In the past few weeks, Mosaic, like many other publications, has paid a lot of attention to the universities: their abandonment of their educational mission, their pusillanimity in the face of violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, their penchant for radical indoctrination, and their increasingly hostile environments for Jewish students. Princeton’s efforts to form relations with the Iranian government, and its callousness toward two students taken hostage by Iranian agents, may be even worse. Jay Solomon writes:

Princeton entered the Iran debate in a significant way in 2009, when it agreed to host Hossein Mousavian, a top regime diplomat and former nuclear negotiator, in New Jersey. Mousavian fled Tehran that year after being charged with espionage. . . . Mousavian was no dissident, though, and used his perch at Princeton to advocate Iran’s positions on its nuclear program and other key national-security issues. . . . Many of Mousavian’s dictums on the nuclear file would be adopted by the Iranian government.

The Princeton scholar was a prolific producer of opinion pieces and commentary during this period who liaised, at times, with Iranian diplomats, including Mostafa Zahrani and then-Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, to promote their messaging and engagements in the West.

In other words, Princeton had given a cushy and prestigious appointment to a de-facto propagandist for a government that had, in the previous decade, killed hundreds of U.S. servicemen and thousands of Iraqis, and was just getting started on racking up a much larger butcher’s bill in Syria. But it got worse, following the creation of a center for Iran and Persian Gulf studies in 2012:

Princeton’s student-exchange program first took off in 2014, when a prominent Iranian American scholar and future Biden administration official, Ariane Tabatabai, connected the Iran center’s then-associate director to Mostafa Zahrani, a senior Iranian foreign-ministry diplomat with strong ties to his country’s elite military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). . . . The follow-up took time, but by early 2015, Princeton welcomed its first candidate for the Iran program: a Chinese-American graduate student named Wang Xiyue.

The center’s associate director and other Princeton officials assured Wang that his worries about his safety were misplaced, and off he went to Iran. Seven months later he was arrested and held hostage for three years in the notorious Evin prison.

Following his arrest in August 2016, these connections to Tehran proved of little use. . . . The university advised Wang’s wife to stay quiet and not publicly criticize the Iranian government, he says. And Mousavian told Princeton’s leadership that his outreach to Zahrani, Zarif, and other Iranian officials would be counterproductive for Wang, given the Princeton scholar’s own sparring with Tehran’s security state. [One of Wang’s academic advisers, Mona] Rahmani, meanwhile, also declined to lobby the regime.

Now another Princeton graduate student, Elizabeth Tsurkov, is being held hostage by an Iranian proxy in Iraq, and the university has been no more helpful.

The center’s scholarship should also raise some eyebrows. Take, for instance, its director, who, according to Solomon, “has been outspoken while at Princeton in highlighting what he views as some of the Islamic Revolution’s accomplishments, including the empowerment of women.”

In a momentous meeting with the Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa in Riyadh, President Trump announced that he is lifting sanctions on the beleaguered and war-torn country. On the one hand, Sharaa is an alumnus of Islamic State and al-Qaeda, who came to power as commander of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which itself began life as al-Qaeda’s Syrian offshoot; he also seems to enjoy the support of Qatar. On the other hand, he overthrew the Assad regime—a feat made possible by the battering Israel delivered to Hizballah—greatly improving Jerusalem’s strategic position, and ending one of the world’s most atrocious and brutal tyrannies. President Trump also announced that he hopes Syria will join the Abraham Accords.

This analysis by Eran Lerman was published a few days ago, and in some respects is already out of date, but more than anything else I’ve read it helps to make sense of Israel’s strategic position vis-à-vis Syria.

Israel’s primary security interest lies in defending against worst-case scenarios, particularly the potential collapse of the Syrian state or its transformation into an actively hostile force backed by a significant Turkish presence (considering that the Turkish military is the second largest in NATO) with all that this would imply. Hence the need to bolster the new buffer zone—not for territorial gain, but as a vital shield and guarantee against dangerous developments. Continued airstrikes aimed at diminishing the residual components of strategic military capabilities inherited from the Assad regime are essential.

At the same time, there is a need to create conditions that would enable those in Damascus who wish to reject the reduction of their once-proud country into a Turkish satrapy. Sharaa’s efforts to establish his legitimacy, including his visit to Paris and outreach to the U.S., other European nations, and key Gulf countries, may generate positive leverage in this regard. Israel’s role is to demonstrate through daily actions the severe costs of acceding to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions and accepting Turkish hegemony.

Israel should also assist those in Syria (and beyond: this may have an effect in Lebanon as well) who look to it as a strategic anchor in the region. The Druze in Syria—backed by their brethren in Israel—have openly expressed this expectation, breaking decades of loyalty to the central power in Damascus over their obligation to their kith and kin.