One thing that isn’t helping Gaza’s economy is the sale of the keffiyeh, the traditional kerchief favored by the arch-terrorist Yasir Arafat—popular though it has become. Brendan O’Neill writes:

Even the mega-rich are getting in on the act—Balenciaga once made a high-end keffiyeh that will set you back £3,000. But then, you can’t put a price on virtue-signaling.

Consider where their keffiyehs are likely to come from—China. . . . The last remaining keffiyeh-maker in the Palestinian territories says it has become “increasingly difficult to compete with the low prices of the imported counterfeits.” That the keffiyeh craze of the Western bourgeoisie has hurt keffiyeh-makers in [the West Bank and Gaza] is a dark irony that will not be lost on those of us who know that the virtue-signaling of the powerful often has unintended consequences.

It is even possible that Uyghurs made their keffiyehs, given that tens of thousands from this repressed people have been compelled by the Chinese regime to work in factories, including textile factories.

The keffiyeh classes . . . are attracted to the Palestinian people not for their dynamism, but for their wretchedness. Not for their vim but for their victimization. Where the elite posturing that [Tom] Wolfe so mercilessly ribbed was “vicarious radicalism,” the cult of the keffiyeh is something far more unpleasant: vicarious victimhood. The keffiyeh classes seem keen to “appropriate,” [to use a favorite progressive term], not only the clothing of the Palestinians, but their suffering, too. Witness the organizers of the Gaza encampment at Columbia University in New York City mimicking both Palestinian style and Palestinian privation. One student leader said she and her comrades were going hungry and required “humanitarian aid.” Do you want us to die of dehydration and starvation?, she asked university bosses.

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.