Last Friday was Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day), the holiday that celebrates Israel’s capture, during the Six-Day War, of those parts of Jerusalem that had been seized by Jordan in 1948. Gerald Steinberg uses the occasion to reflect on the two intervening decades in the city’s history:

Jews have lived in Jerusalem continuously, and were the majority population in the decades before the 1948 war. [But] on May 28, 1948 the Jordanian army (also known as the Arab Legion) completed the capture of the Jewish Quarter. . . . All of the Jewish inhabitants were exiled—the ethnic cleansing was complete. Jews were prohibited from accessing the Temple Mount . . . or the Western Wall.

Even after the fall of the Jewish Quarter, the conquerors systematically desecrated all remnants of 3,000 years of Jewish Jerusalem. Fifty-seven ancient synagogues, libraries and centers of religious study were ransacked and twelve were totally and deliberately destroyed. Those that remained standing were defaced and turned into barns for goats, sheep, and donkeys. Appeals were made to the United Nations and in the international community to declare the Old City to be an “open city” and stop this destruction, but there was no response.

In addition, thousands of tombstones from the ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives were used as paving stones for roads and as construction material in Jordanian army camps.

The armistice agreement that ended Israel’s War of Independence included a Jordanian guarantee that Jews would still be allowed access to their holy places, but it was at first ignored and then forgotten.

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.