In his book The God Delusion, the evolutionary biologist and New Atheist polemicist Richard Dawkins proclaims that the commandment in Leviticus 19:18 to “love your neighbor as yourself” originally meant “only ‘love another Jew.’” Not so, argues the Bible scholar Richard Elliott Friedman, mustering significant contextual and linguistic evidence:

[First], the text already directs Jews/Israelites to love foreigners: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). What [then] would be the point of saying to love only Jews—and in the very same chapter! So who is our “neighbor”?

The Hebrew term here for “neighbor” is re’a. The first occurrence of re’a in the Torah is in the story of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:3), the Bible’s story of the origin of different nations and languages. The term refers to every human, without any distinctions by group. . . [T]he next occurrence of the word [is] in the story of [Jacob’s son] Judah and [his daughter-in-law] Tamar. Judah has a re’a named Hirah the Adullamite (Genesis 38:12, 20). Hirah is a Canaanite, . . .  from the then-Canaanite city of Adullam. He cannot be a member of Judah’s clan because, at this point in the story, that clan, the Israelites, consists only of Jacob and his children and any grandchildren.

In the Exodus story the word appears in both the masculine and feminine, [when] Moses instructs the Israelites to ask their Egyptian neighbors for silver and gold items before they leave Egypt (Exodus 11:2): “each man will ask of his neighbor and each woman of her neighbor . . .”. The word there refers precisely to non-Israelites. . . .

In short, the word re’a is used to refer to an Israelite, a Canaanite, an Egyptian, or to everyone on earth.

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.