While the missile boat—a small craft equipped with sophisticated missiles meant to be fired at other ships—is now a standard component of modern navies, its use was largely pioneered by the Jewish state. In his 1988 book, The Boats of Cherbourg: The Navy that Stole Its Own Boats and Revolutionized Naval Warfare, which has recently been updated and republished, Abraham Rabinovich tells the story of how this came about. Efraim Inbar writes in his review.

During [the Yom Kippur War], Israel’s military was ill-prepared, but the exception was the Israeli navy. Until 1973, it played a marginal, low-priority role in Israel’s security landscape, strategic outlook, and budgets. Yet, it planned for years for the possibility of war and won every naval battle to worldwide accolades.

Rabinovich recounts how innovative Israeli naval officers developed the concept of the missile boat with approval from the Ministry of Defense (primarily Shimon Peres) and harnessed modest resources to complete the project. Israel’s defense establishment helped the navy procure the necessary equipment from abroad, and finally, smuggled the boats from [the French port of] Cherbourg to Israel despite a French embargo.

In 1960, opposing larger and better equipped navies, including Soviet destroyers and missile boats, Israel’s naval command faced immense challenges. Neither the required missiles nor suitable boats existed in Western arsenals. So the Israelis developed a weapons system indigenously. The German government feared repercussions from Arab governments and refused to build a revised version of the Jaguar fast-attack craft for the Israelis. Instead, Israeli naval engineers modified the German design and moved construction to a French shipyard in Cherbourg. The Gabriel missile was developed for use with these boats.

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.