On Friday, President Trump announced a normalization agreement between Sudan and Israel. Amnon Lord surveys the history of the African country’s relationship with the Jewish state—beginning with the former’s independence in 1956, when its government wished to establish diplomatic ties with Israel, but was pressured not to by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.

As an ally of Egypt, Sudan partook in the War of Attrition (1967-1970) and the Yom Kippur War, when it sent a brigade to the Egyptian front. One of the commanders of this brigade was an officer by the name of Omar al-Bashir, the recently deposed dictator of Sudan.

Yet, during Golda Meir’s premiership (1969-1974), Jerusalem made some successful overtures to the country:

Israel sent Mossad agents led by David Ben-Uziel to help the Christians in South Sudan, [which gained independence in 2011], defend themselves against genocidal campaigns. The Sudanese president Jaafar Nimeiry, who recognized the autonomy of South Sudan in the early 1970s, permitted Ethiopian Jews [in his country] to immigrate to Israel more than a decade later. He was also the only [leader] in the Arab world who supported former the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat when he made peace with Israel.

Thereafter the country increasingly turned toward Islamism and to Iran. In 2009 and 2012, Israel is thought to have carried out airstrikes against Hamas-related targets in Sudan:

[The] airstrikes, . . . which destroyed a terror base and a weapons convoy earmarked for the Gaza Strip via the Sinai Peninsula, . . . nudged the Sudanese more toward the American-Saudi axis; and made it obvious to its rulers that their alliance with global terror—chiefly with Iran—was ruining them. Sudan was an important base of operations for al-Qaeda, and the Sudanese government even armed al-Qaeda terrorists with diplomatic passports. The [recent] sea-change in this regard is absolute. Sudan, where an American ambassador was murdered in 1973 under orders from Yasir Arafat, and where the notorious terrorists Carlos the Jackal and Osama Bin-Laden found refuge, is now changing its colors.

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.