(Hanan Ashrawi’s daughter telling her story)

I am Palestinian - born and raised - and my Palestinian roots go back centuries. No one can change that even if they tell me that Jerusalem , my birth place, is not Palestine , even if they tell me that Palestine doesn't exist, even if they take away all my papers and deny me entry to my own home, even if they humiliate me and take away my rights. I AM PALESTINIAN.

Name: Zeina Emile Sam'an Ashrawi; Date of Birth: July 30, 1981; Ethnicity: Arab. This is what was written on my Jerusalem ID card. An ID card to a Palestinian is much more than just a piece of paper; it is my only legal documented relationship to Palestine . Born in Jerusalem , I was given a Jerusalem ID card (the blue ID), an Israeli Travel Document and a Jordanian Passport stamped Palestinian (I have no legal rights in Jordan ). I do not have an Israeli Passport, a Palestinian Passport or an American Passport.

Here is my story:

I came to the United States as a 17 year old to finish high school in Pennsylvania and went on to college and graduate school and subsequently got married and we are currently living in Northern Virginia. I have gone home every year at least once to see my parents, my family and my friends and to renew my Travel Document as I was only able to extend its validity once a year from Washington DC . My father and I would stand in line at the Israeli Ministry of Interior in Jerusalem , along with many other Palestinians, from 4:30 in the morning to try our luck at making it through the revolving metal doors of the Ministry before noon – when the Ministry closed its doors - to try and renew the Travel Document. We did that year after year. As a people living under an occupation, being faced with constant humiliation by an occupier was the norm but we did what we had to do to insure our identity was not stolen from us.

In August of 2007 I went to the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC to try and extend my travel document and get the usual "Returning Resident" VISA that the Israelis issue to Palestinians holding an Israeli Travel Document. After watching a few Americans and others being told that their visas would be ready in a couple of weeks my turn came. I walked up to the bulletproof glass window shielding the lady working behind it and under a massive picture of the Dome of the Rock and the Walls of Jerusalem that hangs on the wall in the Israeli consulate, I handed her my papers through a little slot at the bottom of the window.

"Shalom" she said with a smile. "Hi" I responded, apprehensive and scared. As soon as she saw my Travel Document her demeanor immediately changed. The smile was no longer there and there was very little small talk between us, as usual. After sifting through the paperwork I gave her she said: "where is your American Passport?" I explained to her that I did not have one and that my only Travel Document is the one she has in her hands. She was quiet for a few seconds and then said: "you don't have an American Passport?" suspicious that I was hiding information from her. "No!" I said. She was quiet for a little longer and then said: "Well, I am not sure we'll be able to extend your Travel Document." I felt the blood rushing to my head as this is my only means to get home! I asked her what she meant by that and she went on to tell me that since I had been living in the US and because I had a Green Card they would not extend my Travel Document.

After taking a deep breath to try and control my temper I explained to her that a Green Card is not a Passport and I cannot use it to travel outside the US. My voice was shaky and I was getting more and more upset (and a mini shouting match ensued) so I asked her to explain to me what I needed to do. She told me to leave my paperwork and we would see what happens.

A couple of weeks later I received a phone call from the lady telling me that she was able to extended my Travel Document but I would no longer be getting the "Returning Resident" VISA. Instead, I was given a 3 month tourist VISA. Initially I was happy to hear that the Travel Document was extended but then I realized that she said "tourist VISA". Why am I getting a tourist VISA to go home? Not wanting to argue with her about the 3 month VISA at the time so as not to jeopardize the extension of my Travel Document, I simply put that bit of information on the back burner and went on to explain to her that I wasn't going home in the next 3 months. She instructed me to come back and apply for another VISA when I did intend on going. She didn't add much and just told me that it was ready for pick-up. So I went to the Embassy and got my Travel Document and the tourist VISA that was stamped in it.

My husband, my son and I were planning on going home to Palestine this summer. So a month before we were set to leave (July 8, 2008) I went to the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC, papers in hand, to ask 2 for a VISA to go home. I, again, stood in line and watched others get VISAs to go to my home. When my turn came I walked up to the window; "Shalom" she said with a smile on her face, "Hi" I replied. I slipped the paperwork in the little slot under the bulletproof glass and waited for the usual reaction. I told her that I needed a returning resident VISA to go home. She took the paperwork and I gave her a check for the amount she requested and left the Embassy without incident.

A few days ago I got a phone call from Dina at the Israeli Embassy telling me that she needed the expiration date of my Jordanian Passport and my Green Card. I had given them all the paperwork they needed time and time again and I thought it was a good way on their part to waste time so that I didn't get my VISA in time. Regardless, I called over and over again only to get their voice mail. I left a message with the information they needed but kept called every 10 minutes hoping to speak to someone to make sure that they received the information in an effort to expedite the tedious process. I finally got a hold of someone. I told her that I wanted to make sure they received the information I left on their voice mail and that I wanted to make sure that my paperwork was in order. She said, after consulting with someone in the background (I assume it was Dina), that I needed to fax copies of both my Jordanian Passport and my Green Card and that giving them the information over the phone wasn't acceptable. So I immediately made copies and faxed them to Dina. A few hours later my cell phone rang. "Zeina?" she said. "Yes" I replied, knowing exactly who it was and immediately asked her if she received the fax I sent. She said: "ehhh, I was not looking at your file when you called earlier but your Visa was denied and your ID and Travel Document are no longer valid." "Excuse me?" I said in disbelief. "Sorry, I cannot give you a visa and your ID and Travel Document are no longer valid. This decision came from Israel not from me."

I cannot describe the feeling I got in the pit of my stomach. "Why?" I asked and Dina went on to tell me that it was because I had a Green Card. I tried to reason with Dina and to explain to her that they could not do that as this is my only means of travel home and that I wanted to see my parents, but to no avail. Dina held her ground and told me that I wouldn't be given the VISA and then said: "Let the Americans give you a Travel Document".

I have always been a strong person and not one to show weakness but at that moment I lost all control and started crying while Dina was on the other end of the line holding my only legal documents linking me to my home. I began to plead with her to try and get the VISA and not revoke my documents; "put yourself in my shoes, what would you do? You want to go see your family and someone is telling you that you can't! What would you do? Forget that you're Israeli and that I'm Palestinian and think about this for a minute!" "Sorry" she said," I know but I can't do anything, the decision came from Israel ". I tried to explain to her over and over again that I could not travel without my Travel Document and that they could not do that - knowing that they could, and they had!

This has been happening to many Palestinians who have a Jerusalem ID card. The Israeli government has been practicing and perfecting the art of ethnic cleansing since 1948 right under the nose of the world and no one has the power or the guts to do anything about it. Where else in the world does one have to beg to go to one's own home? Where else in the world does one have to give up their identity for the sole reason of living somewhere else for a period of time? Imagine if an American living in Spain for a few years wanted to go home only to be told by the American government that their American Passport was revoked and that they wouldn't be able to come back!

If I were a Jew living anywhere around the world and had no ties to the area and had never set foot there, I would have the right to go any time I wanted and get an Israeli Passport. In fact, the Israelis encourage that. I however, am not Jewish but I was born and raised there, my parents, family and friends still live there and I cannot go back! I am neither a criminal nor a threat to one of the most powerful countries in the world, yet I am alienated and expelled from my own home.

As it stands right now, I will be unable to go home - I am one of many.

So today is the third day of Eid Al Fitr that all Muslims worldwide celebrate right after the culmination of the month of Ramadan. Not sure if it’s only me, but Ramadan seems to have lost its glory. Years ago when I was a child, people’s attitudes towards both Ramadan and Eid (festival) were way different than now. Maybe I have grown up to the extent that I see in them nothing but the mere fact that few arrogant relatives come for a visit for a couple of minutes, and everyone just sucks them up.

It has been a gloomy day in deed. Being self-centered often times, I thought that my own family never enjoyed the Ramadan that other people celebrate. But the night prior to the Eid, I went for a drive to Ramallah with my uncle and three sisters, we toured around Al Manara and the mall a bit, and felt the legendary atmosphere. People were happy. That hit me; I am not accustomed to seeing them vividly preoccupied with the preparation for the big “day.”

So I came back home and wrote to all my contacts wishing them a Happy Eid and expressed my astonishment and satisfaction to see promising smiles in the crowded streets of Ramallah. But the sad part was that I knew it was merely fleeting moments and that those smiles would be wiped off soon. Not only have my fears become true, but I was blind. Yes, blind. Or may be I just chose not to see it. May be I wanted to believe that we are actually happy.

Would I miss Ramadan? NO. Not really. It has been made hell this year.

While Ramadan is believed to be the holy month during which people get closer to Allah by fasting from food and drink all day long and focus on their faith instead, I am not pretty sure this was the case with us Palestinians. It was only a drug. Ramadan numbed our pain. We could handle both the Israeli and Palestinian political, economic, and security pressure knowing that the day of salvation was approaching; the Eid. But after the three days elapsed, then what?

Now thousands of Palestinians are waiting for the next phase. It has been seven months now. Seven months, and thousands of the PA employees have not received their salaries. And two months elapsed with millions of students deprived form their right of education. I have three sisters and two brothers who do nothing but stay at home. They have not attended school from the very beginning of this term. It is both sad and frustrating that they have to “do the time” and pay a high price.

Reading the news headlines on the first days of Eid is not healthy at all. It lessens the effect of the drug, and one starts to get sober. Sounds funny in deed, but that was the case.

Few minutes ago, I surfed some of the blogs and came across few Iraqi bloggers writing on both Ramadan and Eid. If the titles did not mention “in Iraq,” I swear I could never tell the difference between Iraq and Palestine. The hunger, misery, constant killing, and lack of security are all Palestinian symptoms.

I am speechless now; I can hardly verbalize the so many conflicting thoughts. Heaven knows how things would be like next Ramadan, but I would not speculate it already. It is not time to worry about it now, other issues are on stake; food, money, and education. Until then, there are a lot of things to sort out.

Yesterday, I realized that I believe in love at first sight. Not the romantic kind, rather the sense of connecting with another human being without ever having to say a word. Indeed, the person I was so enthralled with last night was a five-month-old girl, who smiled at me and then hid her face in shyness. Those few moments of interacting with this baby lifted my spirits, but it also made me reflect in sadness about the fact that many children in this current conflict are robbed of their joy and their childhood.

I often contemplate how mature Palestinian children seem. Sure, they play the childhood games that we all played in our day, but there is wisdom in their words that is eerily sobering. Their age defines them as children, but if you have a conversation with a Palestinian child, you will realize how much awareness she has of the world around her, of suffering in the next village, in Gaza, in Lebanon. She is a child that has empathy and understands that life, by nature, is wrought with all sorts of difficulties.

A Palestinian child knows better; life is not as it is depicted in cartoons, where those who die are miraculously resurrected not once, but several times, where injuries are healed instantaneously, where death is a joke and life is a series of slapstick moments. A Palestinian child escapes into imagination, but she is never far removed from the reality of children and adults alike being indiscriminately shot outside her window, in her classroom, at the local bakery.

Who would have thought that normal things, simply walking down the street to grab a falafel sandwich, could result in your untimely death? Perhaps the Israeli army mistook the falafel stand for a bomb-making factory, or an ammunition shop? Make no mistake about it; the Israeli military have made too many “mistakes” that there is obviously a pattern there, wouldn’t you think?

A child that is robbed of the sense of security, therefore, is a child that is mature beyond her years. She knows that the bullets and the tank shells do not discriminate. Her father can shield her from the neighbor’s vicious dog, from the crazy drivers, he will hold her hand to cross the street, but he will not be able to capture a bullet in his hand like the mythological superheroes in blockbuster movies out this summer in theatres near you. He might be able to take the bullet for her though. But once gone, who will be her protective shield against the harsh reality of life that goes on in what seems the periphery of the conflict? And who will be there to share some of her joyous milestones; graduation, marriage, the birth of a child? Hers is a joy that is always overshadowed by a greater sorrow.

Is it fair that 31 Palestinian children have died in a 31-day period? A child-a-day; is that the new Israeli army mantra? Khaled was just a one-year-old, Aya was seven, Sabreen was only three. What lost potential, what lost promise – who knows what Khaled would have grown up to be? An astronaut? A veterinarian? A philosopher? What about Aya; she could have become a fashion designer, a teacher, a mother. By what right has this promise been so violently plucked and trampled upon cruelly and without a moment’s hesitation on the part of the Israeli soldier, who heartlessly unleashed a fiery rain of bullets and shells on a neighborhood as if he is in a simulated video game and those who die are fictitious and unreal? Perhaps that is what he is made to believe, otherwise, who in clear consciousness is so willing to pull the trigger and with one spray of bullets destroy life, potential and rob joy?

If you can see the smiling face of your own child, then how do you go out and unquestioningly take the life of others? If you value life, then how do you live with the burden of knowing that you have taken it so unjustifiably? Perhaps that is your perpetual punishment; the judgment of a child scorned is the harshest of them all.

The Iraq war has been an amazing success, global warming is just a myth – and as for Guantanamo Bay, it's practically a holiday camp... The annual cruise organised by the 'National Review', mouthpiece of right-wing America, is a parallel universe populated by straight-talking, gun-toting, God-fearing Republicans.

By Johann Hari
Published: 13 July 2007

I am standing waist-deep in the Pacific Ocean, both chilling and burning, indulging in the polite chit-chat beloved by vacationing Americans. A sweet elderly lady from Los Angeles is sitting on the rocks nearby, telling me dreamily about her son. "Is he your only child?" I ask. "Yes," she says. "Do you have a child back in England?" she asks. No, I say. Her face darkens. "You'd better start," she says. "The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they'll have the whole of Europe."

I am getting used to these moments – when gentle holiday geniality bleeds into... what? I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer. As she explains the perils of Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear her say, " Of course, we need to execute some of these people," I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. "A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country," she says. "Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that's what you'll get." She squints at the sun and smiles. " Then things'll change."

I am travelling on a bright white cruise ship with two restaurants, five bars, a casino – and 500 readers of the National Review. Here, the Iraq war has been "an amazing success". Global warming is not happening. The solitary black person claims, "If the Ku Klux Klan supports equal rights, then God bless them." And I have nowhere to run.

From time to time, National Review – the bible of American conservatism – organises a cruise for its readers. I paid $1,200 to join them. The rules I imposed on myself were simple: If any of the conservative cruisers asked who I was, I answered honestly, telling them I was a journalist. Mostly, I just tried to blend in – and find out what American conservatives say when they think the rest of us aren't listening.

I. From sweet to suicide bomber

I arrive at the dockside in San Diego on Saturday afternoon and stare up at the Oosterdam, our home for the next seven days. Filipino boat hands are loading trunks into the hull and wealthy white folk are gliding onto its polished boards with pale sun parasols dangling off their arms.

The Reviewers have been told to gather for a cocktail reception on the Lido, near the very top of the ship. I arrive to find a tableau from Gone With the Wind, washed in a thousand shades of grey. Southern belles – aged and pinched – are flirting with old conservative warriors. The etiquette here is different from anything I have ever seen. It takes me 15 minutes to realise what is wrong with this scene. There are no big hugs, no warm kisses. This is a place of starchy handshakes. Men approach each other with stiffened spines, puffed-out chests and crunching handshakes. Women are greeted with a single kiss on the cheek. Anything more would be French.

I adjust and stiffly greet the first man I see. He is a judge, with the craggy self-important charm that slowly consumes any judge. He is from Canada, he declares (a little more apologetically), and is the founding president of "Canadians Against Suicide Bombing". Would there be many members of "Canadians for Suicide Bombing?" I ask. Dismayed, he suggests that yes, there would.

A bell rings somewhere, and we are all beckoned to dinner. We have been assigned random seats, which will change each night. We will, the publicity pack promises, each dine with at least one National Review speaker during our trip.

To my left, I find a middle-aged Floridian with a neat beard. To my right are two elderly New Yorkers who look and sound like late-era Dorothy Parkers, minus the alcohol poisoning. They live on Park Avenue, they explain in precise Northern tones. "You must live near the UN building," the Floridian says to one of the New York ladies after the entree is served. Yes, she responds, shaking her head wearily. "They should suicide-bomb that place," he says. They all chuckle gently. How did that happen? How do you go from sweet to suicide-bomb in six seconds?

The conversation ebbs back to friendly chit-chat. So, you're a European, one of the Park Avenue ladies says, before offering witty commentaries on the cities she's visited. Her companion adds, "I went to Paris, and it was so lovely." Her face darkens: "But then you think – it's surrounded by Muslims." The first lady nods: "They're out there, and they're coming." Emboldened, the bearded Floridian wags a finger and says, "Down the line, we're not going to bail out the French again." He mimes picking up a phone and shouts into it, "I can't hear you, Jacques! What's that? The Muslims are doing what to you? I can't hear you!"

Now that this barrier has been broken – everyone agrees the Muslims are devouring the French, and everyone agrees it's funny – the usual suspects are quickly rounded up. Jimmy Carter is "almost a traitor". John McCain is "crazy" because of "all that torture". One of the Park Avenue ladies declares that she gets on her knees every day to " thank God for Fox News". As the wine reaches the Floridian, he announces, "This cruise is the best money I ever spent."

They rush through the Rush-list of liberals who hate America, who want her to fail, and I ask them – why are liberals like this? What's their motivation? They stutter to a halt and there is a long, puzzled silence. " It's a good question," one of them, Martha, says finally. I have asked them to peer into the minds of cartoons and they are suddenly, reluctantly confronted with the hollowness of their creation. "There have always been intellectuals who want to tell people how to live," Martha adds, to an almost visible sense of relief. That's it – the intellectuals! They are not like us. Dave changes the subject, to wash away this moment of cognitive dissonance. "The liberals don't believe in the constitution. They don't believe in what the founders wanted – a strong executive," he announces, to nods. A Filipino waiter offers him a top-up of his wine, and he mock-whispers to me, "They all look the same! Can you tell them apart?" I stare out to sea. How long would it take me to drown?

II. "We're doing an excellent job killing them."

The Vista Lounge is a Vegas-style showroom, with glistening gold edges and the desperate optimism of an ageing Cha-Cha girl. Today, the scenery has been cleared away – "I always sit at the front in these shows to see if the girls are really pretty and on this ship they are ug-lee," I hear a Reviewer mutter – and our performers are the assorted purveyors of conservative show tunes, from Podhoretz to Steyn. The first of the trip's seminars is a discussion intended to exhume the conservative corpse and discover its cause of death on the black, black night of 7 November, 2006, when the treacherous Democrats took control of the US Congress.

There is something strange about this discussion, and it takes me a few moments to realise exactly what it is. All the tropes that conservatives usually deny in public – that Iraq is another Vietnam, that Bush is fighting a class war on behalf of the rich – are embraced on this shining ship in the middle of the ocean. Yes, they concede, we are fighting another Vietnam; and this time we won't let the weak-kneed liberals lose it. "It's customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who's 'we'?" the writer Dinesh D'Souza asks angrily. "The left won by demanding America's humiliation." On this ship, there are no Viet Cong, no three million dead. There is only liberal treachery. Yes, D'Souza says, in a swift shift to domestic politics, "of course" Republican politics is "about class. Republicans are the party of winners, Democrats are the party of losers."

The panel nods, but it doesn't want to stray from Iraq. Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan's one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbles from beneath low-hanging jowls: "The coverage of this war is unbelievable. Even Fox News is unbelievable. You'd think we're the only ones dying. Enemy casualties aren't covered. We're doing an excellent job killing them."

Then, with a judder, the panel runs momentarily aground. Rich Lowry, the preppy, handsome 38-year-old editor of National Review, says, "The American public isn't concluding we're losing in Iraq for any irrational reason. They're looking at the cold, hard facts." The Vista Lounge is, as one, perplexed. Lowry continues, "I wish it was true that, because we're a superpower, we can't lose. But it's not."

No one argues with him. They just look away, in the same manner that people avoid glancing at a crazy person yelling at a bus stop. Then they return to hyperbole and accusations of treachery against people like their editor. The ageing historian Bernard Lewis – who was deputed to stiffen Dick Cheney's spine in the run-up to the war – declares, "The election in the US is being seen by [the bin Ladenists] as a victory on a par with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We should be prepared for whatever comes next." This is why the guests paid up to $6,000. This is what they came for. They give him a wheezing, stooping ovation and break for coffee.

A fracture-line in the lumbering certainty of American conservatism is opening right before my eyes. Following the break, Norman Podhoretz and William Buckley – two of the grand old men of the Grand Old Party – begin to feud. Podhoretz will not stop speaking – "I have lots of ex-friends on the left; it looks like I'm going to have some ex-friends on the right, too," he rants –and Buckley says to the chair, " Just take the mike, there's no other way." He says it with a smile, but with heavy eyes.

Podhoretz and Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11 American conservatism, and they stare at wholly different Iraqs. Podhoretz is the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who travelled through a long phase of left-liberalism to a pugilistic belief in America's power to redeem the world, one bomb at a time. Today, he is a bristling grey ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been "an amazing success." He waves his fist and declaims: "There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria ... This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn't have gone better." He wants more wars, and fast. He is "certain" Bush will bomb Iran, and " thank God" for that.

Buckley is an urbane old reactionary, drunk on doubts. He founded the National Review in 1955 – when conservatism was viewed in polite society as a mental affliction – and he has always been sceptical of appeals to " the people," preferring the eternal top-down certainties of Catholicism. He united with Podhoretz in mutual hatred of Godless Communism, but, slouching into his eighties, he possesses a world view that is ill-suited for the fight to bring democracy to the Muslim world. He was a ghostly presence on the cruise at first, appearing only briefly to shake a few hands. But now he has emerged, and he is fighting.

"Aren't you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf War I, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this " rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we're winning." The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn't he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley "a coward". His wife nods and says, " Buckley's an old man," tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.

I decide to track down Buckley and Podhoretz separately and ask them for interviews. Buckley is sitting forlornly in his cabin, scribbling in a notebook. In 2005, at an event celebrating National Review's 50th birthday, President Bush described today's American conservatives as "Bill's children". I ask him if he feels like a parent whose kids grew up to be serial killers. He smiles slightly, and his blue eyes appear to twinkle. Then he sighs, "The answer is no. Because what animated the conservative core for 40 years was the Soviet menace, plus the rise of dogmatic socialism. That's pretty well gone."

This does not feel like an optimistic defence of his brood, but it's a theme he returns to repeatedly: the great battles of his life are already won. Still, he ruminates over what his old friend Ronald Reagan would have made of Iraq. "I think the prudent Reagan would have figured here, and the prudent Reagan would have shunned a commitment of the kind that we are now engaged in... I think he would have attempted to find some sort of assurance that any exposure by the United States would be exposure to a challenge the dimensions of which we could predict." Lest liberals be too eager to adopt the Gipper as one of their own, Buckley agrees approvingly that Reagan's approach would have been to "find a local strongman" to rule Iraq.

A few floors away, Podhoretz tells me he is losing his voice, "which will make some people very happy". Then he croaks out the standard-issue Wolfowitz line about how, after September 11, the United States had to introduce democracy to the Middle East in order to change the political culture that produced the mass murderers. For somebody who declares democracy to be his goal, he is remarkably blasé about the fact that 80 per cent of Iraqis want US troops to leave their country, according to the latest polls. "I don't much care," he says, batting the question away. He goes on to insist that "nobody was tortured in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo" and that Bush is "a hero". He is, like most people on this cruise, certain the administration will attack Iran.

Podhoretz excitedly talks himself into a beautiful web of words, vindicating his every position. He fumes at Buckley, George Will and the other apostate conservatives who refuse to see sense. He announces victory. And for a moment, here in the Mexican breeze, it is as though a thousand miles away Baghdad is not bleeding. He starts hacking and coughing painfully. I offer to go to the ship infirmary and get him some throat sweets, and – locked in eternal fighter-mode – he looks thrown, as though this is an especially cunning punch. Is this random act of kindness designed to imbalance him? " I'm fine," he says, glancing contemptuously at the Bill Buckley book I am carrying. "I'll keep on shouting through the soreness."

III. The Ghosts of Conservatism Past

The ghosts of Conservatism past are wandering this ship. From the pool, I see John O'Sullivan, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher. And one morning on the deck I discover Kenneth Starr, looking like he has stepped out of a long-forgotten 1990s news bulletin waving Monica's stained blue dress. His face is round and unlined, like an immense, contented baby. As I stare at him, all my repressed bewilderment rises, and I ask – Mr Starr, do you feel ashamed that, as Osama bin Laden plotted to murder American citizens, you brought the American government to a stand-still over a few consensual blow jobs? Do you ever lie awake at night wondering if a few more memos on national security would have reached the President's desk if he wasn't spending half his time dealing with your sexual McCarthyism?

He smiles through his teeth and – in his soft somnambulant voice – says in perfect legalese, "I am entirely at rest with the process. The House of Representatives worked its will, the Senate worked its will, the Chief Justice of the United States presided. The constitutional process worked admirably."

It's an oddly meek defence, and the more I challenge him, the more legalistic he becomes. Every answer is a variant on "it's not my fault" . First, he says Clinton should have settled early on in Jones vs Clinton. Then he blames Jimmy Carter. "This critique really should be addressed to the now-departed, moribund independent counsel provisions. The Ethics and Government [provisions] ushered in during President Carter's administration has an extraordinarily low threshold for launching a special prosecutor..."

Enough – I see another, more intriguing ghost. Ward Connerly is the only black person in the National Review posse, a 67-year-old Louisiana-born businessman, best known for leading conservative campaigns against affirmative action for black people. Earlier, I heard him saying the Republican Party has been "too preoccupied with... not ticking off the blacks", and a cooing white couple wandered away smiling, "If he can say it, we can say it." What must it be like to be a black man shilling for a magazine that declared at the height of the civil rights movement that black people "tend to revert to savagery", and should be given the vote only "when they stop eating each other"?

I drag him into the bar, where he declines alcohol. He tells me plainly about his childhood – his mother died when he was four, and he was raised by his grandparents – but he never really becomes animated until I ask him if it is true he once said, "If the KKK supports equal rights, then God bless them." He leans forward, his palms open. There are, he says, " those who condemn the Klan based on their past without seeing the human side of it, because they don't want to be in the wrong, politically correct camp, you know... Members of the Ku Klux Klan are human beings, American citizens – they go to a place to eat, nobody asks them 'Are you a Klansmember?', before we serve you here. They go to buy groceries, nobody asks, 'Are you a Klansmember?' They go to vote for Governor, nobody asks 'Do you know that that person is a Klansmember?' Only in the context of race do they ask that. And I'm supposed to instantly say, 'Oh my God, they are Klansmen? Geez, I don't want their support.'"

This empathy for Klansmen first bubbled into the public domain this year when Connerly was leading an anti-affirmative action campaign in Michigan. The KKK came out in support of him – and he didn't decline it. I ask if he really thinks it is possible the KKK made this move because they have become converted to the cause of racial equality. "I think that the reasoning that a Klan member goes through is – blacks are getting benefits that I'm not getting. It's reverse discrimination. To me it's all discrimination. But the Klansmen is going through the reasoning that this is benefiting blacks, they are getting things that I don't get... A white man doesn't have a chance in this country."

He becomes incredibly impassioned imagining how they feel, ventriloquising them with a shaking fist – "The Mexicans are getting these benefits, the coloureds or niggers, whatever they are saying, are getting these benefits, and I as a white man am losing my country."

But when I ask him to empathise with the black victims of Hurricane Katrina, he offers none of this vim. No, all Katrina showed was "the dysfunctionality that is evident in many black neighbourhoods," he says flatly, and that has to be "tackled by black people, not the government. " Ward, do you ever worry you are siding with people who would have denied you a vote – or would hang you by a rope from a tree?

"I don't gather strength from what others think – no at all," he says. "Whether they are in favour or opposed. I can walk down these halls and, say, a hundred people say, 'Oh we just adore you', and I'll be polite and I'll say 'thank you', but it doesn't register or have any effect on me." There is a gaggle of Reviewers waiting to tell him how refreshing it is to "finally" hear a black person "speaking like this". I leave him to their white, white garlands.

IV. "You're going to get fascists rising up, aren't you? Why hasn't that happened already?"

The nautical counter-revolution has docked in the perfectly-yellow sands of Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, and the Reviewers are clambering overboard into the Latino world they want to wall off behind a thousand-mile fence. They carry notebooks from the scribblings they made during the seminar teaching them "How To Shop in Mexico". Over breakfast, I forgot myself and said I was considering setting out to find a local street kid who would show me round the barrios – the real Mexico. They gaped. "Do you want to die?" one asked.

The Reviewers confine their Mexican jaunt to covered markets and walled-off private fortresses like the private Nikki Beach. Here, as ever, they want Mexico to be a dispenser of cheap consumer goods and lush sands – not a place populated by (uck) Mexicans. Dinesh D'Souza announced as we entered Mexican seas what he calls "D'Souza's law of immigration": " The quality of an immigrant is inversely proportional to the distance travelled to get to the United States."

In other words: Latinos suck.

I return for dinner with my special National Review guest: Kate O'Beirne. She's an impossibly tall blonde with the voice of a 1930s screwball star and the arguments of a 1890s Victorian patriarch. She inveighs against feminism and "women who make the world worse" in quick quips.

As I enter the onboard restaurant she is sitting among adoring Reviewers with her husband Jim, who announces that he is Donald Rumsfeld's personnel director. "People keep asking what I'm doing here, with him being fired and all," he says. "But the cruise has been arranged for a long time."

The familiar routine of the dinners – first the getting-to-know-you chit-chat, then some light conversational fascism – is accelerating. Tonight there is explicit praise for a fascist dictator before the entree has arrived. I drop into the conversation the news that there are moves in Germany to have Donald Rumsfeld extradited to face torture charges.

A red-faced man who looks like an egg with a moustache glued on grumbles, " If the Germans think they can take responsibility for the world, I don't care about German courts. Bomb them." I begin to witter on about the Pinochet precedent, and Kate snaps, "Treating Don Rumsfeld like Pinochet is disgusting." Egg Man pounds his fist on the table: " Treating Pinochet like that is disgusting. Pinochet is a hero. He saved Chile."

"Exactly," adds Jim. "And he privatised social security."

The table nods solemnly and then they march into the conversation – the billion-strong swarm of swarthy Muslims who are poised to take over the world. Jim leans forward and says, "When I see these football supporters from England, I think – these guys aren't going to be told by PC elites to be nice to Muslims. You're going to get fascists rising up, aren't you? Why isn't that happening already?" Before I can answer, he is conquering the Middle East from his table, from behind a crème brûlée.

"The civilised countries should invade all the oil-owning places in the Middle East and run them properly. We won't take the money ourselves, but we'll manage it so the money isn't going to terrorists."

The idea that Europe is being "taken over" by Muslims is the unifying theme of this cruise. Some people go on singles cruises. Some go on ballroom dancing cruises. This is the "The Muslims Are Coming" cruise – drinks included. Because everyone thinks it. Everyone knows it. Everyone dreams it. And the man responsible is sitting only a few tables down: Mark Steyn.

He is wearing sunglasses on top of his head and a bright, bright shirt that fits the image of the disk jockey he once was. Sitting in this sea of grey, it has an odd effect – he looks like a pimp inexplicably hanging out with the apostles of colostomy conservatism.

Steyn's thesis in his new book, America Alone, is simple: The "European races" i.e., white people – "are too self-absorbed to breed," but the Muslims are multiplying quickly. The inevitable result will be " large-scale evacuation operations circa 2015" as Europe is ceded to al Qaeda and "Greater France remorselessly evolve[s] into Greater Bosnia."

He offers a light smearing of dubious demographic figures – he needs to turn 20 million European Muslims into more than 150 million in nine years, which is a lot of humping.

But facts, figures, and doubt are not on the itinerary of this cruise. With one or two exceptions, the passengers discuss "the Muslims" as a homogenous, sharia-seeking block – already with near-total control of Europe. Over the week, I am asked nine times – I counted – when I am fleeing Europe's encroaching Muslim population for the safety of the United States of America.

At one of the seminars, a panelist says anti-Americanism comes from both directions in a grasping pincer movement – "The Muslims condemn us for being decadent; the Europeans condemn us for not being decadent enough." Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz's wife, yells, "The Muslims are right, the Europeans are wrong!" And, instantly, Jay Nordlinger, National Review's managing editor and the panel's chair, says, " I'm afraid a lot of the Europeans are Muslim, Midge."

The audience cheers. Somebody shouts, "You tell 'em, Jay!" He tells 'em. Decter tells 'em. Steyn tells 'em.

On this cruise, everyone tells 'em – and, thanks to my European passport, tells me.

V. From cruise to cruise missiles?

I am back in the docks of San Diego watching these tireless champions of the overdog filter past and say their starchy, formal goodbyes. As Bernard Lewis disappears onto the horizon, I wonder about the connections between this cruise and the cruise missiles fired half a world away.

I spot the old lady from the sea looking for her suitcase, and stop to tell her I may have found a solution to her political worries about both Muslims and stem-cells.

"Couldn't they just do experiments on Muslim stem-cells?" I ask. " Hey – that's a great idea!" she laughs, and vanishes. Hillary-Ann stops to say she is definitely going on the next National Review cruise, to Alaska. "Perfect!" I yell, finally losing my mind.

"You can drill it as you go!" She puts her arms around me and says very sweetly, "We need you on every cruise."

As I turn my back on the ship for the last time, the Judge I met on my first night places his arm affectionately on my shoulder. "We have written off Britain to the Muslims," he says. "Come to America."

There are many things you expect to find in the cratered, cramped heart of Gaza City, but a group of proto-Germaine Greers and Betty Friedans would be low on the list. Yet, I am sitting under a lush green tree with a group of tough old ladies at the heart of the feminist hub they have built here - and where hundreds of Gazan women are flocking to find freedom.

In 1989, the women's rights campaigner Um Ahmad returned to her native Gaza after decades working for women's groups across the world. "I was determined to do something about the fact that women were in a much worse position here than even in other Arab countries," she says.

She found that Palestinian women were trapped between the savage Israeli occupation and a suffocatingly patriarchal Palestinian society. She knew there was only one way to free them - by getting them jobs and hard earning power.

Her proposal to establish an organisation providing jobs for women was refused by the Israeli occupying authorities, but Ms Ahmad refused to let this stop her. Risking interrogation and imprisonment, she went ahead and set up a network for women to make jams and foods in their homes and to sell them on. In Gaza, the Women's Institute was revolutionary, and jam-making an act of subversion.

After four years, Ms Ahmad's organisation was finally legalised. Today - thanks to the Welfare Association, one of the three charities being supported in this year's Independent Christmas Appeal - it has a permanent base.

She is sitting with me in the courtyard, watching women sip coffee and read print-outs from the internet terminals here. If you shut out the endless car-horns - the tinnitus of the most congested land-mass in the world - and the simulated explosions of the Israeli sonic booms, this is as close to tranquil as Gaza City gets.

"Women are suffering most from the occupation and economic collapse," she explains. "When the husband is out of work and at home all the time, he starts picking on his wife. For a lot of men, being unemployed and humiliated by the Israelis makes them show they are still in control somewhere - over their wives and children. Often violence breaks out."

Ms Ahmad's priority was to give women a chance to earn money and achieve independence. That is why she set up a women-only, non-profit clothing factory, and today as she walks along its floor with me, the 30 women are engaging in the usual factory-floor banter. They all have a story of how this centre changed their lives. Leila is a 40-year-old sewing machinist, and as she steps away from her machine she explains: "I used to live on food and money subsidies from a local charity. I was stuck at home, staring at the walls and thinking 'What am I doing with my life?'

"Then a charity worker told me I was intelligent and I could be a producer, not just a passive recipient - and he put me in touch with this charity. Now I support my husband and my seven children." She laughs with a mixture of surprise and glee. "I am convinced that sitting at home waiting for donations is bad. Going out, fulfilling yourself, being independent - that is good. I want all women to be able to do this."

Fatima is a bubbly 18-year-old who works on the knitting machines. She has always wanted to be a teacher of deaf children, but her parents could not afford to send her to university - so she is paying her own way as a student while working. "It's an amazing feeling, to be able to stand on your own feet: to be an independent woman," she says.

The Welfare Association helps to pay for these women to make school uniforms for the poverty-wracked children, and to maintain a bakery. Ms Ahmad says: "The most noticeable thing is that when women first join our society, they don't speak a lot. They are silent, because that's how they have been taught to be. But after a while they start to express their views, and soon they are drawn out of their silence. They want to browse the internet, see the world out there. It's like a person who has been locked in a room; then you offer them a window and they want to see more and more."

Ms Ahmad wants to open more windows - but she needs your money to do it. "When you help a Palestinian woman, you help all her children," she says. "When you free a Palestinian woman, you help to free Palestine."

The selling of Sharon as a dove is setting up the Palestinians for another fall.

It would make a beautiful biopic: The blood-splattered old general, in his 77th year, discovers the cause of peace. The movie opens with a young Ariel Sharon leading Unit 101 — a notorious Israeli death squad that was sent into Palestinian villages to burn houses and terrorize civilians in raw attacks. Cut to Sharon 50 years later, sitting over a plate of gefilte fish with Abu Mazen, the elected Palestinian leader, haggling over he status of east Jerusalem as grandchildren play at his feet.

This story is so intoxicating that many Israelis — desperate for an end to the grinding war of attrition that has haunted the country since its creation — have convinced themselves it must be true. Look at the changes Sharon is bringing, they say: He has now dismantled two big settlement blocs in his career — Sinai in 1982 and Gaza in 2005. He has torched the Israeli political landscape by quitting his own right-wing party, Likud, and formed a new center party for peace. His people are briefing the Israeli press that they want a binding peace treaty and the creation of a Palestinian state in Sharon’s third term. So is it time to clear the Israeli film studios and start casting the movie?

The facts, alas, do not back up this fantasy. Ariel Sharon has dedicated his career to destroying any sort of peace negotiations and to denying the Palestinians a viable state. Far from representing a Damascene conversion, his statements reveal the underlying continuity of his plans.

Just a year ago, Sharon said he accepts the road map because “first and foremost, it does not demand a return to the 1967 borders; it allows Israel permanently to keep large settlement blocks which have high Israeli populations; and [it entrenches] the total refusal of allowing Palestinian refugees to return to Israel.” Yesterday his top political strategist, Eyal Arad, said that the idea of swapping land for peace was “false philosophically, and naive politically,” and insisted Sharon would never lead his new party to a return to the Green Line. You can’t say they didn’t warn us.

In reality, what Sharon means by “peace” and a “Palestinian state” is so withered and weak that the Palestinians can never accept it. He is proposing — as a nonnegotiable starting point to talks — to annex much of the West Bank, one of the few remaining scraps of land inhabited by the Palestinians. Today only 22 percent of historical Palestine is designated for its Arab inhabitants, and this is too much for Sharon: he will append even more to Israel by force and seal it off with an iron wall. All that will remain on the other side is a Palestinian statelet consisting of the scrag-end of the West Bank and isolated Gaza. Three decades ago, Sharon said the way to control the Palestinians was to “salami slice” their land, separating them from each other and surrounding them with armed Israeli settlers. That is precisely what he is proposing today.

Even to get to the miserable position where this offer is made, the Palestinian leader Abu Mazen has to do the impossible and dismantle “all terrorist organizations” operating on his soil. This is hard when almost all your police stations have been demolished or blown up. And it is harder still for Abu Mazen to persuade a people living under vicious occupation that they should pre-emptively hand over all their weapons, on the off-chance that Sharon is now suddenly interested in peace after all these years of killing them.

Yet most of the world is ignoring Sharon’s explicit statements and buying the rhetoric of Sharon as centrist peacemaker. Partly, this is because the genuine shift that occurred in Sharon’s political thought has been poorly understood. He has genuinely moved — but only a few inches. He used to believe in a Greater Israel stretching from the river to the sea, populated by new waves of pioneering Jewish settlers like his parents. He was the champion of these settlers in the Knesset, allocating huge funds for them to build homes on Palestinian land.

But then — some time earlier this decade — he began to understand that this bloated Israel was resting on a demographic time bomb. Because Palestinians have far more children than Jews, within 20 years Israel was set to become an apartheid state presiding over an Arab majority. This is unthinkable — so Sharon had to claw back Israel’s borders to accommodate a firmer Jewish majority. His advisor Dov Weisglass explained that Sharon gave up as little as possible to the Palestinians, shedding Gaza — “which is of no strategic importance” — precisely so he could retain control of the choicest morsels of the West Bank. “The settlers should have been dancing around the prime minister’s office” in glee at this clever move, he said.

So here’s the reality: Sharon has shifted from believing in Greater Israel to believing in the greatest Israel compatible with a Jewish majority. This is enough to enrage the crazies in Likud, but it is hardly a conversion to the cause of peace. It is not likely to end in a Palestinian state that even moderates like Abu Mazen can settle for. That’s why I am extremely nervous about the pre-emptive selling of Sharon as a dove: It is setting up the Palestinians up for another fall.

There is now a real danger that Sharon will be elected on a “peace” landslide, sweep up to Abu Mazen with a derisory, dangerous offer and be rejected. (If Abu Mazen gives in to American pressure to accept a lousy deal, there is a risk of triggering a third Intifada among an outraged population.) Cue the accusations once again that the Palestinians have inexplicably rejected Israel’s “generous offer” (copyright Ehud Barak), when in fact they have merely been offered a cheap Tesco Own Brand peace they could never accept.

I hope I am wrong. I hope Sharon has — in his late seventies — undergone a much larger change of heart than is revealed in his words and actions.

But everybody who has put their trust into Sharon seems to have been cruelly disappointed. Levi Eshkol — the Israeli prime minister during the 1967 war — trusted the general, only to find out years later that Sharon had suggested mounting an anti-democratic military coup against him.

Menachem Begin — the first Likud prime minister — trusted Sharon in 1982 when, as minister of defense, he led the country into an invasion of Lebanon he claimed would last a matter of weeks. Israeli troops remained for 18 years, and Begin retired into near-seclusion, believing Sharon had deliberately deceived him. Sharon’s own soldiers trusted him, until he was found by the Israeli Knesset’s own investigation to be indirectly responsible for the 9/11-sized massacre of over 2,000 innocent Lebanese civilians.

If you were a Palestinian or an Israeli peace activist, would you trust in this half-offer of a half-state?

All my life, the images of the occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have flickered on television screens in the corner of my living room, mostly unwatched and unnoticed. Like most people, I guess, I can't remember a time when I honestly felt shocked by them, even when they showed some nameless, bullet-pierced child. They have always seemed, I'm ashamed to say, a bit like the weather forecast: predictable, dull, a cue to zap to another channel. So when this week, for the first time, I visited the Occupied Territories - no, to hell with the angry e-mailers, Palestine - I didn't expect to feel like I had been kicked in the stomach by the Israeli Defence Force.

Even though I had piously written in defence of a Palestinian state alongside Israel and against the settlers, I had long ago turned the Palestinian people in my mind into faceless lumps of suffering putty, an amorphous, bleeding blob on which to confer occasional pity. So as I was driven towards the huge, snaking queue of battered cars that waits tetchily in front of the Qalandia road-block, the first thing I noticed - stupid, I know - was how familiar they looked. There is an old lady being pushed in a wheelchair past our car along a bumpy dust-track. The Israeli soldiers leave the sick waiting for so long at the checkpoints in hot ambulances that have no air conditioning that the doctors have no choice but to simply carry, push or drag them to the nearest medical centre. She looks, it strikes me suddenly, quite a lot like my granny.

These road-blocks and these queues pock and slice the Palestinian lands, dividing families - most Palestinians are forbidden to move between areas - and crushing the local economy; each one of them is full of people who look like your friends and mine. It suddenly seemed obvious, waiting in that hellish queue, that on some subconscious level, even as I nodded along to my Edward Said essays and Amos Oz novels, I had never really thought about the Palestinians as individuals who cry and who laugh, like we do. I know that all but my most liberal Israeli friends cannot afford to think of them in that way.

In the sitcom Drop the Dead Donkey, the war correspondent Damien would invariably file an image of a blood-stained teddy-bear lying in a gutter - a guaranteed tear-jerker. I knew I shouldn't have visited any of the 103 summer camps across the Occupied Territories run by the Palestinian Medical Relief Committee for fear of doing a Damien. And yet...

As a little five-year-old girl throws a big green ball at my head before scampering away mischievously, Nasif Aldech, the director of the centre I visit, explains, "It's not a rare thing for one of the children here to be seriously traumatised - it's the norm. They are often extremely stressed, extremely angry. They have seen their families harassed, their homes raided, and they have lived through lockdowns that can last weeks, where they are effectively imprisoned in their own homes. Most of our 10-year-olds are bed-wetters. I have one kid who saw his father being assassinated. About 5 per cent of the children are disabled as a result of Israeli actions."

And, as the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees found last year, 22 per cent of Palestinian children are suffering from malnutrition. If I deliberately wanted to create suicide bombers, I would raise children in this way.

There are, undeniably, two peoples who have legitimate claims to this tiny patch of land, this Israel, this Palestine, and neither one is going to leave. So I ask what these children - who will forever live alongside Israelis - what they think when they hear the word "Israel". "Terrorists!" one girl calls. "The only Israeli goal is to send us all away from here and claim Palestine for themselves," says her little friend. I ask their names. "No, I will not say. I do not want to go to prison." She will reveal that she is 12 years old.

Some of my Israeli friends will take this as regrettable evidence that the Palestinians are inherently rejectionist; that they need to be fenced away or they will destroy all of Israel. I understand their fears. Another little girl, Maram, would confirm their every anxiety: "All Israelis have weapons. There are no innocent Israelis... Peace will only happen when the Jews go back where they came from," she says in a thin, reedy voice. But, frightening though her sentiments are, the only Israelis Maram has ever met are soldiers and settlers - what is she supposed to think?

There is a possibility - perhaps slim - that a generation of children growing up in a secure, peaceful Palestinian state will come in time to meet and like their Israeli neighbours. In contrast, it is a certainty that every child growing up under Israeli occupation will grow a violent hatred of Israel, just as surely as they grow hair and teeth. I would not be surprised to see Maram's picture on that long-ignored flickering TV screen in five years' time, in a CNN report explaining that she has blown herself up in Tel Aviv.

Why have Israeli governments for 35 years chosen a route that is doomed to failure? This occupation is not only evil, it is insane; and if the road-map ends up going the same way as the Oslo peace process and fails to create a Palestinian state, then there will be a thousand more Marams in the generations to come.

Source: The Independent