In Lebanon, Hizballah runs multiple networks of private religious schools, and likely exerts influence over other educational institutions, both public and private. In an in-depth report, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) delves into the anti-Semitic propaganda that permeates the curricula of two of the Iran-backed terrorist group’s most prominent school systems. Herewith, a few examples:

[One sixth-grade] ancient-history textbook . . . is divided into chapters surveying various ancient civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean with a rather notable exception: the Jewish people. Instead, the Jews are only discussed in chapters of this book about other civilizations. . . . It claims that Judaism teaches its adherents they are “the masters of the world and the emperors of the universe, which nobody is entitled to belong to, no matter his station” and that “this is what made them hated and outcast, and perhaps what intensified people’s aversion to them: their unjustness, their arrogance, their greed, and their monopolizing.”

The sixth-grade religion textbook called Islam Is Our Message [includes] a lesson about the Jews and Muslims of Medina that opens with [a] Quranic verse about the “animosity” of “the Jews.” [It] then jumps to the present day, telling of a family watching the news on television about “the crimes of the Zionists in Palestine.”

Notably, these textbooks use the term “Zionists” interchangeably with “Jews,” even using the former when discussing the Jews of the ancient world. A group of fifth-graders, meanwhile, concluded a lesson about the Balfour Declaration by chanting “Death to Israel, Death to America!” And then there are the Mahdi Scouts, a Hizballah youth organization, which teaches members that “the root of [Israel’s] existence is evil, and there is no cure for it except its eradication.” But, the ADL argues, Washington has some power to combat this incitement.

[S]everal of Hizballah’s educational institutions could be ripe targets for international sanctions because of their clear role in Hizballah’s system of terrorist recruitment, as a sort of conveyor belt for generating future members, combatants, and leaders. Such sanctions could be surprisingly effective in this case, in part because of a new  law passed by Congress in 2018 with the ADL’s encouragement that provides the U.S. government with added authorities to deter foreign transactions that benefit Hizballah. . . . [Moreover], sanctions could deter certain third-party actors in Lebanon from conducting business as usual with educational entities that benefit Hizballah.

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.