On Sunday morning, Iraqi terrorists hit a naval base in the southern Israeli city of Eilat with a drone, damaging a building but not causing any injuries. Michael Knights and Hamdi Malik calculate that Iran-backed militias in Iraq have launched 40 attacks on Israel since November 2 of last year, most of which fell short or were intercepted. They also observe an overall increase in the frequency of attacks, except for a pause in the second half of February in response to American retaliatory strikes.

On Monday, meanwhile, the head of Kataib Hizballah—the most formidable of Tehran’s many terrorist proxies operating in Iraq—announced plans to arm 12,000 Jordanians to make war on Israel in retaliation for the IDF’s targeted killing of Iranian officers in Syria. The threat comes amid several days of large protests outside the Israeli embassy in Amman calling for the revocation of the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, protests that are thought to be supported by Iran as well. Knights and Malik write that the threat

could be seen as part of a long-term ambition of the Islamic Republic to arm fighters in the West Bank. In July 2014, the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei said, “We believe that like Gaza, the West Bank must be armed.” . . . . There is only one efficient way to arm fighters in the West Bank, and that is via Jordan. Kataib Hizballah has some experience training Arab operatives and projecting back into their home nations, and providing arms to those fighters, notably in Bahrain.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Kataib Hizballah closely follow the pro-Palestinian protests in Jordan. There are reports of Jordanian authorities fear of a “Hamas takeover.” The Iranian front seems to see in these protests a possible opportunity to expand the unrest in the region. At a minimum, Iran and its proxies find in the threat to stoke unrest in Jordan an opportunity to push a concerned U.S. administration to put increasing pressure on the Israeli government not to launch the Rafah operation and to hold back greater attacks on Iranian and Lebanese Hizballah interests in Lebanon and Syria.

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.