Earlier this month, Israel and Lebanon concluded a U.S.-brokered deal to divide up the natural resources in their respective coastal waters. The two parties agreed upon a provisional maritime border that would place all of the Karish offshore gas field in Israeli waters, while placing the bulk of the so-far-unproven Qana field in Lebanese waters. Within the Jewish state, there remains ongoing debate over the agreement’s merits, much of which has become entangled with the upcoming election. Oded Granot addresses some of the criticisms:

The truth of the matter—and Lebanon will concede as much—is that this is a worthy agreement that serves both sides. Those who say that the ten-year dispute could have ended with a better deal [for Israel] are just selling you a lie. . . . The deal, put simply, prevents a conflagration with Hizballah that would have erupted once Israel would begin extracting gas from Karish.

This is not a historic deal and not the first step toward normalization. Lebanese officials have insisted on calling it an arrangement of understanding and have vowed to sign it separately and without meeting Israeli officials at the border crossing. . . . Neither does the deal significantly prevent Israel from getting its fair share of the revenue from the gas deal and provides security for both countries.

There is also an added plus: successful U.S. mediation. The guarantees the Biden administration provided both sides, however toothless, underscore the renewed U.S. presence in the Middle East after it had been long been neglected and handed to Vladimir Putin.

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.