Last week, the Jewish state commemorated the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzḥak Rabin, who served in that position from 1974 to 1977 and then from 1992 to 1995. On the Israeli left, and perhaps even more so on the American Jewish left, a persistent myth remains that, had he not been murdered, the Oslo peace process that he began would have somehow succeeded. On the right, many blame him for embarking on this course in the first place, ushering in years of terror and bloodshed. Efraim Inbar rejects both views:

Only very few [Israelis] deny the fact that overall, the Oslo process was a failure because the Palestinian national movement was not (and still is not) ready for historic compromise with the Zionist movement. There is evidence that Rabin came to this realization as well, before he was assassinated. Rabin was skeptical of the Oslo process from the start, and he projected growing ambivalence. He was considering calling an end to the process.

A close look at Rabin’s core diplomatic and defense views, above and beyond Oslo, does the late prime minister more justice. It is worth remembering that the centrality of Israeli national security in his worldview never wavered.

Rabin was ready for partition of the West Bank, which was the classic Zionist position, but he insisted on defensible borders for Israel. He never entertained a return to the 1967 borders or any territorial swaps. . . . Israel’s defensible eastern border was to be the Jordan Valley (“in the widest sense”). The areas around a united Jerusalem were to be included in Israel. . . . These formulations were (and remain) in sync with the Israeli consensus.

Rabin also believed that Israel would have to live by its sword for many years. Therefore, he insisted that large defense outlays were mandatory even after the signing of peace treaties. According to Rabin, Israeli military power was a necessary condition in guaranteeing the preservation of treaties with neighbors in a turbulent Middle East. This view is still very relevant nowadays.

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.