By 1938, it was clear to most German and Austrian Jews that there was no future for them in Germany, but they soon found that there were few countries that would take them in. Enter Ho Feng-Shan, the Chinese consul-general in Vienna. Harold Brackman tells his story:

Ho . . . was born in rural Hunan in 1901. Ho grew up poor. His mother was a devout Christian; his father, a Confucian scholar, died when he was seven. Helped by the Norwegian Lutheran Mission, Ho was educated at Yali College. He received his doctorate in political economy at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Ho then entered China’s diplomatic service. . . . Fluent in German, he made friends with many Jewish intellectuals [while stationed] in Vienna.

In the wake of 1938’s Evian Conference—where only the Dominican Republic agreed to accept a significant number of Jewish refugees—Ho acted. Against the orders of his superiors, he started to issue visas to Shanghai to Austrian Jews for humanitarian reasons. He gave panicked Jews, fearing internment in concentration camps, visas with almost no questions asked. Eventually, tens of thousands of Jews fled Austria for Shanghai. . . . Ho continued his one-man crusade until he was ordered to return to China in 1940.

During World War II, Ho served on military and diplomatic missions to the Allied powers. After the Communist victory in 1949, he followed the Nationalist government to Taiwan.

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.