Yesterday, Naftali Bennett, head of the Yamina party, was sworn in as Israel’s new prime minister, bringing an end to Benjamin Netanyahu’s twelve-year premiership, Many Israelis hope that the new administration will also bring an end to the political crisis that began in 2018, during which no party has been able to form a stable coalition. Haviv Rettig Gur outlines Bennett’s unusual path to the top of Israel’s political order:

[When] Bennett stepped onto the national political stage in 2013, at the age of forty-one, many already took note of the frenetic speed of his rise: an elite but short six-year military career, a wildly successful but scarcely seven-year-long high-tech career, a political climb from Netanyahu aide to settlements advocate to religious-Zionism’s ballot-box champion that itself stretched across scarcely seven years—he did everything on full throttle and nothing, it seemed, for very long.

Yet by 2015, Bennett’s fortunes seemed to have changed: his party had lost seats in an election and his own standing within it was tenuous. Bennett then launched a new party that performed abysmally in its first electoral contest. Yet he surprised most Israeli political pundits by engineering a comeback and catapulting himself into the premiership. Gur observes:

To his critics, there’s something galling about the fact that Bennett is set to take the prime minister’s seat while leading a mere six-seat faction that now fails even to clear the electoral threshold in most polls. . . . But it’s hard to think of a more characteristically Bennett-esque act. A driven soldier, a self-made tech millionaire, a political activist turned political leader, a fast-moving, ever-striving, ambitious, and fickle and astoundingly confident man—Israel’s newest leader is a brazen risk-taker and gambler with an unusual penchant for beating the house.

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.