Two weeks ago, Kyiv formally requested that Jerusalem share its missile-defense systems—including the vaunted Iron Dome—citing evidence that Russia plans to use increasing numbers of rockets and drones against the Ukrainian population. Bradley Bowman explains why Israel has thus far declined the request:

In August, Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired some 600 rockets and mortars toward population centers in Israel. But those attacks paled in comparison to what Israel confronted in May 2021. During that conflict, Hamas fired around 4,360 rockets from Gaza toward Israel. In both instances, casualties in Israel would have been significant if it were not for the role of Iron Dome.

Worse still, Hizballah, Tehran’s terror proxy in Lebanon, has about 150,000 surface-to-surface rockets and missiles and an estimated 2,000 unmanned aerial vehicles. Most of the rockets and missiles are relatively rudimentary systems. A small but growing number of them, however, are precision-guided munitions, which are more effective in hitting their desired targets, requiring a greater expenditure of missile interceptors.

That combination of a growing quantity and increasing capability is a genuine nightmare for Israel. Indeed, if Hizballah were to launch an estimated 1,500 rockets and missiles per day, existing Israeli missile defenses could be overwhelmed. Despite efforts to build additional missile-defense capability and capacity, Israel has a long way to go before it has enough missile defenses to deal with a war of this magnitude.

To make matters worse, some in Israel worry Russia could capture an Iron Dome system sent to Ukraine and then provide the system and its information to Iran. Tehran and its terror proxies would undoubtedly then use the information to develop capabilities to circumvent Iron Dome’s defenses, reducing its effectiveness and increasing the ability of Hizballah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to kill Israelis in future conflicts.

As for those in the U.S. that have criticized Israel for its reticence to send its technology to the Ukrainians, Bowman notes that the “United States itself has not provided the Patriot air- and missile-defense system to Ukraine.”

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.