Beginning in 2017, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)—an anti-Israel group that is neither for peace nor especially Jewish in its membership—launched its “Deadly Exchange” campaign, which takes the fact that some American police departments have visited Israel to meet with law-enforcement agents there as evidence that Israelis are training U.S. police officers to commit unnecessary shootings and other abuses, especially against racial minorities. In reality, these visits, many of which are arranged by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), are used to study Israeli strategies for dealing with terrorism and mass-casualty situations. Miriam Elman describes JVP’s insidious logic:

Heavily promoted today by a host of U.S.-based anti-Israel organizations, the “Deadly Exchange” campaign . . . traffics in tropes about Jewish power in order to accuse Israel and Jewish American organizations of conspiring to encourage police brutality and increased deportation and imprisonment rates of American people of color. It follows that if you care about social-justice issues like policing problems and prison reform or the Black Lives Matter movement, then you must also revile Israel and detest its supporters, who now stand accused of complicity in the suffering of American blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans. . . . .

Racial issues in the U.S. unrelated to Israel have long been hijacked by BDS activists keen on turning them against Israel, and for years prominent progressive activists have been blaming Israel for police shootings of African Americans. . . . JVP’s innovation was to package that patently false [account] into a full-blown campaign that turns American Zionists into co-conspirators with Israel in some nefarious mission to hurt their fellow Americans. . . .

City councils are being aggressively lobbied by activists promoting the campaign, and at least one municipality—Durham, North Carolina—has now aligned its policing policy with the Deadly Exchange agenda. . . .

“Deadly Exchange” positions JVP at the forefront of the effort to stoke hatred of Israel and Zionist Jews through intersectionality. . . . According to [JVP’s version of the theory], Israel is a global oppressor of American minority communities and the source of the problems that these groups face. Once you’re wedded to this view of intersectionality, it’s not a great leap to begin castigating Israel’s supporters in the U.S. as the driving force behind a white police power structure harming non-white Americans.

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.