In his book Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism, and the Middle East, Matthias Küntzel argues that the Third Reich’s efforts to export anti-Jewish propaganda to the Arab world went far beyond the famous meeting between Hitler and the mufti of Jerusalem, or hate-filled radio broadcasts in 1941 Baghdad. One key piece of evidence he considers is a pamphlet titled Islam and Judaism, which employs such phrases as “free of Jews”—an evident borrowing from the German Judenfrei, a term popular with the Nazis:

Islam and Judaism is significant because it is, as far as we know, the very first document to construct a continuity between Mohammad’s confrontation with the Jews in Medina and the contemporary conflict in Palestine, thus linking the 7th century to the 20th. It is the first written evidence for what I call Islamic anti-Semitism and the forerunner of [the Muslim Brotherhood theoretician] Sayyid Qutb’s 1950 pamphlet Our Struggle with the Jews.

The first Arabic version of Islam and Judaism was published in August 1937 in Cairo by the director of the Palestinian-Arab Bureau of Information in Egypt, who is believed to have had many contacts with Nazi agents. In 1938 a German version of was published in Berlin. . . . Finally, during the Second World War, this brochure was printed and distributed in large numbers by German forces and translated into several languages.

The very date of the pamphlet’s publication and dissemination . . . contradicts the widespread assumption that Islamic anti-Semitism developed as a response to alleged Israeli misdeeds. It was not the behavior of the Zionists that prompted the publication of this hostile text but rather the very first attempt to implement a two-state solution for Palestine. This fact suggests that Jew-hatred was a cause, not a consequence, of the crises in the [Arab-Israeli] conflict.

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.