A leading expert on public opinion in the Arab world, David Pollock has recently supervised a vast survey of citizens of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. The results are both encouraging and surprising:

The first crucial finding is simply that people are willing to speak their minds, even on controversial matters, at least in private.

[Most] unexpected is the finding that the mid-May armed conflict between Israel and Hamas has had little effect on attitudes toward either party. In a previous poll, taken in November 2020, around 40 percent in each country backed the Abraham Accords with Israel, with almost as many also accepting “business or sports contacts with Israelis.” Those numbers hardly budged at all in this latest poll, taken just a few weeks after the Gaza hostilities ended.

More specifically, when asked to pick their top two priorities for U.S. policy in their region, respondents are about evenly divided among the four options offered. Only around a quarter pick “pushing for a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict” as their top option, while approximately equal percentages opt for other objectives: containing Iran, ending the wars in Yemen and Libya, or—more surprisingly—“promoting human rights and democracy.”

Regarding the even more sensitive internal issues of political Islam, the data show a similarly moderate trend over time. The past seven years show a slow but steady uptick in the percentages agreeing with this assertion: “We should listen to those among us who want to interpret Islam in a more moderate, modern, and tolerant way.” In ascending order, the numbers today stand as follows: the UAE, 33 percent; Saudi Arabia, 39 percent; and Bahrain, a whopping 51 percent.

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.