According to a report on the news website Axios, Biden administration officials held a “high-level meeting” to discuss how to deal with the likely presence of certain right-wing ministers in the new Israeli government. Meanwhile, Washington has been making various efforts to improve relations with the Palestinian Authority. Bassam Tawil comments:

Two . . . Palestinian officials, Majed Faraj and Hussein al-Sheikh, still hold regular meetings with senior representatives of the Biden administration who evidently are not even remotely bothered by their past activities. Faraj, one of the ruling Fatah party’s most prominent activists, was arrested by Israel many times. Altogether, he spent at least six years in Israeli prison for his role in violent activities against Israel and membership in a terror group, especially during the first intifada, which erupted in 1987.

Sheikh, also a Fatah member, spent eleven years in Israeli prison for similar charges. During the second intifada, which began in 2000, he was wanted by Israel for his role in terrorism. In 2005, he was removed from Israel’s list of wanted terrorists, apparently as part of an Israeli-American attempt to strengthen the Palestinian Authority and prevent Hamas from taking over the West Bank. Faraj is head of Palestinian General Intelligence, while Sheikh is considered the number-two in the Palestinian leadership after Mahmoud Abbas.

Recently, Mahmoud al-Habbash, religious-affairs adviser to the Palestinian Authority president, equated the Jews who visit the Temple Mount in Jerusalem with “those whom Allah has cursed . . . and made of them apes and pigs.” Another senior Palestinian official, Mohammed al-Lahham, recently bragged that 90 percent of the terrorists who carried out attacks against Israelis in 2022 were members of Fatah, headed by the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. Lahham also credited Fatah with murdering twenty Israelis, saying this is a source of honor for the faction.

One rarely hears the Biden administration or other Western countries expressing concern over human-rights violations committed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas against their own people. Many in Washington and other capitals remain obsessed with Israel and refuse to see any wrongdoing on the Palestinian side.

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.