudan, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who came to power ten months ago after the overthrow of the dictator Omar al-Bashir. Dore Gold explains the geostrategic and symbolic significance of the meeting:

It was on September 1, 1967, just after Israel’s lightning victory in the Six-Day War, that an Arab League Summit convened in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, and issued what became known as the Khartoum Declaration, or simply the three no’s: “No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.” Today that declaration has been reversed, symbolizing the beginning of the end to the Arab-Israeli wars that raged for decades in the past.

Sudan has multiple connections to the worst conflicts that Israel and the West have faced. The Sudanese brought together many of the main Islamist militant organizations from around the Middle East and supplied them with training camps, including the Muslim Brotherhood, the Algerian GIA, Hizballah, and even the PLO. Sudan was one of the earliest places that hosted the Saudi jihadist Osama bin Laden before he made Afghanistan his main base of operations in the summer of 1996. It provided neutral ground where al-Qaeda could meet with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

Sudan was incorporated into the regional network of Iran as well. Tehran gained access to Port Sudan on the Red Sea for its naval forces. . . . This was [part of] one of the key supply routes for Hamas as it built up its capacity to wage war against Israel.

In short, while it was geographically on the periphery of the Middle East, Sudan was part of the joint front against Israel in many significant ways. With Sudan exploring new ties with Israel, that front has been split.

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.