The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has a long history of slandering Israel and abetting terrorism while doing little to help ordinary Palestinians. Elliott Abrams comments on the most recent revelations:

In a new report, UN Watch has found a dozen UNRWA employees spewing anti-Semitic hatred and celebrating violence and terrorism in Internet postings. On Facebook pages where they identify themselves as UNRWA officials, these UN employees laud killing and kidnapping of Jews and Israelis and post vicious anti-Semitic cartoons and drawings.

This is our tax money at work: the United States is by far the largest contributor to UNRWA, at over $400 million. . . . So now what happens? Does UNRWA discipline or fire these individuals? Does Ban Ki-Moon step in? Nope, not so far. The only reaction has been—you probably guessed it—attacks on UN Watch by UNRWA’s spokesman. Not a word about these postings or the employees.

The next step should be action by the State Department and by Samantha Power, our UN ambassador, demanding that the UN wake up. . . . Either such conduct is tolerated or it is not. Either UNRWA reacts with disciplinary moves against these individuals, or it attacks UN Watch. If the latter, . . . the United States should suspend payments to UNRWA. We should not be financing the spreading of hatred by UN employees. It ought to be simple.

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.