During the years when Jeremy Corbyn led the UK Labor party, and anti-Semitism within the party’s ranks became a full-blown crisis, Chris Williamson became one of several members of parliament who attracted attention for his obsessive hatred of Israel, his paranoid beliefs about the power of the “Zionist lobby,” and his dismissiveness of the concerns of Jewish leaders. Since his expulsion from the party and departure from parliament, his activities have included a weekly radio show sponsored by the Iranian government called Palestine Declassified. Marc Goldberg reviews Williamson’s recent memoir, Ten Years Hard Labor:

From 2017 until his suspension in 2019 it is fair to say that Williamson represented for many one of the main symbols of Labor’s anti-Semitism problem. According to Williamson this is because he was “in the crosshairs of the Zionist lobby.” A lobby which he describes as “aggressive” and “fanatical.” He claims that the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, which found that Labor had behaved unlawfully to its Jewish members, had been “appropriated by the Zionist lobby.” What precisely the Zionist lobby is we are left to ponder. [The major institutions of Anglo-Jewry, along with the] Jewish Labor Movement, are all mentioned in the book as if they are a part of it.

Williamson’s major criticism of Labor is that it took complaints of anti-Semitism too seriously:

Williamson criticizes Corbyn because “rather than rebutting the ‘anti-Semitism’ smears, he indulged them.” He refers to a “fake ‘anti-Semitism crisis’” within the Labor party. In fact, the book is peppered with references to the “smear” of anti-Semitism and also claims it was “bogus.” The attempt to argue both that he thinks that the Labor party had done an excellent job of tackling the “scourge of Judeophobia” and that it was a “smear” at the same time appears to be contradictory.

Williamson claims that his fellow MP Naz Shah’s public apology for her own previous anti-Semitic discourse was “craven” and that one of her [controversial social-media] posts, implying that Jewish Israelis should leave their homes and live in the U.S., was “a perfectly reasonable and moderate observation to make” adding that “there was no way that I was going to fold like a deck of cards as Shah had done in the face of a coordinated smear operation by the Zionist lobby.”

At present, Williamson laments, “the Labor party is a victim of state capture. Much of its international policy is now effectively dictated by the state of Israel.”

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.