On September 25, the charismatic socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced that she no longer planned to attend an upcoming commemoration of the 25th anniversary of Yitzḥak Rabin’s assassination, sponsored by the left-wing group Americans for Peace Now. Michael Koplow comments:

Rabin is revered by liberal American Jews and Democratic lawmakers, many of whom view his assassination as the event from which the peace camp never recovered. To denigrate Peace Now by leaving the impression that it is covering for alleged Israeli war crimes and to treat Rabin as an insincere Trojan Horse who was only feinting toward peace and concessions, in order to perpetuate injustice, [as have the far-left activists who appear to have convinced Ocasio-Cortez to back out of the event], is as hard a turn to radicalism as exists in the context of Democratic politics and American Jewish discourse. It is out of step with the overwhelming majority of American Jews, who view Rabin as a positive example, and it is redolent of when outsiders make lists of good and bad representatives of an ethnic or racial minority. Many Palestinians have cause to dislike Rabin, but for Ocasio-Cortez to treat him as beyond the pale puts her well beyond the boundaries of traditional liberal politics.

This message is not a criticism of Israeli behavior; it is a criticism of Israeli legitimacy. It says that nothing Israel can do is good enough, that compromise is not sufficient, that Palestinian concerns and grievances and aspirations are valid—and they are!—but that Israeli ones are not.

If Rabin, who did what he did despite deep reservations and what turned out to be fatal opposition from his domestic political opponents, is worthy only of being shunned, then no Israeli leader will ever meet Ocasio-Cortez’s standard.

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.