Last week, Israel approved Egypt’s transfer of the Red Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi Arabia, a de-facto move toward normalization between Jerusalem and Riyadh. The Saudis took another step in this direction by opening their airspace to Israeli flights, and an Israeli journalist has reportedly visited Mecca, from which non-Muslims are generally barred. Jacob Magid, another journalist who came to Jeddah on the first-ever direct flight from Tel Aviv to the kingdom, spoke to several Saudis in the Haifa mall, located on the city’s Palestine Street:

“A Jew is a Jew, whether in Israel or Moscow,” said Sultan, a salesman at a watch kiosk, as Beyonce’s “Halo” played in the gleaming mall. . . . Aware he was speaking with a member of the Israeli press—I was one of three reporters for Israeli publications who joined the White House press corps for the Saudi leg of Biden’s Middle East trip—the salesman had no problem launching into a diatribe about how the Jews wanted to kill the prophet Mohammad and are “the enemies of Islam.”

Learning my name, Sultan admitted that he had never met a Jew before. “The Quran says it’s good that we’re all different,” Sultan clarified, in an impressive 180-degree turn from his original argument. Experts say a similar about-face will be needed if Israeli-Saudi normalization—a process Riyadh claims is not happening—is to see a warm welcoming of Israeli and Jews after decades of hostility and demonization.

Although Sultan was not alone in expressing this view, Magid encountered another position as well:

Out in the Jeddah night, my Uber driver, Ahmed, echoed a sentiment expressed by many others in the mall: that he didn’t have much of an opinion on the matter and that he trusted the Saudi government to act appropriately.

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.