This may be the right time for a short intermezzo about opinions and beliefs.

A few years ago I read a book called The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt.

Wait a minute here, this strikes me as a very Jewish sounding name!

A trip to Wikipedia confirms he is indeed of Jewish decent, though he is an atheist.

The book made a big impression on me.

Especially when it comes to explaining how we form and then defend our opinions.

I apologize beforehand to Jonathan Haidt if I summarize it the wrong way, but this is how I see it.

Our mind is made up of an elephant and a rider.

The elephant represents our upbringing, culture, gut feelings, emotions, etc.

When we need to make up our minds about something like let’s say, Universal Income, good or bad idea, the elephant immediately decides. 

The rider thinks it’s he, the rider, who is deciding, based on rational calculations.

The elephant however is really in charge.

I myself imagine that someone could be for or against depending on how he or she thinks a deeply beloved and admired grandmother would have decided.

Once the elephant has decided – and this only takes a second or two – the rider then goes to work and acts as the lawyer of the elephant.

The lawyer will select any evidence that the elephant is right to see things that way and will fervently dismiss any evidence that shows the rider is wrong.

Whether I have explained it the same way Jonathan Haidt did or not, this is how I believe the human mind operates.

We do not know where our opinions come from or why we have them, but we will, if needs be, defend them to the death and will radically reject any information that could potentially force us to change our mind about something.

One of the hardest things for a human is to change one’s opinon about something once it’s been strongly imbedded. After the third conversation I had with Moshe I told my wife: ‘I feel forced to change my opinions on certain aspects of this conflict and it’s literally hurting my brain.’ My ears were red hot for about an hour after our conversation.

I personally believe that a lot of vehemently defended opinions are tied to loyalty to the opinions – real or imagined – of loved ones.

Am prone to be pro-Palestinian, even radically pro-Palestinian, partly because I loved my father with my whole heart and I think he was pro-Palestinian as well.

He’s been dead since 2009, so right now am not even sure anymore, but I think he was. I think that because he always identified with the oppressor and not with the oppressed and am sure that anno 2009 he saw Israel as the oppressor.

At other times he was very harsh in his opinions of Muslims and even that I have internalized. I will defend the Palestinians, even though the majority of them are Muslims, and then nod along when some of my students say things like: ‘I will never visit this or that Muslim country anymore. Awful culture!’.   

I would say then that all my opinions are formed by my father, but here and there we did have very different opinions. That leads me to think that am not loyal to every clearly expressed opinion of my father per se, but am loyal to his emotional experience of the world.

I will root for Kurt Cobain even though my father didn’t like his music, because Kurt Cobain felt like a total weirdo and outcast even at the height of his fame, and I experienced my father as a talented weirdo and outcast.

I think we are loyal to emotional blueprints passed down to us by our ancestors.

Defending Palestine is me taking the side of myself as a child growing up in a working class family where the general feeling was: we don’t have many opportunities, if we’re not careful we will be trampled, ignored, marginalized. And our wealthier neighbours scoff at our working class accents no matter what we do anyway.

This is exactly the image I have of the Palestinians. If we don’t shoot our crappy rockets with pathetic payloads into Israel the world will forget us and we will wilt and fade into oblivion.

This doesn’t mean that this image is entirely inaccurate, but it explains why I root for the Palestinians. Am rooting for how I see myself.

To see the issue any different I don’t just need to accept certain facts, I have to do something much harder: I have to change myself.

There is this meme that pops up from time to time:

‘We don’t see reality as it is. We see reality as we are.’

To try and unravel that mechanism behind my own perception and that of people I converse with has been a life long challenge. One where I keep opening new rabbit holes inside my own soul. There is a reason why I have mentioned Woody Allen, master of showing us what alienation and obsessive overthinking feels like.  

But back to my stay in Palestine.