Almost immediately after the White House announced the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) issued a press release stating its concern that “Judge Kavanaugh’s judicial record does not reflect the demonstrated independence and commitment to fair treatment for all that is necessary to merit a seat on our nation’s highest court.” Jonathan Tobin sees this statement, which makes no mention of either Jews or anti-Semitism, as a sign of the organization’s dangerous politicization under its current director, Jonathan Greenblatt:

Though it spent its first century of existence being careful to avoid getting labeled as a partisan outfit, in the three years since the ADL’s longtime national director Abe Foxman retired, Greenblatt has steadily pushed the group farther to the left and, in so doing, more or less destroyed its reputation of being above politics. After the ADL has repeatedly involved itself in partisan controversies, it is impossible to pretend that Greenblatt’s vision of the group isn’t fundamentally that of a Democratic-party auxiliary that is increasingly overshadowing and marginalizing its still-vital role as the nation’s guardian against anti-Semitism. . . . Not only is Greenblatt uninterested in avoiding accusations of partisanship, he has actively courted them, especially since Trump became president. . . .

Greenblatt, who had been rumored to be in line for a senior post in a putative Hillary Clinton administration, made no secret of his animus for the new president. In early 2017, Greenblatt didn’t hesitate to blame President Trump directly for what was being represented as a surge of anti-Semitic incidents. The surge was largely the result of a spate of bomb threats at Jewish community centers around the country. But it turned out that—contrary to the ADL’s charge that it was the work of alt-right extremists inspired or unleashed by Trump—a disturbed Israeli teenager had made the threats. The ADL never apologized for its misleading accusations. . . .

Succumbing to the temptation to join the fray against Kavanaugh without a moment’s hesitation wasn’t just a mistake. It was the act of a man who doesn’t even feel the need to maintain the pretense that the group he leads has a higher purpose than diving into the daily political scrum. . . . The question for the ADL is: how can it possibly do its job on anti-Semitism if that’s where Greenblatt has positioned it?

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.