RUTHFULLY YOURS

Analysts on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean — and of the political spectrum — have been scrutinizing every syllable uttered by members of the new administration in Washington to determine whether U.S. President Donald Trump is as good a friend to the Jewish state as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hopes.

So far, four issues have been discussed and debated ad nauseam: U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley’s pronouncement that her government would not abandon Israel at the world body, as the Obama administration did when it enabled the passage of Security Council Resolution 2234, which deemed all Jewish presence beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines illegal; the nomination of David Friedman — a settlements sympathizer who supports relocating the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — as U.S. ambassador to Israel; a recent Trump administration warning that Israeli settlement construction could be potentially harmful to peace negotiations toward Palestinian statehood (the “two-state solution”); and the omission of any mention of Jews in the statement issued by the administration on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Where the bigger picture is concerned, Israel is observing Team Trump’s behavior toward Iran, telling Tehran that its saber-rattling and ballistic missile tests will incur serious consequences; imposing new sanctions on the mullah-led regime; and openly weighing the designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.

But the one question that has not been raised is how the Trump administration will respond when Israel is forced to go to war, yet again, with Hamas in Gaza and/or with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Middle East experts have been predicting, albeit cautiously, that neither scenario is likely in the near future, due to the internal difficulties each terrorist group is currently experiencing. Hezbollah is deeply entrenched in the Syrian civil war, and has already lost many of its men in the fighting. Hamas is suffering from a loss of income, as a number of European countries begin to reconsider the process of transferring cash earmarked for the rehabilitation of Gaza, which ends up paying for the rebuilding and enhancement of tunnel and rocket infrastructure.

Recent developments indicate, however, that more serious military action — in addition to retaliatory IDF moves following errant or aimed fire on Israel from just beyond its southern and northern borders — may be unavoidable.

Will Palestine exist in another generation? With the Trump administration gearing up for its meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next week, it’s a question worth asking. The last thing the Trump administration should want is a repeat of the mistakes the Great Powers made a century ago when they created artificial countries.

Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Yemen and Palestine among others were all carved up out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire by the Great Powers — chiefly Britain and France — after the First World War. It was a recipe for continual strife, as peoples of different nationalities, ethnicities, cultures, religions and political traditions were forced to live together. The Great Powers created, in effect, mini multicultural, multinational states. The result was civil and sectarian discontent, and war, throughout much of the last 100 years.

We see the latest chapter of those horrors in Syria where yet another civil war has led to yet another split up. Iraq has de facto split, as has Yemen, and Lebanon, which originally was part of a multi-state Syrian federation. Jordan, whose Hashemites fought a civil war against its Palestinian Arab majority, is also tenuously held together.

The creation of a Palestinian state astride Israel — the two-state solution today’s Great Powers insist on — would have even less chance of survival than its failed neighbour states. The Arab clans of Palestine throughout the 20th century refused to accept a state of their own. Only in the 1960s did the idea of a Palestinian nation take shape when Yasser Arafat created the concept of an Arabic “Palestinian people.” Previously, “Palestinian” was a term that referred to all the residents of Palestine, Jews and Arabs. The original name of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra was the Palestine Orchestra. The Jerusalem Post was first the Palestine Post.

But Arafat never forged a united people — most Palestinians only grudgingly accepted the rule of his Palestinian Authority and some never did. Few Palestinians identify chiefly with a national identity; their loyalty instead is clan-based — to the tight-knit group of extended families that share the same ancestry, based on the father’s male line and a preference for marrying within the clan. Palestinians pledge loyalty to their clan in a binding, formal code of honour backed by local militias. An attack on one clan member is an attack on all members.

Clan-based systems of governance do not lend themselves to nation states. Little surprise, then, that after Arafat died, civil war broke out and Gaza broke off from the West Bank to form its own statelet. To make dicier still the notion of a coherent Palestinian nation whose people share common values, Gaza is theocratic, run by Hamas, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, while the West Bank is largely secular.

Local media reported a man opened fire on a bustling market, injuring at least three people who were buying groceries ahead of the Jewish sabbath. Israeli police have said one man also suffered stab wounds after being knifed in the neck with a screwdriver. The ambulance service rushed to the scene and confirmed they treated a man and a woman, in their 50s, for bullet wound injuries to their lower bodies.

Paramedics added the stab victim was a 40-year-old man. Police branded the incident a terror attack, adding the suspect was overpowered by shoppers using their bare hands.The incident occurred at a market in the central Israeli town of Petah Tikva, on Thursday afternoon.

Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the suspect was arrested at the scene.A police investigation is underway. According to reports the suspect is a 19-year-old Palestinian. Video from the scene shows a large crowd gathered around the suspect, who is on the floor and surrounded by armed police. The attack came just hours after an explosion ripped through the Gaza border with Egypt, killing two Palestinians in what appeared to be a strike on cross-border smuggling tunnels.

At a time when many classical musicians are scrambling to book trendy alternative venues (mostly bars and clubs), the Israeli mandolin virtuoso Avi Avital is doing exactly the opposite—taking his folk instrument to concert halls around the world to perform with musicians more typically at home in such places.

Last September, Mr. Avital, age 38 and based in Berlin, made his debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, performing Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” for an audience of around 10,000 at the Hollywood Bowl. In December, he appeared with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, performing both a concerto he commissioned from Avner Dorman in 2006 and one by Vivaldi. Later that month, he joined the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for two concerts of Baroque music at Alice Tully Hall in New York.

On Thursday, he and the harpsichordist Kenneth Weiss perform a nearly all-Baroque program at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, right before Mr. Avital and the Dover Quartet resume a tour that sandwiches three appearances on the West Coast between dates in Toronto on Saturday and Vancouver on Feb. 19. The programs include arrangements of six miniatures by the Georgian composer Sulkhan Tsintsadze, a favorite of Mr. Avital’s, and a 23-minute piece from 2013 written for mandolin and string quartet by David Bruce, which Mr. Avital and the Dover plan to record. In addition, Mr. Avital will perform a transcription of the Chaconne from Bach’s Second Partita for Solo Violin.

Mr. Avital first gained wide attention in 2012, when Deutsche Grammophon, with whom he now has an exclusive contract, released an album of Bach transcriptions he produced himself. His arrangement there of Bach’s First Violin Concerto makes a compelling case for his instrument’s ability to lend welcome new textures to familiar music without compromising the score’s integrity. That principle received ideal expression on his second album: the aptly titled “Between Worlds,” a gratifying compendium of folk-inflected music by composers as diverse as Béla Bartók, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Manuel de Falla, Astor Piazzolla and Ernest Bloch. His third and most recent CD, an all-Vivaldi record, returned him to the classical mainstream, albeit in music largely adapted for his instrument—the fecund composer having written just two works expressly for mandolin. (Mr. Avital’s next album, “Avital Meets Avital,” arriving this spring, pivots in another direction, pairing him with the jazz bassist and composer Omer Avital, no relation, in music that pays homage to their shared Moroccan heritage.)

On the face of it, the anti-normalization campaign appears driven by political motivations. However, it turns out that there is also a powerful Islamic angle to this campaign of hate, which is aimed at delegitimizing Israel and demonizing Jews.

The Palestinian anti-normalization “enforcers” do their utmost to conceal the Islamic aspect of their campaign. They are not eager for the world to know that Islam supplies much of the ideology and justification for their anti-Israel activities.

Fatwas (Islamic religious decrees) and statements issued by leading Muslim scholars and clerics have long warned Muslims against normalization with the “Zionist entity.” Such normalization, they have made it clear, is considered an “unforgivable crime.” The authors of these hate messages are not opposed to normalization with Israel because of settlements or house demolitions, but rather because they believe Jews have no rights at all to any of the land.

In 1989, more than 60 eminent Muslim scholars from 18 countries ruled that it was forbidden for Muslims to give up any part of Palestine.

The vicious campaigns to boycott Israel and Jews, while political in dress, are in fact deeply rooted in Islamic ideology.

These campaigns are patently not a legitimate protest. They are not even part of an effort to boycott Israeli products or politicians and academics. The real goal of the campaigns is revealed in the words of the Muslim leaders: that Jews have no rights whatsoever to the land, and must be targeted through jihad as infidels and enemies of all Muslims and Arabs

Settlements, checkpoints and fences are irrelevant; Muslim scholars want Jews off what they define as sacred Muslim land. Supporters of BDS and the anti-normalization movement would do well to consider this fact. Failing to do so is tantamount to aiding and abetting Muslims to destroy Israel, and kill as many Jews as possible in the process.

Muslim scholars have feverishly citing chapter and verse from the Quran and the hadith, the words of the Prophet Mohammed, in their efforts to encourage Arabs and Muslims to avoid normalization with Jews.

At the heart of its call for peace and justice, however, lies a profound imbalance. We might say that Ionians, like Quakers and many other Christian groups, are naïve innocents let loose in the real world. There is a role for idealists in limited situations. But problems arise when such do-gooders do not properly understand what lies behind mutual hatred, enduring antagonism between people, and conflicts in the name of one cause or another. And here, the Iona Community falls down spectacularly.

Kairos is built on an Islamic, not a Christian narrative. Under Islamic law, territory once conquered by Muslim armies becomes sacrosanct and can never be forfeited to non-believers. If non-Muslims take control of formerly Muslim land (for example, Spain or Portugal), then Muslims are bound to reconquer it through renewed military action.

Kairos, significantly, does not refer to the fact that Jews lived in and ruled in the region long before the Arab conquests.

When Christians choose to ignore the rights of Jews, they deny their own origins in the land. Jesus was a Jew. The first Christian community was made up of Jews who adhered to Jewish law. All Christian churches recognize the Jewish Bible as part of their own scriptural, and the New Testament is a clear record of Jewish existence in the first Christian century.

There never was a “historic Palestine”, and it is disturbing to find a Christian community buying into the modern Islamic narrative. and the “Palestinian” inhabitants of the Mandate are a combination of the descendants of the 7th-century Arab invaders.

In Israel, Jewish, Arab, Christian, Druze and other citizens, regardless of race or religion or any other circumstance, have exactly the same rights under law to form political parties, serve in parliament, seek employment. Why does the Iona Community single Israel out?

Why is the Iona Community seemingly uninterested in the fate of their fellow Christians in the Palestinian territories yet determined to accuse Israel of enormities, when in fact, Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population, instead of diminishing, has grown since the establishment of the state?

Why, then, does the Iona Community join forces, not with the people who support Christians but with Palestinian Muslims who seek to destroy Israel and who will, in due course, treat the Christians as badly as they are treated in other Arab Muslim states?

The Israelis have never stalled in the peace process: they have made offers and the Palestinians have turned them all down. There has never been peace because Israel has no partners for peace. That a so-called Christian organization should misrepresent history in this way is an appalling dereliction of truth and honesty on its part.

When will the Iona Community come to terms with its far-left bias, its anti-Semitism, its own reputation, and the harm it is doing to any real hope in the Holy Land for peace?

The Iona Community is a famous ecumenical Christian community with three centers in Scotland, two on the island of Iona in the beautiful Inner Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland and another on the nearby Isle of Mull. But the community is also a far-flung body, with members across the globe. These include people from many denominations, from Presbyterians and Anglicans to Lutherans, Roman Catholics and Quakers, not forgetting members who do not belong to any church.

1. Saudi columnist Siham Al-Qahtani: Jews should no longer collectively be blamed for all disasters throughout history
2. “No Jewish plot against Arabs, without Arab knowledge”
3. Muhammad Al-Sheikh: Only political ignoramuses advocate armed resistance; the two-state solution is the only feasible option
4. Al-Sheikh criticized by Al-Jazeera presenter
5. Prominent Saudi Journalist: West Jerusalem is part of Israel; moving the U.S. embassy there as part of a peace agreement could herald the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
6. Kuwaiti journalist: I support relocating the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem
7. Saudi Cleric Awadh Al-Qarni: 9/11 was “fabricated”
8. Assad welcome in London, Trump not?