After the repression of the Great Revolt and the destruction of the Second Temple, the Roman emperor Vespasian issued coins reading “Judea has been captured.” But before that, Jews were minting coins bearing the inscription, “Freedom of Zion.” Herb Keinon writes:

[Israel’s] culture minister Miri Regev unveiled the coin at Sunday’s cabinet meeting as part of a presentation she gave about preparations for next year’s celebration of 50 years since the reunification of Jerusalem. The coin was uncovered during an excavation about a month ago of a recently discovered road in Jerusalem. . . .

The ancient coin was one of a series minted during the Jewish revolt against the Romans. The flip-side of the coin bears the inscription, “The second year of the Great Revolt,” which dates it to 67 CE.

“Exactly 1,900 years later, in 1967, the paratroopers entered Jerusalem’s Old City and renewed its freedom, and ours,” Regev said.

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.