In An Army Like No Other, Haim Bresheeth-Zabner—a professor of film studies at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, and himself a veteran of the Six-Day War—tells the story of Israel’s army from 1948 until the present day. The military historian Edward Luttwak begins his review by examining Bresheeth-Zabner’s insinuation that the IDF slaughtered some 200 Syrian POWs in 1967:

Israeli military actions—past, present and nonexistent—receive, I would wager, more scrutiny than those of any other army, and in the endless list of accusations against it—valid, semi-valid, improbable, or utterly impossible—no such prisoner massacre has ever previously been included. But I will offer no such probabilistic argument because I was there in the Hula Valley in June 1967.

Of course, Luttwak saw no sign of such a massacre, because one never occurred. But, he goes on to argue, the entire book is filled with similar libels and insinuations, unencumbered by excessive concern for the truth, or even for plausibility.

Bresheeth-Zabner is one of those Israelis who are warmly welcomed in London by the academics and publicists who, for reasons on which we need not speculate here, studiously overlook every other conflict in the world (including Syria’s, amazingly enough, with its own Palestinian casualties numbering in the many thousands) to campaign relentlessly against Israel. That warm welcome is available in exchange for the acceptance of a simple axiom: Israel has no right to exist; hence everything about it is illegitimate, if not also atrocious, beginning with the Israeli army of course.

That is a bargain that Bresheeth-Zabner is very willing to fulfil. We thus read: “The Israelis are the greatest warmongers in the Middle East.” . . . The author’s apparent need to blacken Israel affords him no license for the [book’s] countless factual errors—most of them easily avoidable via a little light googling.

As for the IDF’s supposed victims, Luttwak writes that Bresheeth-Zabner “does not like the Palestinians enough to tell them the truth, thereby insisting on Palestinian exceptionalism.”

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.