Some fifteen years ago, a Canadian named Chaim Moetzen came to Khartoum in search of the remnants of the city’s Jewish graveyard—which had been transformed into a garbage dump—but was chased off by cries of “Jew!” Since the fall of Sudan’s Islamist dictatorship in 2019, and the opening of relations with Israel, Moetzen has returned to clean up the site and reconstruct its tombstones. Will Brown writes:

Sudan has a small but rich Jewish history. In the 1900s, hundreds of Arabic-speaking Jews from across the Middle East lived in the Sudanese capital harmoniously alongside Muslims and Christians, working as merchants, business folk, doctors, and lawyers. . . . But when the Arab-Israeli conflict began in the 1950s, a flood of anti-Semitism washed across the Arab world, forcing nearly all of Sudan’s Jews to flee.

Many arrived in Israel, Geneva, London, and the U.S. as stateless refugees and by the 1980s, there was almost no trace of the community left except the small Jewish graveyard in downtown Khartoum. When the Islamist dictator Omar al-Bashir came to power in 1989, the community’s heritage came under attack like never before.

No one quite knows what happened to the graveyard. But it’s clear that many of the tombstones were smashed into thousands of pieces, most probably by anti-Semites. Other marble slabs were looted and local authorities allowed the site to become a dumping ground.

Motzen asked for and immediately got permission from the minister of religious affairs, Nasr Eldeen Mofarih, . . . to restore the site as a private individual in January 2020. He paid for a Sudanese archaeologist and dozens of workers out of his own pocket and got to work. Over several weeks they removed some fourteen trucks of almost everything imaginable from the site. “There were about five metric tons of glass, car parts, a crazy amount of dirt, medical waste, lots of scorpions, and even beehives,” he says.

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.