[المر]

I advised him to stay clear of Afghanistan. In its own way, the American national press was doing the same. Two days later, the Los Angeles Times, in a remarkable dispatch from its correspondent David Zucchino, reported on the bitterness and anger among Afghans whose families had been killed in United States B-52 bomber raids. The recent American battle in Gardez, the report said, had left "bitterness in its wake".

If only the same bluntness was applied to the Palestinian-Israeli war. Alas, no. On the freeway past Long Beach on Friday, I opened the LA Times to be told that Israel "mops up [sic] in the West Bank", while the syndicated columnist Mona Charen was telling readers in other papers that "98 per cent of Palestinians have not been living under occupation since Israel pulled out under the Oslo accords" and that the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, Ehud Barak, had offered Arafat "97 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza". This was 1 per cent higher even than the statistic from "Michael" on WSUI/KSUI radio. Arafat - "this murderer with the deaths of thousands of Jews and Arabs on his hands" - was to blame. The issue between Israel and her neighbours, Charen contended, "is not occupation, it is not settlements and it certainly is not Israeli brutality and aggression. It is the Arabs' inability to live peacefully with others".

Maybe California is organically different from the rest of the United States, but its journalists as well as its students seemed a tad smarter than the Midwest of America. The Orange County Register, a traditionally conservative newspaper in an area that is now 50 per cent Latino, has been trying to tell the truth about the Middle East and was carrying a tough feature by Holger Jensen, which warned that if President Bush didn't rein in Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister "will succeed where Osama bin Laden failed: forcing us into a war of civilisations against 1.2 billion Muslims". When I lunched with senior editorial staff, they invited three members of the Orange County Muslim community to join them.

Cocktails with friends of the Methodist church revealed a sane grasp of the Middle East - one of them was deeply disturbed by a recent remark by Israel's Internal Security Minister, Uzi Landau, who had said that "we're not facing human beings, but rather beasts". A black guest commended the UN secretary general Kofi Annan's criticism of Israel. Yet when I flipped on Fox News, there was Benjamin Netanyahu out-Sharoning Sharon, declaring that Palestinian suicide bombers would soon be prowling America's streets, meeting Congressmen to enlist their help in Israel's "war on terror", even while the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was in Israel.

"Why Israel's Mission Must Continue," the New York Times's comment page shouted on Friday. A long and tedious article on Israel's crusade against "terror" by an Israeli army colonel, Nitsan Alon, included several of my favourite cop-out phrases, including the stock reference to "a large number of civilians" who were - yes - "caught in the crossfire".

By the time I was addressing the more bohemian denizens of an art club in Los Angeles, the newspapers I was attacking were beginning to turn up. Mark Kellner arrived to report for The Washington Times. "He's going to stitch up everything you say," a friend remarked. "The Washington Times is to the right of the Republican Party." We shall see.

But if my audiences had been largely made up of Americans without any Middle East roots, the same could not be said of Sunday's cocktails at the home of Stanley Sheinbaum, the philanthropist, art collector and libertarian - we shall forget the period in which he helped to run the Los Angeles Police Department - where my little speech was to set off some verbal hand-grenades. Sheinbaum it was who met Syria's President Hafez el-Assad at President Jimmy Carter's request, arranging Assad's extraordinary summit with Carter in Geneva. "Tell me something good about yourself," he said to me. Have you heard nothing good from anyone else, I enquired? "Nope," he said.

But I liked Sheinbaum, a crusty, humorous man in his eighties who encourages every liberal Jewish American to have his say about the Middle East. As the lunchtime fog embraced the rose gardens and villas and swimming pools and hills of Brentwood, up stepped Rabbi Haim dov Beliak to explain how he intends to close down the bingo and gambling operations of one of America's greatest Jewish settlement builders. "Call me when you get back to Beirut - by all means write about it." As we scoffed Stanley Sheinbaum's strawberries and sipped his fine Californian red wine, another rabbi approached. "You're gonna have some hostile people in your audience," he said. "Just let 'em hear the truth."

So I did. I talked about the cowardice of Secretary Powell, who dawdled his way around the Mediterranean to give Sharon time to finish destroying the Jenin refugee camp. I talked about the rotting bodies of Jenin and the growing evidence that back in 1982 Sharon's troops handed the survivors of the Sabra and Chatila massacre back to their Phalangist tormentors to be killed. I said that Arafat was never offered 96 per cent of the West Bank at Camp David. I advised the 100 or so people in the room to read the Israeli journalist Amira Haas' courageous reports in Haaretz. I talked about the squalor of the Palestinian camp. I talked of suicide bombings as "evil" but suggested that Israel would never have security until it abided by UN Security Council Resolution 252; that Israel would never have peace until it abandoned all of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan and East Jerusalem.

"I find it very difficult to ask you a question, because what you said made me so angry," a woman began afterwards. Why did I not realise that the Palestinians wanted to destroy all of Israel, that the right-of-return would destroy the state? For an hour I explained the reality I saw in the Middle East; an all-powerful Israel fighting an old-time colonial war. I talked about the 1954-62 Algerian war, its brutality and cruelty, the French army's torture and killings, the Algerians' slaughter of civilians, the frightening parallels with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I talked about the Palestinians who wanted, at the least, an admission of the injustice their people had suffered in 1948, adding that there were Palestinians aplenty who realised that financial compensation would have to suffice for most of those refugees whose homes were in what is now Israel. I talked about Sharon and his bloody record in Lebanon. And about the pressures of the Israeli lobby in America, the fear of being labelled an anti-Semite, and the feeble reporting of the Middle East.

A rabbi was the first to tell me afterwards that the Palestinians were victims, that they should be given a real state. An old lady asked me for the name of the best book on the Algerian war. I gave it to her; Alastair Horne's A Savage War of Peace . A card was pushed into my hand. "Insightful talk!" the owner had written at the bottom and - hate though I do the word "insightful" - I couldn't help noticing that the name on the card was Yigal Arens, the son of one of Israel's most ruthless right-wing ministers, who had once informed me - in Beirut, back in 1982 - that Israel would "fight forever" against Palestinian terror.

On the freeway to LAX afterwards, the terminals and control tower looming through the Californian haze, I looked over Saturday's LA Times. A report on page 12 revealed that the BBC's award-winning film on Sharon's involvement in the Sabra and Chatila massacres had been dropped from a Canadian film festival after protests from Jewish groups. The organisers had explained that The Accused "could invite unwanted attention from interest groups" - whatever that means. But a paragraph at the end of the report caught my attention. "Sharon, who was the Israeli defence minister at the time, allegedly facilitated the assault on the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps..." There it was again. Allegedly? How many angry letters was that little lie supposed to avoid? Allegedly indeed.

But on reflection, I didn't think the Americans I met would be fooled by this. I didn't think my hotel proprietor would accept "allegedly". Nor the old naval officer from the John F Kennedy. Nor the listeners to KSUI. Nor even Stanley Sheinbaum. Yes, Osama bin Laden told me he thought Americans didn't understand the Middle East. Maybe he was right then. But not any more.