Last week, the State Department upbraided the Knesset for repealing a 2005 law forbidding Jews from entering or living in a small area of the West Bank, on the grounds that doing so “represents a clear contradiction of undertakings” that “Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on behalf of Israel affirmed in writing to George W. Bush.” Elliott Abrams comments:

In an exchange of letters on April 14, 2004, Bush gave Sharon the support he needed to complete the Gaza withdrawal. Bush’s letter made several important statements: that the United States would impose no new peace plan on Israel beyond what was already agreed; that the United States would “preserve and strengthen Israel’s capability to deter and defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats”; and that the Palestinian refugee problem would be solved in [the West Bank and Gaza] rather than by moving Palestinians to Israel. More relevant, Bush also said that “in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.” In other words, Israeli settlements were realities, and the United States understood that in any final status agreement, Israeli borders would reflect their location.

This formal exchange of letters, upon which Sharon relied, was then endorsed by Congress. The United States Senate voted 95–3 in favor on June 23, 2004, and the House of Representatives supported the Bush–Sharon commitments by a vote of 407–9 on the following day.

Why is this an act of hypocrisy? Because it was the United States, under the Obama–Biden administration in 2009, that claimed that the 2004 exchange of letters and commitments was absolutely of no consequence and not binding on the United States. . . . The Obama administration had already torn up any such commitment and turned the Bush–Sharon exchange of April 2004 into a pair of dead letters.

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.