Unlike in the U.S., where the White House is required to produce, regularly, an official document outlining its national-security strategy, the Jewish state has never released any such statement, although one or two reports have come close. Yaakov Amidror has thus attempted to articulate the unwritten doctrines that have long guided Israeli strategists. Underlying his vision are certain basic, and unchanging, facts about the country’s situation:

Israel . . . will forever face a yawning gap between the size of its resident population and that of neighboring countries. The latter all have been hostile to Israel’s existence in the past, and some remain so. Israel always will be a small country in size, and hence hypersensitive to any loss of territory and to high-trajectory (artillery and rocket) fire—unlike most of her neighbors.

Israel can never reach a “fall of Berlin” moment in the Middle East, i.e., it cannot attain a decisive victory in war, such as that of the allies in World War II—a moment that would radically transform the political culture of the region [and] the desire of neighboring nations and organizations to annihilate of the state of Israel. This means that no victory in any war would ensure, once and for all, that Israel again will not face threats to its existence. Moreover, Israel’s first defeat may well be its last, certainly so if its territory ends up being conquered by Arab or Islamic forces. This is not the case for any Arab country which Israel might defeat or whose territory it might occupy.

These realities lead to many important conclusions, among them:

Israel . . . must aspire to defensible borders, i.e., lines of defense that enable the IDF . . . to parry an offensive by any hostile coalition until the reserves are called-up. Contrary to the claim that “territory has no value in the age of missiles,” the geographic dimension of Israel’s national-security concept is extremely important, and even more so in the missile era.

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.