Feelings and thoughts drive our emotions.My emotions bubbled over when I was in Aberdeen.I was seventeen. Then I fell in love with music and girls.It was the beginning of the Beatle era; it was the end of the romantic period. It was an age of passion and purity. No words can describe what happened.Listen to ‘more than a feeling’; one of the greatest pop song. It tells about feelings and thoughts which engender emotions. I hear the song and remember Allison Lyall. I was in the physics lab. I stepped into her blue eyes. The world stopped. It was pale blue. Everything was a sea of blue, and I walked through it in slow motion. There was no beginning, and there was no end; it filled my very being. There was only Allison. I wanted to live and breathe her. I thought of no one or nothing else. The whole world was blue. When love failed, I wilted and mourned months.I remember the first time I saw Barbara McEwan. I remember the look on her face. I relive the feeling I had the first time she kissed me.
I remember discovering Israel. It was the same time. A place I had never been to and had no contact with jumped into my conscience. This foreign land so far away from me fought a war. An atavistic fear devastated me. Everything ceased to matter. I glued myself to the radio; I celebrated places I’d never heard of before. I wanted to go and fight. I hadn’t a clue for who or why. Emotions and turmoil invaded every part of me. Then the BBC announced the Jewish Army had wiped out the Arab air force; the Jewish Army had taken Jerusalem. The Jewish Army was on the banks of the Suez Canal. The Jewish Army would take the Golan. The world has never seen the victory the Jewish Army brought. And I wept tears; I did know where they came from or why. A friend- a Gentile held me- he said I had no need to fear anymore. It was all over. I swore to this land I did not know; ‘wherever you go, I will go. My children will be yours, and yours will be mine.’ I kept my promise. Oranit is the fruit of the oath I never broke.More than a feeling is Oranit.Twice a week, if not more I drive through our woods. Together we wind down the hill to the coastal plane. The view is exquisite and excruciatingly beautiful. As I do I pass all the partial shades of green known to God. The trees undulate in the breeze. They sway to the sensual breaths of a sleeping angelic child. The view of a beautiful Israel engenders a new ‘more than a feeling’ emotion of belonging. It is more than a feeling, and it belongs to me; it is me. It is part of me. It makes what I am.
The life we live is very much a river flowing in the subterranean passage. A river flows inside us; we float in its currents and move with its eddies.A river which the Jews cannot deny; it is eternal and internal. We are part of a river that flows back to Israel.We belong to Israel, and Israel belongs to us.It's more than a feeling. But there are more to life than feelings.
We cannot live by feelings, and we don't live by feelings alone. We may deny our feelings -- but we cannot deny our thoughts. Many of us deny our feelings. Feelings are alien to modern man. We refuse to acknowledge their presenceIt is unthinkable we will admit they are of the highest significance.
We, modernists, prefer to think and rationalise. Emotions are false and betray. Thoughts are the compass which will guide us.Many basic ideas are invariably wrong.We are adept at denying feelings and falsifying our thoughts.The basic concepts about Palestine are woefully wrong. Look for yourself:-Poverty drives the Palestinians. No, it does not. The choice between financial wellbeing or mayhem, always produced the same result. The Palestinians preferred —mayhem.Kalkilia, Jenin, Nablus pre- Intifada were gold mines.Still, the residents preferred killing Jews to trading with them.The casino in Jericho made a fortune. The local Arabs preferred shooting Jews over shooting craps.We know if we make them prosper, they will throw their wealth away at the first opportunity they have slaughter Jews.We bleat about two people two states. The Palestinians have never been a people. They have no tradition or shared heritage. The one thing uniting them is the hatred of Israel. Given every opportunity, they betray themselves and kill each other.The Hamas hates the PLO. The West Bank Arabs loath the Israeli Arabs. Having exploited them at every opportunity – it is no surprise. The political elite has stolen from the masses. We forget no Sunni Arab State exists as a democracy and most are failed states riddled by ISIS.
No government in these circumstances would offer ‘a state.’ The world pretends. And the pretense is a sham.The most ardent proponents of the ‘two -state- solution’ postulate essential caveats.The State will not bear arms; it will not control its air space. Palestine will not be free to form military alliances.These limitations mean Palestine is not a sovereign state. It will enjoy a high-grade autonomy.We pay lip-service to the Palestinians refugees. There are now nigh on none. After almost 70 years all so-called Palestinians were born in other countries. The fact they were not afforded citizenship in their country of birth has nothing to with Israel.We continue to use cognitive dissonance.All the facts about Palestinian are false if not downright lies.Palestine is non-viable not because of our deep yearnings.Palestine cannot come into existence because of one reason. The root-cause is the Palestinians’ innate and inherent problems.The issues have nothing to do with Israel.If Israel did not exist Palestine would appear? Would Palestine function as an independent sovereign state? We all know the answer. It is no.
Of course, we have deep yearnings. Like the love of youth, time will never extinguish the embers. We belong to this land as this land belongs to us. The land is indivisible. Our attachment is more than a feeling. Nonetheless, we can share the land.
This process can only start when everyone ceases to castigate our emotions even if they are more than a feeling. The process will start when we move from the Jews’ true feelings.We must recognise the implications of the Palestinian cognitive deceit.
