On June 20, the Supreme Court ruled that a 40-foot cross, erected in 1925 to commemorate those Americans who died fighting in World War I, could be allowed to remain on state property in Bladensburg, Maryland. The case originated with the American Humanist Society, which claimed that the cross’s presence on public land violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause. While some Jewish groups, most notably the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), objected to the decision, Jonathan Tobin argues that Jews should view it favorably:

What remains troubling about this case is not so much the arguments put forward by the plaintiffs, [but] that the effort to take down the war memorial seemed animated by hostility to the intersection of faith and the state that goes far beyond the mandate of the Constitution’s establishment clause. In the early years of the American republic, many states maintained restrictions on the rights of non-Christians, which were incompatible with the Constitution’s promise of freedom. To the extent that the majority needed to be restrained from establishing their faith at the expense of minorities, it was appropriate to build a wall of separation between church and state.

It ill behooves those who lament the fraying of the fabric of our common political culture and a spirit of growing intolerance to support a campaign to eradicate inoffensive memorials; doing so will only reinforce the belief that religion is under siege in the United States. The mere presence of a cross intended to memorialize the fallen involves, as Justice Clarence Thomas rightly noted, “no legal coercion” that should worry Jews or any other non-Christian group.

To the extent that some Jews think eradicating evidence of the faith of others can only protect their safety or even their sensibilities, they are doing neither religious freedom nor the country any good. To the contrary, by demonstrating hostility to, and intolerance for, the faith or the symbols venerated by other Americans, the ADL and other supporters of [the American Humanist Society’s] position are setting us up for unnecessary conflicts that are bad for America, as well as for Jews.

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.