While the story of the cooperation of the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, with the Third Reich has been told many times, an Israeli historian has recently published an article, based on extensive research, showing that many Palestinian Arabs instead chose to cast their lot with the Allies during World War II. Mustafa Abbasi, who came to the topic via research into his own family history, has found that the British created many Palestine-based units, made up of Jews and Arabs, to fight against Germany. Nadav Shragai explains:

All in all, some 12,000 Arabs from Mandate Palestine volunteered for the British army during World War II, approximately half the number of Jewish volunteers. Hundreds of Palestinian fighters were captured. Approximately 300 died in battle. . . . At the time, the Arab population in pre-state Israel was split between the Husseinis, [led by the grand mufti], and the Nashashibi clan who openly supported the British and usually maintained good ties with the Jewish population.

Abbasi has also discovered that several dozen Jews and Arabs fought together alongside thousands of British and Egyptian troops at the First Battle of El Alamein in July 1942. . . . A few of the volunteers also took part in the Allied invasion at Normandy in the summer of 1944.

There were a total of 4,041 Arab volunteers and 10,000 Jewish volunteers from Palestine in the British infantry. . . . Jews and Arabs also served together in the Middle East Commando unit, which included 240 Jews and 120 Arabs under a team of British commanders. The volunteers with the unit underwent exhausting physical training and long marches in difficult conditions. At the end of 1940, some members of the unit took part in the first British attack in [Egypt’s] Western Desert and burst through Italian lines at Bardia on the Egyptian-Libyan border. In the winter of 1941, the unit fought fierce battles against the Italians.

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.