On December 1, Donald Trump announced the appointment of Massad Boulos as his senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs. Boulos is what would be called in Yiddish the president-elect’s mekhuten—that is, his son is married to Trump’s daughter—and helped court Arab voters during the campaign. Seth Mandel dives into the conflicting reports about Boulos’s employment and finances, and other facts about his background:

Boulos’s . . . father was mayor of the Lebanese town Boulos was born in, and his great-uncle was in parliament. Boulos tried his hand in politics as well, though he has denied running for Lebanese parliament.

The crux of the complicated story is that Boulos, allied with a pro-Syria/Hizballah party, launched a campaign in 2005 but quickly withdrew his candidacy. In 2009, the party leader passed over Boulos in favor of a local rival. Boulos threw his support to the anti-Syrian side. Boulos is now an ally of Suleiman Frangiyeh, a presidential contender in [Hizballah’s] orbit.

Boulos’s campaign role was low risk and high reward. A White House role of any real substance would be the opposite.

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.