Soon enough, students will return to college campuses and in all likelihood, student activists will renew their efforts to vilify Israel and ostracize Jews. Searching for the roots of the protests, Paul Berman embarks on an intellectual journey that includes the political evolution of the Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael, the works of the anticolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, and much else. He concludes by detecting a certain “climate of opinion that hovers over the university humanities departments and maybe a few other places, and over the art world and the literary world, and seeps at times into the mainstream press.”

Behind that climate of opinion, Berman writes, is a “single notion”

that deep truths lurk invisibly beneath the falsities of modern life, and, if only the truths were revealed, a new era would dawn. . . . This sort of thing may strike some people as very exciting for political reasons, or for moral reasons.

But the primary victim right now of this sort of thinking has turned out, somehow or another, to be the Jews. I suppose the somehow-or-another has been inevitable, given the allure of the either/or habit of mind.

So there are a great many people who gaze at Israel and prefer to see South Africa and its past. They do not see one more bloodbath in a history of even larger Middle Eastern bloodbaths. They prefer to see what the Islamists have always claimed to see, which is the crime against God, or the maximum crime of crimes, namely, an outright extermination of an entire people, such that “genocide,” the word, has become a catch phrase.

They see the Jews as Nazis, which has been a theme of the Islamist hysteria against Zionism for many decades. They decline to see anything at all about Hamas’s nature, doctrines, and practices, even if they do see those things. They see that resistance to what they imagine to be white settler-colonialism is righteous, and self-defense is monstrous. And the October 7 massacre seems to them—such is the logic, it is inescapable—a good thing, not just on balance. The October 7 massacre is a good thing absolutely.

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.