Analyzing the recent bloody attacks on Brussels, Soeren Kern discusses some of the factors that have made Belgium a major hub for Islamist terrorist organizations:

Belgium’s radical-Islam problem originated in the 1960s, when Belgian authorities encouraged mass migration from Turkey and Morocco as a source of cheap labor. These migrants were later followed by [others] from Egypt and Libya.

The factories eventually closed, but the migrants stayed and planted family roots. Today, most Muslims in Belgium are the third- and fourth-generation offspring of the original migrants. While many Belgian Muslims are integrated into Belgian society, many others are not.

Growing numbers of Belgian Muslims live in marginal districts—isolated ghettos where poverty, unemployment, and crime are rampant. . . . Radical imams aggressively canvass the area in search of shiftless youths to wage jihad against the West. As in other European countries, many Muslims in Belgium are embracing Salafism—a radical form of Islam—and its call to wage violent jihad against all nonbelievers for the sake of Allah. . . .

[F]or the past three decades, Belgium has [also] faced an existential crisis due to growing antagonism between the speakers of Dutch and French. . . . This dysfunction extends to Belgian counter-terrorism [in which there is insufficient cooperation between the two groups within the government]. . . .

The language issue also affects integration. As a Washington Post analysis explains, “Many jobs in Brussels require knowledge of French, Flemish or Dutch, and now sometimes English, too, while most immigrants speak mostly Arabic and some French. That has blocked integration.”

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.