Most European countries expelled their Jews at some point, usually between the 13th and 16th centuries. But Poland remained one of the most notable exceptions up until 1968, when the Six-Day War, tensions within the Communist party, and student unrest combined to lead the country’s rulers to inaugurate an “anti-Zionist” campaign. No formal edict of expulsion was ever issued, but more than half of the Jewish population left Poland by 1970. Tom Sawicki reviews a recent Polish film, March 1968, depicting these events:

Against the backdrop of newfound love between two young people, the movie presents the account of the events that led to the expulsion from Poland, where I was born and grew up, of some 13,000 Jews, including my family—practically the last remnants of the community that numbered 3.3 million before the Holocaust—and in many cases ethnic Poles married to Jews, for their alleged “Zionist” activities.

The June 1967 Israeli victory created an excuse for an anti-Semitic, or rather “anti-Zionist” campaign in Poland which, following Moscow’s example, broke off diplomatic and all other relations with Israel. Subsequently, over the next few months, most Poles of “Jewish descent” who occupied senior and even mid-level positions in academia, medicine, the country’s economic and intellectual life, and other fields, were dismissed from work. The pretext was their “Zionist activities” coupled with “imperialist tendencies.” In the movie you witness what happens to a family that is left without a source of income and what choices remained for them. You also see that many Poles were more than happy to take part in the anti-Semitic campaign.

Different scenes reminded me of the time when the principal of my high school, Director Redlich (who was of Jewish descent), was replaced by a party apparatchik, and of the time when my chemistry teacher said that “now the Jews will not rule over us.” And I, knowing that my family will soon leave Poland, bravely called her in front of the entire class a “filthy anti-Semite” and for this, she gave me two F’s, which would have prevented my graduating had we remained in Poland.

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.