On August 15, Iranian proxy forces in Iraq launched a drone attack on a U.S. base in Syria. There also appears to have been an attempted drone attack on American forces in the region by Iranian affiliates on Tuesday. Despite responding to these provocations with force, Washington still appears on track to approve a revived version of the 2015 nuclear deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Danielle Pletka comments:

Per official Iranian news sources, . . . the Biden administration agreed to specific measures to propitiate the Tehran regime. Among them: lifting sanctions on most (if not all) Iranian banks; release of at least $7 billion in Iranian funds now frozen in South Korean banks; across-the-board sanctions relief for organizations including the supreme leader’s massive slush fund; . . . rapid oil sales for a mass cash infusion (about $4 billion); and an exemption to sanctions on foreign companies should the U.S. once again pull out of the JCPOA.

The curious may wonder what it is that the United States, the Europeans, Russia, and China will get out of this deal. For the United States and those European countries concerned about Iran’s malign intentions, a “return” to “compliance” with the JCPOA will be nearly moot, as the agreement’s vaunted restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities will begin to expire in a mere year and a half, and almost all will lapse by the end of this decade. At that point Iran will be fully within its rights under the agreement to do all the things that the Biden administration tells us today it is too risky to permit Iran to do.

There will supposedly be an exchange of hostages. There will not be any end to Iranian efforts to “avenge” the killing of Quds Force leader Qassem Suleimani, which means no end of efforts to murder former President Donald Trump, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and other former senior officials.

For the Russians and the Chinese, there is another story entirely. These two adversaries of the United States stand to gain a great deal.

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.