Earlier this week, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky reiterated complaints that Jerusalem has not provided his country with military assistance, and in particular that it has not shared its sophisticated missile-defense systems. Zelensky claimed, moreover, that Israel’s reluctance to send weapons resulted in Tehran providing Moscow with the drones it is now using to attack his country. On Wednesday, he changed his tune somewhat, thanking Israel for its recent sharing of vital intelligence. The editors of the Jerusalem Post take issue with the initial accusations:

Russia has been working with Iran for decades on defense technology, from missiles to air defense. Russia has even helped Iran to expand its nuclear-power program through expanding capacity at the Bushehr nuclear plant.

The main weapons Russia used against Ukraine since February, destroying villages and massacring civilians, have been Russian-made. Moscow’s decision to acquire thousands of Iranian drones is a new dangerous stage in the Moscow-Tehran partnership, but it is not because of Israel that Russia has relied on Iran and there is no evidence Israel could have prevented this partnership.

Israel has supported Ukraine since the war began; with humanitarian aid and also in international forums and through joining Western countries in condemning Russia’s invasion. It is true Israel has not sent air defenses to Ukraine. Western countries have also been slow to provide Ukraine with air defenses; many advanced systems, such as the Patriot system, have not been sent to Kyiv. [Furthermore], there is no evidence that Israel could have supplied Ukraine with [its] advanced systems, such as David’s Sling, Iron Dome, or Arrow; and it’s not clear even that these systems are appropriate for Kyiv.

Ukraine was careful in the past not to side too closely with Israel as it balanced its relations in the Middle East. Israel, too, was careful to balance its relations. Does Israel stand with Ukraine? Yes. Does that mean it needs to do everything Kyiv wants? No.

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.