US President Donald Trump meets Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in this handout released on May 14, 2025. Photo: Saudi Press Agency/Handout via REUTERS

The United States is preparing to establish a military presence at an airbase in Damascus to help enable a security pact that Washington is brokering between Syria and Israel, six sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The US plans for the presence in the Syrian capital, which have not previously been reported, would be a sign of Syria’s strategic realignment with the US following the fall last year of longtime leader Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Iran.

The base sits at the gateway to parts of southern Syria that are expected to make up a demilitarized zone as part of a non-aggression pact between Israel and Syria. That deal is being mediated by US President Donald Trump’s administration.

TRUMP SET TO MEET SYRIAN PRESIDENT ON MONDAY

Trump will meet Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa at the White House on Monday, the first such visit by a Syrian head of state.

Reuters spoke to six sources familiar with preparations at the base, including two Western officials and a Syrian defense official, who confirmed the US was planning to use the base to help monitor a potential Israel-Syria agreement.

The Pentagon and Syrian foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the plan. The Syrian presidency and defense ministry did not immediately respond to questions about the plan sent via the Syrian information ministry.

A US administration official said the US was “constantly evaluating our necessary posture in Syria to effectively combat ISIS [Islamic State] and [we] do not comment on locations or possible locations of [where] forces operate.”

The official requested that the name and location of the base be removed for operational security reasons. Reuters has agreed to not reveal the exact location.

A Western military official said the Pentagon had accelerated its plans over the last two months with several reconnaissance missions to the base. Those missions concluded the base’s long runway was ready for immediate use.

Two Syrian military sources said the technical talks have been focused on the use of the base for logistics, surveillance, refueling, and humanitarian operations, while Syria would retain full sovereignty over the facility.

A Syrian defense official said the US had flown to the base in military C-130 transport aircraft to make sure the runway was usable. A security guard at one of the base’s entrances told Reuters that American aircraft were landing there as part of “tests.”

It was not immediately clear when US military personnel would be dispatched to the base.

JOINT SYRIAN-AMERICAN PRESENCE

The new US plans appear to mirror two other new US military presences in the region monitoring cessation of hostilities agreements: one in Lebanon, which closely watches last year’s ceasefire between Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah and Israel, and one in Israel that monitors the Trump-era truce between Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and Israel.

The US already has troops stationed in northeastern Syria, as part of a decade-long effort to help a Kurdish-led force there combat Islamic State. In April, the Pentagon said it would halve the number of troops there to 1,000.

Sharaa has said any US troop presence should be agreed with the new Syrian state. Syria is set to imminently join the US-led global anti-ISIS coalition, US and Syrian officials say.

A person familiar with the talks over the base said the move was discussed during a trip by Admiral Brad Cooper, Commander of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), to Damascus on Sept. 12.

A CENTCOM statement at the time said Cooper and US envoy to Syria Thomas Barrack had met Sharaa and thanked him for contributing to the fight against IS in Syria, which it said could help accomplish Trump’s “vision of a prosperous Middle East and a stable Syria at peace with itself and its neighbors.” The statement did not mention Israel.

The US has been working for months to reach a security pact between Israel and Syria, two longtime foes. It had hoped to announce a deal at the United Nations General Assembly in September but talks hit a last-minute snag.

A Syrian source familiar with the talks told Reuters that Washington was exerting pressure on Syria to reach a deal before the end of the year, and possibly before Sharaa’s trip to Washington.

New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the Unisphere in the Queens borough of New York City, US, Nov. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kylie Cooper

The calls and texts started pouring in well before the race was even called. Friends, colleagues, rabbis, and former students — people who rarely agreed on anything — shared the same sense of shock.

“What happens now?” one message asked. “What does this mean for us?” said another. The tone was not rage, but grief along with fear, sadness, and concern about the Jewish future in New York.

Zohran Mamdani is now the mayor-elect of this city and presented a harsh and uncompromising vision of the future in his acceptance speech. These ideas would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Yet here we are. The question before Jewish New York is not whether the election was fair (it was), or whether we can wish the results away (we can’t), but whether we will have the courage to respond with clarity, unity, and purpose.

This was no fringe contest decided by radicals. Many Jews — especially in Orthodox and older communities — backed former governor Andrew Cuomo, drawn to his long record and his familiarity with Jewish institutions. But roughly a third of Jewish voters, disproportionately younger and more secular, cast their ballots for Mamdani.

They did so despite his open anti-Zionism, his refusal to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” calls to end the Cornell-Technion partnership on Roosevelt Island, and his repeated portrayal of Israel as a colonial project.

That division tells a story larger than one election. It tells of a community that has mistaken assimilation for acceptance, comfort for civic strength, and political quietism for peace. Mamdani’s rise is a mirror. What it reflects is not only the left’s growing hostility to Jewish identity, but our own complacency.

For decades, many Jews in New York assumed the city’s liberalism was a shield; that education, affluence, and civic reputation would protect us from the oldest hatred. October 7, 2023, should have shattered that illusion. Mamdani’s victory should bury it.

This is a man who proudly calls himself anti-Zionist, who has justified slogans glorifying violence against Jews, and who has described Israel’s existence as a moral failure. His final campaign message had a Palestinian flag prominently displayed behind him to further cement those statements.

That such a candidate could not only run but win in a city once called the modern capital of Jewish life speaks volumes. It reveals how profoundly the moral vocabulary of our politics has changed and how hesitant too many Jews have become to defend our own legitimacy in public life.

Too many Jewish institutions were slow to react, slow to mobilize, and slow to sound more than vague alarms. That hesitation cost us ground and voices. It revealed that for all our communal infrastructure, the reflex was to retreat, not rise. Engagement is no longer optional, it is imperative.

The fragmentation of the Jewish vote reflects a generational and cultural drift. Many younger Jews, alienated from synagogues and federations, are drawn to movements that speak in the language of justice and belonging, the very language our tradition helped shape but we’ve allowed others to monopolize.

Their support for Mamdani is not betrayal so much as a symptom of neglect: of education, of meaning, of connection. We taught the Holocaust, but not covenant. We taught survival, but not sanctity. We taught tolerance, but not purpose. We let Jewish identity become a lifestyle brand instead of a moral calling.

If Mamdani’s election jolts us awake, it will have served one sacred purpose: to remind us that continuity requires more than nostalgia and philanthropy. It requires conviction: a belief that being Jewish in New York is not an accident of history but a mission in itself.

New York’s Jewish community has been tested before. In the 1970s, when the city teetered on bankruptcy and neighborhoods burned, many families fled. Yet those who stayed built anew: schools, community centers, newspapers, and cultural networks that became models for the nation. Jewish New York did not survive by retreating. It survived by rebuilding.

We face another such inflection point. The test is not whether we can out-organize a political movement, but whether we can rediscover the courage and confidence that once made this community indispensable to the moral life of the city.

The temptation in moments like this is to withdraw — to build higher walls, add more guards, host more closed-door meetings. Security matters. But civic withdrawal is suicide. Jewish life flourished in New York not because we hid, but because we built. Our response to hostility must be institutional vitality: new leadership, deeper partnerships, serious investment in Jewish education and culture.

We must engage Mamdani’s administration on issues of safety, education, and fairness — but engagement must never mean erasure. Jewish organizations should meet him firmly and respectfully, insisting that antisemitism be confronted, religious freedom protected, and Jewish schools and synagogues treated as full partners in civic life. If he governs all New Yorkers, he must prove it.

Every political earthquake exposes what is fragile and what endures. For all our anxiety, Jewish New York remains vast, creative, and resilient. There is an extraordinary opportunity now to rebuild communal strength; not in fear, but with faith. That means reclaiming Jewish education as the beating heart of continuity, alive with history, text, and moral reasoning, not rote or apologetic.

It means reinvesting in culture, music, art, and literature that express pride, humor, and belonging. It means reconnecting generations, letting older Jews teach courage and younger Jews teach empathy. And it means redefining leadership: raising voices who are intellectually serious, civically engaged, and unafraid to say that Jewish life has something vital to offer America.

As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reminded us, “The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference — can I recognize God’s image in someone who is not in my image, whose language, faith, and ideals are different from mine?”

That must be our standard, not fearlessness as denial, but courage rooted in identity. New York has long been a proving ground for Jewish civic imagination from the Yiddish presses of the Lower East Side to the philanthropies that built hospitals and universities. The task now is to channel that same creative energy into a new era of pluralism without passivity.

In the short term, Jewish institutions must ensure that the mayor-elect’s administration guarantees security for synagogues and day schools, protects kosher and Sabbath accommodations, and confronts antisemitic hate crimes with the urgency they demand.

In the longer term, our challenge is civic and spiritual: to fortify a community that has grown affluent but unanchored, visible but unsure of its message. We cannot outsource Jewish identity to politicians or assume our moral credibility will be recognized automatically. It must be earned anew through learning, living, and leadership.

If Mamdani’s tenure tests us, let it also refine us. The health of Jewish New York will depend less on his rhetoric than on our resilience.

New York has always been more than a metropolis. For Jews, it is a covenantal space: a place where our story and America’s intersect. That story is now being rewritten, and we have a choice: to fade quietly into the background, or to remind the city that Jewish life is not a relic but a living force. Mamdani’s victory was democratic. Our response must be democratic too and rooted in persuasion, education, and courage. We will work with any administration that governs fairly, but we will speak plainly when Jewish dignity is at stake.

If this moment pushes us to strengthen our institutions, deepen our learning, and reassert our moral voice, then Jewish New York will emerge stronger, not weaker. The covenant did not end on election night. It begins again each morning — in our classrooms and sanctuaries, in our courage to speak, and in our refusal to disappear. That is how Jewish New York will endure: not by hiding, but by leading.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Democratic candidate for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani reacts after winning the 2025 New York City Mayoral race, at an election night rally in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, New York, US, Nov. 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jeenah Moon

In politics, people talk about the Overton Window — the range of ideas society deems acceptable to discuss in public. It shifts with time. And over the past 15 years, no form of hate has moved more dramatically from taboo to tolerance than antisemitism.

After World War II, antisemitic tropes in the United States largely lived on the margins — muttered in extremist circles, scribbled in pamphlets, and later echoed in chatrooms on the Dark Web. But somewhere between the rise of “The Squad,” the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism, and the transformation of identity politics into a hierarchy of victimhood on the left and a mirror-image grievance culture on parts of the populist right, the world’s oldest hatred has been repackaged for the modern age.

What once cost you credibility in public life now earns applause, retweets, and primetime airtime.

Antisemitism didn’t vanish — it adapted.

From the Margins to the Megaphone

The shift began before “The Squad,” but the rise of these antisemitic and anti-Israel members of Congress marked a turning point — the first-time open hostility toward Israel, and by extension the vast majority of Jews, could be celebrated as moral courage from the House floor.

When Ilhan Omar (D-MN) tweeted that Israel had “hypnotized the world” and that support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins,” she didn’t face moral reckoning. In 2019, Congress responded with a diluted resolution condemning all hatred — an “all lives matter” moment for antisemitism.

Rather than directly condemning antisemitism, Democratic Party leaders blurred it into abstraction — because calling it out was politically inconvenient. It was a watershed: the moment the Democratic Party signaled that antisemitic rhetoric, if veiled as “anti-Zionism,” was tolerable.

When Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and others began claiming that Jewish sovereignty itself was oppression, they weren’t shunned — they were lionized as purported truth-tellers. The moral vocabulary of the left, once rooted in universal rights, morphed into a simplistic hierarchy of oppressor and oppressed.

Within that framework, Jews — a historically persecuted people — were recast as “white colonizers.” It was an ideological coup: turning the survivors of genocide and mass expulsions from Arab lands into the villains of the story.

The Far Right Joins the Chorus

As the progressive left mainstreamed antisemitism in the name of “justice,” the “anti-woke” right embraced its own version in the name of “nationalism” and “America First.” The parallels to the antisemitic 1930s isolationists — Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Father Coughlin — are unmistakable.

Conspiracy theories that merely a decade ago belonged largely to the far-left now circulate freely among populist conservatives. Tucker Carlson, once a self-styled defender of Israel, now amplifies Holocaust minimizers and open antisemites, people praising figures who idolize Hitler and Stalin, while blaming “Jewish influence” for Western decline.

They aren’t alone. Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and Candace Owens have trafficked in antisemitic memes, “globalist” conspiracies, and blood-libel tropes that would have ended political careers a decade ago.

And on the other side, far-left pundits like Mehdi Hasan — apparently unaware of the horseshoe theory — find themselves surprised to be sharing these same figures’ social media talking points. In their mirror-image hatreds, the far right and far left converge, using the same ancient scapegoat to explain modern grievances.

Enter Mamdani: The Product of a Shifted Window

This moral drift explains how someone like Zohran Mamdani could become mayor of New York City — a city that is 12% Jewish.

Mamdani blames police brutality on Israel, claiming “the laces of the NYPD’s boots are tied by the IDF.” He instructs fellow socialists to link every domestic “austerity issue” to the US–Israel alliance — as if the 0.04 percent of the Federal budget connected to Israel explains rent prices in Brooklyn.

That isn’t criticism. It’s scapegoating — the oldest antisemitic reflex, wrapped in today’s language of social justice.

And the most revealing part is that it doesn’t hurt him politically. The use of antisemitic tropes no longer disqualifies candidates; it energizes them. The Overton Window has moved so far that such rhetoric isn’t scandalous — it’s strategy.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

For Jews, this moment carries an echo. We’ve seen it before — in Warsaw, Minsk, Baghdad, and Tripoli — cities that were once over 30% Jewish and home to flourishing Jewish life. In each, the pattern was the same: what was once unspeakable became debatable; what was debatable became acceptable.

Within a generation, those cities became Judenrein — emptied of Jews — not by accident but by political design. It always began with talk: the idea that the Jews were powerful, disloyal, manipulative. That “the people” were suffering because of them. Then talk became action.

Americans flatter themselves that it can’t happen in the USA — that its institutions and pluralism are too strong. But Overton Windows don’t move because of evil people; they move because of complacent or cowardly ones.

The Moral Drift

Today, antisemitism doesn’t always come in jackboots. It travels in hashtags and soundbites. It calls itself “humanitarian,” “anti-imperialist,” “decolonial.” It thrives in elite universities, “progressive” city councils, and digital echo chambers — and on the identitarian right, where “replacement theory” and “globalist” conspiracies recycle the same poison in a different accent.

It comes dressed as virtue and camouflaged in the moral language of the age.

That’s why the 2019 “all hate” resolution mattered. It wasn’t merely a procedural dodge — it was a moral surrender. It told every rising activist and politician: if your antisemitism is ideological enough, you can survive it — even thrive. And thrive, they have.

Drawing the Line

There’s a Jewish lesson older than America itself: when societies decide antisemitism is acceptable — even in coded form — they do not remain moral or safe for long.

Yes, the Overton Window has shifted. But it can shift back — if we make antisemitism, in every form, politically toxic again. That means calling out the right’s conspiracies and the left’s moral inversions with equal force.

History has already shown us where silence leads. The only question is whether we recognize the warning signs — or once again pretend the rhetoric is “complicated.”

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.