In 1950 and 1951, some 100,000 Iraqi Jews—most of whose assets had been frozen by the Iraqi government—immigrated to the Jewish state. In response, Israeli leaders began to investigate the possibility of an agreement with the Arab countries whereby any property abandoned by Palestinian refugees would be exchanged for property lost by Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Eylon Aslan-Levy writes:

One week [after Iraq announced the freezing of assets], the Israeli foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, addressed the Knesset. The government of Iraq, he argued, had “opened an account with the government of Israel,” and forced the Jewish state to link this account to one that already existed: [that of] the Arab refugees from Israel’s War of Independence. “We shall take into account the value of the Jewish property that has been frozen in Iraq,” declared Sharett, “when calculating the compensation that we have undertaken to pay the Arabs who abandoned property in Israel.”

This principle has been a centerpiece of Israeli policy ever since. . . . In August 1948, Israel had told the UN mediator Folke Bernadotte that any peace treaty with the Arab states should pay “due regard to Jewish counterclaims” for “havoc and destruction.” . . .

[What’s more], this linkage was not entirely Israel’s idea: its strongest support came from Baghdad. In 1949, [the Iraqi prime minister] proposed an organized Jewish-Arab population exchange to a UN commission, offering a compulsory transfer of 100,000 each way, in which Iraq would confiscate Jewish property as compensation for Palestinian property. This came after Arab states suggested to the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) an “exchange of their [Jewish] population against the Arab Palestinian refugees.” Egypt specifically mentioned a possible “exchange of Jews and Arabs.”

Britain rejected Iraq’s proposal. . . . The UNCCP [likewise] refused to endorse it. . . . Arab governments . . . never replied [to formal letters about the subject]. Israel eventually unblocked Arab bank accounts at the UNCCP’s request, after the Israeli UN ambassador Abba Eban’s plea that “equal concern” be given to Jewish refugees fell on deaf ears.

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.