A group of municipal workers and officials recently entered the Arab neighborhood of al-Tur on the Mount of Olives—and, in the middle of the night, carried out a crackdown on the lawlessness that has become commonplace in many parts of eastern Jerusalem. David M. Weinberg explains:

Under police protection, [the officials] hauled away abandoned vehicles, piles of garbage, and rubble from ruined buildings. They took down dangerously placed signs and illegal sheds. They erased graffiti, fixed broken street lights, and painted road-safety markings. They enforced business codes by confiscating merchandise placed in public areas without permits, checked for violations of safety rules, issued fines for illegally commandeered parking spaces, and more.

The police also combed through the neighborhood with lists in hand to confirm that people under house arrest were really at home. They found an illegally held M1 rifle, and arrested twenty Arab residents of eastern Jerusalem suspected of throwing rocks and firebombs at civilians and police. . . .

The Jerusalem district police commander, Yoram Halevy, said these operations are . . . part of the implementation of a new strategy . . . to shift from only “chasing the bad guys” to also “nurturing the good guys,” so that the latter “can help the police help them.”

It is quite clear to me, [however], that there is more to this strategy than just “nurturing the good guys.” The enforcement operations are . . . part of a broader plan to insure effective and equitable Israeli rule over a united Jerusalem. They aim to push back against proposals for cutting Arab neighborhoods out of the Jerusalem municipality or for handing them over to the Palestinian Authority.

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.