Much of the current debate over transsexuality that has been roiling the West grew out of the radical position that a man who chooses to “identify” as a woman should be considered a woman in every possible respect, regardless of his biological or anatomical characteristics. The same goes for a woman who wishes to be a man. At the extremes, this situation leads to male transexuals demanding entry to women’s locker rooms and prisons, and even rape shelters, and accusing lesbians who reject their sexual advances of “transphobic” bigotry. Adherents to this set of ideas have engaged in an ongoing crusade against dissenters, especially those of their fellow leftists whom they label “TERFS” or “trans-exclusionary radical feminists.”

Kathleen Hayes points to parallels between the radical transgender movement and another intellectual trend that predominates in the same academic and far-left circles, and that similarly disguises the most vicious intolerance as enlightened concern for the oppressed: namely left-wing anti-Semitism. The two movements even share as their “high priestess” one of the most influential contemporary figures in the humanities, the philosopher Judith Butler:

It’s maybe significant that this is the same Judith Butler who has expressed her appreciation of Hamas as “part of a global left” and presides over the grotesquely misnamed Jewish Voice for Peace. It is Butler who, . . . in the mid to late 1980s, . . . hit on the bright idea of defeating biological determinism—the traditional argument that biology dooms women to subordinate status—by decree. Butler argued that not only is gender (culturally variable beliefs about “proper” roles for men and women) socially determined, but so is biological sex. The claim that “anatomy is destiny” would thereby be vanquished.

Only a small mental sleight of hand is necessary for today’s bien pensant to hate Jews and women with a deliciously clear conscience. Jews are fine people, some of my best friends, the leftist will declare—it’s the Zionists who are racists and must be driven from the planet. I love women, he’ll say; of course they deserve equality and dignity—it’s the TERFs who are fascists and must be annihilated. He knows anti-Semitism and misogyny must be repudiated, but even as he congratulates himself on his lack of prejudice, progressive and identity politics allow him to indulge in a socially sanctioned variety of . . . anti-Semitism and misogyny.

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.