Although the Israeli presence in the West Bank is widely considered a terrible crime against the Palestinian people, it has in fact brought health and prosperity. Yoram Ettinger looks at the statistics:

[F]rom the end of 1967 (586,000 people) until the end of 1992 (1,050,000 people), the Arab population of Judea and Samaria expanded by 79 percent, compared to a mere 0.9-percent growth during the 1950-1967 Jordanian rule. The unprecedented Arab population-growth rate was the outcome of the unprecedented Israeli development of health, medical, transportation, education, and employment infrastructure in Judea and Samaria, following the stagnation during the Jordanian occupation of the area. In addition, Israel offered employment opportunities, in its pre-1967 core, to Judean and Samarian Arabs, who preferred working in Israel to the faraway Arab Gulf states, West Africa, or Latin America.

But this rapid population increase, Ettinger explains, follows a pattern familiar from other cases when “a Third World population . . . benefits from a considerable modernization of infrastructure.” In such instances, a demographic surge is followed by a leveling out, as members of the group in question begin to have fewer children. By contrast, Israeli Jews’ fertility rates remain the highest for any Westernized population. Ettinger explains:

Jewish demography [results from] the Israeli state of mind, which is top-heavy on optimism, faith, patriotism, attachment to roots, collective responsibility, the centrality of children, and a frontier mentality in the face of costly Jewish history and contemporary existential threats in the stormy, violently intolerant, . . . Middle East. . . . Israel’s left and right, doves and hawks, secular and religious, wealthy and poor . . . consider children as a means to enrich their own lives, and secure the civilian and military future of the Jewish state.

Israel’s robust demography refutes the assertion that its Jewish majority is threatened by a supposed Arab “demographic time bomb.”

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.