Addressing the United Nations last month, Barack Obama declared that “Israel cannot permanently occupy Palestinian land,” presumably referring to the West Bank. This statement, argues Moshe Arens, is built on a number of faulty assumptions about both the problem at hand and its possible solution:

Was it Palestinian land that Jordan annexed after the conclusion of the armistice with Israel? Nobody made that claim at the time, or during the following eighteen years when Jordan held that area. Did it suddenly become Palestinian land only after Jordan joined Egypt and Syria in their war against Israel in 1967 and was forced to withdraw from the area? Or was it Palestinian land all along, [but] the Palestinian claim was left in abeyance as long as Jordan ruled the area and sprang to life only after the Jordanian army was defeated? . . .

[Be that is it may], much of the United States—California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Texas—is territory captured during the Mexican-American war of 1846-48. . . . [Likewise], President Obama surely knows that his birthplace of Hawaii, once an independent nation, had been taken over by the United States in an 1893 coup, becoming the 50th state more than 60 years later in 1959. So who is the “occupier”? Can “occupation” lead in time to a peaceful accommodation as it did in California and Hawaii?

[By contrast], Obama himself was the commander in chief of an occupying army when he inherited the American occupation in Iraq. He decided to pull out and damn the consequences. The victims of the American exit from Iraq were the people of Iraq and the rest of the region, not the American people.

Some would suggest that Israel follow the same path. Get out of the West Bank, end the “occupation,” and damn the consequences. But Israel cannot exit the region like America; Israel is here to stay. And the first victims of an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria would be the Israeli people, who could expect rockets to rain down on their cities.

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.