On Tuesday evening, a National Security Council spokesman stated that the U.S. rejects the Arab nations’ plan for the reconstruction of Gaza. And rightly so, especially as the plan ignores Hamas, and offers no suggestions of how to remove it from power. Elliott Abrams notes some additional problems, including the question of providing security:

The Arab plan says Egypt and Jordan have started training Palestinian police, but no timing or numbers are offered. The plan acknowledges that more will be needed: “It is proposed that the UN Security Council commences a study concerning establishing international presence in Palestinian territories (West Bank and Gaza), including through the adoption of a resolution to deploy international protection/peacekeeping forces.”

Oh, boy. The famously divided Security Council will do a “study” whose goal is to send international forces—to Gaza and the West Bank. Why the reference to the West Bank here, when the subject is supposed to be Gaza? To prevent Israeli forces from fighting terrorism in the West Bank, just as UNIFIL got in the way of the Israelis in southern Lebanon without ever confronting Hizballah itself. It’s hard to think of anything less likely to help bring security to the West Bank than a UN force. . . .

In other words, the authors of the plan have no real idea how to deal with terrorist groups—except the ridiculous notion that if Israel only agreed to the “two-state solution” and “restoring the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people,” those “challenging” terrorist murderers would simply go home.

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.