“Palestinians left waiting as Israel is set to deploy COVID-19 vaccine,” ran the headline of an Associated Press report last month. Not to be outdone, the notoriously anti-Israel newspaper the Guardian carried a story on Sunday under the headline “Palestinians excluded from Israeli COVID vaccine rollout as jabs go to settlers.” While it is indeed true that the Jewish state has vaccinated its citizens against the coronavirus at a record rate, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas—like many governments—have not yet begun to do so, framing these facts as an injustice done by Jews to Arabs is misleading to the point of slander. Lahav Harkov explains:

You have to get halfway through the Guardian story before you reach the following: . . . “the [Palestinian] Authority has not officially asked for help from Israel. Coordination between the two sides halted last year after the Palestinian president cut off security ties for several months.” In other words, the Palestinian leadership refused even to talk to Israel when the latter was ordering vaccine doses, let alone coordinate a complex rollout operation.

Here are some other pertinent facts: the Oslo Accords, though a group of interim agreements and not a final-status peace treaty, are widely considered a legally binding agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. They stipulate that the Palestinian Authority is responsible for healthcare, including vaccinations, for Palestinians in Judea and Samaria and Gaza. The PA has been keeping its end of the bargain on that front for nearly 30 years, something that news outlets whose reporters constantly quote the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s reports of damage inflicted by Israel surely already know.

Also a fact: Israel is actually already vaccinating Palestinians—the ones in east Jerusalem. [Moreover], Israel’s vaccine operation has run in predominately Arab areas in Israel from day one.

Why have so many supposedly respectable outlets gotten this story wrong? . . . In this particular case, it looks like some reporters are being led by the nose by activists with a certain point of view.

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.