Two years ago, the German scholar Clemens Jochem wrote a book based on extensive research into the German-born industrialist Willy Foerster—long thought to have been a Nazi war criminal—showing that he in fact used his factory to save Jews in the Far East from the grip of the Third Reich. Liane Grunberg writes:

Josef Meisinger, known as the “Butcher of Warsaw” for crimes he had earlier committed in Poland, was sent to Japan [in] 1941. Until 1945, Meisinger served in Tokyo as a liaison between the Gestapo and the Japanese secret police. He worked tirelessly in those years at influencing the Japanese officials to persecute, imprison, and kill off its minuscule Jewish population and the approximately 20,000 refugees of Nazi-occupied Europe who had fled to Japan-occupied Shanghai. Failing at this aim, Meisinger turned to the persecution of those he suspected of anti-Nazi activity in Japan, chief among them, Willy Foerster.

Foerster first arrived in Tokyo in the early 1930s to launch a turret-lathe factory. In 1936 he lost his citizenship in his home country after Germany passed a new law that punished evaders of military service. Being a stateless resident of Japan didn’t hinder Foerster’s rise to fortune. He became wildly successful, founding several companies and employing hundreds of workers—among them many Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi occupation of Europe—a move that provoked Meisinger’s ire. . . .

In May 1943, Meisinger had Foerster arrested, on accusations of spying for the Soviets and spreading antiwar propaganda. While in captivity, Jochem reports, Foerster was tortured by Meisinger. Foerster . . . was released in June 1944 after he agreed, under duress, to sell his factory at a price drastically below its value. Together with his Japanese wife, Hideko, and infant daughter, Erica, he was then put under house arrest.

After the war, Meisinger was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death. But he nonetheless found a way to inflict more misery on Foerster:

On his way to the gallows, Meisinger . . . accused [Foerster] of complicity in his own long list of Nazi crimes. . . . Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied Powers in the Pacific, issued an order to confiscate Foerster’s vast financial assets. On August 20, 1947, Foerster was tried as an alleged Nazi on board the USS General Black while being deported with his family back to Germany.

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.