After anti-Semitic flyers were posted on the University of California, Davis campus last fall, administrators invited the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to lead workshops on anti-Semitism. But the ADL happens to be in the sights of the rabidly anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which sent an angry letter to administrators urging them not to cooperate with the organization. Here SJP follows in the footsteps of a related, and equally vicious organization, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which has been pursuing the ADL for helping U.S. police officers visit Israel. Jonathan Marks explains:

[JVP’s] “Deadly Exchange” campaign cynically seeks to exploit the relative popularity of Black Lives Matter by pinning anti-black discrimination on Israel and American Jewish organizations opposed to the demonization of the Jewish state. JVP specifically targets educational trips to Israel by U.S. law enforcement. . . . Review the logic: U.S. law enforcement, the argument goes, systematically discriminates against black people. To do that, they must travel to Israel, since that is where you go shopping for evil. But to make such shopping trips happen, you need Jewish organizations.

As one promotional video put it, “Who is making this deadly exchange possible? The main groups are actually U.S.-based Jewish organizations” Get it? Scratch American race prejudice and you reveal the Jewish state, working with American Jews who care more about it than they care about their vulnerable fellow citizens. . . .

[A]ccording to UC Davis’s student newspaper, the Aggie, [SJP’s] charges against the ADL were compelling enough to move UC Davis to put its plans on hold. So frightened was UC Davis’s chancellor Gary May by 149 signatures that he denied any involvement in one ADL workshop. . . .

[E]ven when it tries to focus on anti-Semitism, Davis’s administration is blind to it when it comes from the left.

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.