After Vladimir Putin resumed his war against Ukraine last month, Germany suspended the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, designed to import natural gas from Russia. But even without this pipeline, Germany, like most of Europe, nonetheless depends on Russia for its energy needs—just as the Russian economy depends on energy exports. Dore Gold points out that the Jewish state has a role to play in reducing this dependence, and making economic warfare against Moscow possible:

In late 2021, roughly 40 percent of the EU’s natural-gas imports came from Russia. In early March, President Joe Biden announced a ban on Russian oil and gas imports into the United States. The EU announced, in response, that it planned to reduce its imports of Russian natural gas by two-thirds by the end of 2022. . . . Currently, other suppliers to Europe by pipeline include Norway (22 percent), Algeria (18 percent), and Azerbaijan (9 percent), but they cannot provide a substitute for Russian gas.

The eastern Mediterranean, as a whole, including Israel, has immense gas reserves that have been estimated to reach 10.8 trillion cubic meters of gas, or roughly 5 percent of the world’s gas reserves. This amount of gas has been estimated to be roughly equivalent to 76 years of gas consumption by the EU.

With the anticipated improvement in Israeli ties to Turkey, Ankara could emerge as an export hub for Israeli gas in the future. Thus, in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine, there are multiple reasons why the work on the East Med pipeline, [which would bring Israeli, Egyptian, and Cypriot gas to Europe], must be resumed, along with gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean, as soon as possible. Moreover, increasing the supply of gas to the West will also help drive down its price, thereby undermining Russia’s ability to fund its war machine in the future.

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.