Seven years ago Tuesday, the Argentine Jewish lawyer Alberto Nisman—who was investigating the 1994 bombing of Buenos Aires’s AMIA Jewish center by Iranian agents—was shot under mysterious circumstances. As Toby Dershowitz explains, Nisman’s death was initially ruled a suicide, but the police, perhaps deliberately, contaminated the crime scene, and there is every reason to believe that Argentinian officials were responsible for his death:

Nisman had filed a complaint with Federal Judge Ariel Lijo’s court on Wednesday, January 14, 2015. He alleged that then-President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner had made an agreement with Iran to absolve the Islamic Republic of responsibility in the AMIA terrorist attack and to lift the INTERPOL red notices on the Iranian officials Nisman had implicated. In exchange, Iran would sell oil to Argentina and Tehran would receive grain, and possibly weapons, according to the complaint filed with Lijo. A Memorandum of Understanding, or MOU, was signed between the two countries, a document that is now public.

Kirchner’s allies scrambled to learn what else Nisman had on her. Days after his death, Kirchner disbanded the SIDE, the top intelligence agency, knowing some agents had cooperated with Nisman. She created a new spy agency, Agencia Federal de Inteligencia, led by her cronies.

In 2017, Kirchner was indicted for treason, and was expected to stand trial for her role in the coverup of the 1994 bombing, but in 2019 she was elected vice-president:

To the shock of victims’ families, last October [a] three-judge panel dismissed the case before the trial of now-Vice President Kirchner had even started, before the evidence was presented, and before 300 witnesses were to speak—witnesses who were not afforded the opportunity to address the court and the nation. The miscarriage of justice continued. As she did with corruption cases against her before other courts, she successfully unwound this case. Victims’ families appealed the case before a higher court where a decision is pending.

Today, AMIA-related INTERPOL red notices for current and former Iranian officials, including [Iran’s vice-president for economic affairs] Mohsen Rezaee and a Lebanese national, remain in effect. Last week, the world witnessed Nicaragua hosting Mohsen Rezaee for whom Argentina also has an arrest warrant in connection with the AMIA bombing. He is also on Argentina’s terrorism list and is sanctioned by the United States.

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.