In 2006, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) took a firm stance against academic boycotts. The organization, which publishes a journal called Academic Freedom, has now reversed this decision and declared that “faculty members and students should be free” to boycott whomever they wish. Of course, then and now, it is boycotts of Israel that the AAUP has in mind. Cary Nelson writes:

Individual students and faculty have always had the right to advocate for academic boycotts, and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise. But an unqualified right “to make their own choices regarding their participation in them” and not face discipline for doing so validates “rights” that have not previously existed. That will include the right to refuse to write letters of recommendation for highly qualified students who wish to study at Israeli universities, an action that will be defended as only boycotting Israeli institutions. Not that any affected student will accept the distinction.

I predict that hundreds of those and other individual micro-boycotts of Jewish and Israeli students and faculty will be initiated during the 2024–25 academic year as a consequence of the AAUP policy change. There will also be dedicated group efforts to criminalize collaborative research projects between faculty in America and Israel, projects that often entail institutional endorsement and support.

[Previously], the AAUP understood that, unless the opposition to academic boycotts was honored as a universal principle, innumerable debates about boycotting universities in various countries would ensue, and academic boycotts would become routine. The AAUP is now willing to pay that price in the service of its growing anti-Zionism.

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.