Last week, Jake Sullivan, the American national security advisor, announced that he is planning a visit to the Jewish state in order to meet with members of the new governing coalition. Meir Ben-Shabbat, who served in the equivalent position in the Israeli government from 2017 to 2021, suggests how Jerusalem should approach the key issues apt to be on the table when Sullivan arrives.

The special relations between the two nations and the bipartisan support Israel enjoys in the U.S. [constitute] an overarching interest for Israel. However, Israel is a sovereign country that formulates its policies on its own accord and in view of the responsibility that history has given it as the state of the Jewish people and with the realization that the struggle continues over its existence, stature, and security.

A strong Israel is a boon for the U.S. in various aspects: security-wise, technology-wise, and economically. Israel will therefore continue to use its power to defend itself and will not allow its existence to be threatened. The U.S. should at the very least have our back.

As for domestic issues, Prime Minister Netanyahu should make it clear that Israel is a vibrant and young democracy that sorts things out on hot-button issues through the democratic process. There is no room for meddling and foreign influence by any side.

Iran will certainly be high on Benjamin Netanyahu’s list of concerns, and most likely on Sullivan’s as well. Ben-Shabbat observes:

Iran’s activities in the Ukraine war and the failure to revive the 2015 deal provide an opportunity [for the U.S.] to change [its] policy toward Tehran. Europe might be more receptive to this than before. It’s important to take note that it would be wrong to assume that this new approach will drag the U.S. into war. In fact, such a policy will reduce the risk of a war breaking out in the Middle East over Iran’s continued efforts to implement its vision.

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.