In 1970, Ashraf Marwan—the son-in-law of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the chief aide to Anwar Sadat—telephoned the Israeli embassy in London and offered to provide classified documents as well as his own assessments of Egyptian government thinking. Although the Mossad took him on as a spy, Marwan’s warnings about an imminent war were ignored by Israeli intelligence. In a new biography, Uri Bar-Joseph puts to rest rumors that Marwan was a double agent but is unable to explain the mysterious fall from a fifth-story balcony that ended his life in 2007. Dan Raviv writes in his review:

Throughout 1972 and 1973, Marwan repeatedly cautioned the Israelis that Sadat was absolutely determined to go to war. Because several of Marwan’s warnings proved to be false alarms—he explained this by saying that Sadat frequently changed his mind—some Israeli intelligence officials stopped taking his reports seriously. Instead of preparing for a possible war, the Israelis clung to their theory that the Arabs would never attack because they had no chance of winning.

A climactic moment came on October 5, 1973, at an urgently arranged meeting in London, where Marwan told the head of the Mossad that Egypt and Syria would strike Israel the next day. Israel’s military intelligence chief rejected the report, and with Marwan’s warnings unheeded, Israeli troops were not nearly as ready as they could have been when Egypt attacked—as promised—on Yom Kippur. . . .

According to Bar-Joseph’s highly detailed account, full of names, dates, and locations of meetings that demonstrate his encyclopedic knowledge of the Marwan affair, the spy was doing his best to help Israel. He kept the Israelis fully apprised of Sadat’s evolving thought process: Egypt would attack soon. Then it only might attack. Then Sadat decided not to attack until the Soviets provided more arms. Then he wanted to be sure that Syria would join a two-front surprise offensive.

Israeli analysts were not quite able to keep up with this ever-changing picture.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.