For a while I've found the extent to which the most unlikely figures speak out against the Iraq war inspiring, but also slightly disconcerting. I accepted Jimmy Hill, and Burt Bacharach and Joanna Lumley and Eminem. Then I saw an interview in my local paper with Leo Sayer to advertise his show at the Fairfield Halls, and in the middle of a question about his seventies perm he informed us that George Bush was a war criminal. This was now like a puzzling dream, where you wake up gibbering to your partner that you were in a canoe with Eddie Large who was yelling "I can't sell my gooseberries because of that bloody illegal occupation." Would we get as far as Roger Whittaker releasing an album called 'Whistle Against the War' with Des o'Connor in the background reading extracts from Robin Cook's resignation speech. Even more remarkably, while I was driving to do a show at the Tolpuddle Martyrs Trade Union Festival in Dorset, I was listening to the Test Match commentary. And Jonathon Agnew was complaining that the security had been so tight it took him an hour to get into the ground. So out of nowhere came Geoffrey Boycott, who sneered "We've Tony Blair to thank for that."

"I'm sorry Geoffrey," said Agnew, with a hint of "WILL you keep quiet" but Boycott asserted "Tony Blair's to blame for that. He was told if we went to war with Iraq it would increase the risk of terrorism but he wouldn't take any notice."

"Well," said Agnew, "I think it's the terrorists to blame really," mumbling as if he had a dozen producers yelling into his earpiece "SHUT HIM UP - distract him by suggesting he was weak against left-arm spinners or something."

But Boycott held firm, which was how British radio broadcast for surely the first time ever the sentence "We should never have invaded Iraq in the first place that's pushed out gently on the off side and there's no run."

I've suggested before that the Labour Party, supposedly a party of the left, now finds itself on the defining issue of our times militantly to the right of Jimmy Hill, two ex-Presidents of America, Joanna Lumley, Zoe Ball, the ex-President of France, ninety per cent of Spain, Chris Eubank, Brigadier Hewitt, almost every living Arab, Burt Bacharach, the Liberal Democrats, Leo Sayer and the Pope. But who amongst us, even the most poisonously cynical, believed on that day when Labour were elected in 1997, that this government would end up being chastised as too right-wing, pro-war and up America's arse on Test Match fucking Special. 

Do things like this happen to other people? To me they seem normal, but I'm often told they're not.

A few days ago I left my phone charger round someone's house, so it was posted back to me. But the postman delivered it at a point in the morning when I was out, so when I got back it was jammed into the letter box, in a parcel. I pushed it one way, then the other, then ripped off the package so only the charger was left, utterly immovable, impervious to any shoving at all. So I tried whacking it out with my cricket bat, but the bat was too big to swing in the area behind the door. Then I remembered my daughter had been given these kiddies' golf clubs, kiddie size but proper metal ones, as if they were designed for blasting phone chargers that were wedged in letter boxes.

So I chose my club carefully, and could almost hear a commentator mumbling "Ooooo he's going for the putter - brave choice." Then I stood by the front door ferociously swinging this thing, but even on the occasions I connected perfectly with the charger it didn't budge at all (although the sports fanatic in me thought 'Hmm, I'm pleased with the way I timed that one').

There's a moment in a crisis like this one where you panic, and contemplate the consequences if the problem can't ever be solved. I could get a new charger, but what would I do with the door? How would I get any post? Was there a way this could go that would end up involving the fire brigade? Could it result in the whole street being condemned and all my neighbours being put up in temporary accommodation at a DSS hostel? So I went to the sorting office, where I know all the staff, and they all started laughing. Then someone got the manager and, being a manager, he only giggled politely. But he got a hammer and came to the house where the two of us bashed and shoved the bastard thing, occasionally getting excited because it squeaked a millimetre sideways. Passers-by were infuriatingly English, allowing themselves a puzzled glance, then marching on, perhaps assuming this was an experimental form of anger management called 'Letter box aggression therapy'.

After about half an hour it surrendered and popped out, probably because all the bashing had increased the size of the letter box by about three square miles. You feel such a moment of triumph in that sort of situation, you want to lie on your back and yell out an exhausted groan like Nadal after the winning point against Federer. "Here you are," said the manager nonchalantly as he handed me the liberated charger, and he gave me an "I don't know - honestly" look, as if it was MY fault. But maybe it was. Because perhaps things like that don't happen to anyone else. I don't know.

Still, I bet you won't get service like that if it's all privatised. Or there'll be a 'jammed charger hammer tariff', or you'll have to ring a call centre that goes "If the jammed object is perpendicular to the door frame press seven." 

Then a couple of nights ago I was walking home when two local postmen ran out of the pub they were in and yelled across the street "Here Mark, got anything stuck in your letter box mate. Haaaaa haaaaa." I almost felt like a celebrity.

There's never a way of saying this without sounding slightly pretentious, but I've just been in New York for a few days. And like every other time I've been there, it seemed the whole place was playing at being New York. As I came out of the airport's automatic doors onto the road, a shortish man of about forty, with an unnecessary moustache who looked like the teacher you had whose name you can't remember, began striding up and down past the queue for taxis screaming "What the FUCK is wrong with this fucking place - I was FIRST IN FUCKING LINE there," his suburban voice almost snapping as it failed to carry the ferocity he was trying to load onto it. "This place is full of FUCKING ASSHOLES," he told us, and a part of me thought he must be employed by the tourist board to greet visitors with the New York experience. He couldn't be real, any more than if you arrived in Tel Aviv and a bloke with a beard in the taxi queue started singing "If I were a rich man diddle iddle iddle um."

But while New York must be the loudest screamiest place in the world it's possibly also the friendliest. People yell at you because they're interested in you. They talk to your kids in the lift and make them feel important. On the subway, when my kids were squabbling, a black man in blue overalls told me in a deep voice "Hmmm, she annoys the hell out of her big brother right, and makes him mad, and there's times when he wishes she'd never been born. But if anyone laid a finger on her there ain't nothing he wouldn't do to protect her." So I returned his warmth with a smile, but a bit of me felt this must be Morgan Freeman practising at being a wise grandpa.

Because often in New York you find yourself thinking "Oh you don't really mean that." A twitchy woman with hair poking in several directions was talking manically to her friend in a diner, and I tuned in at "I'm telling you - he's a MARXIST. He's a black JFK." Then the waiter arrived. "Are YOU voting for Obama?" she asked. "No," mumbled the waiter, disinterested. "Then I'll let you take my order," she cackled, triumphant.

But they can't mean it. In the taxis there are screens showing adverts, and one of them is for a centre that organises yoga for dogs. That's to say yoga, but for fucking dogs. And there are these dogs, in this big hall, lying on their back and sitting in slightly odd positions as encouraged by their owners, who presumably are under the impression that the dog is clearing its mind of all the stress that's built up from being a dog in New York. So you half expect the next advert to be for insect insurance, with a reassuring voiceover asking "Do you worry about ants? In today's crazy world you never know when they might get injured and fall behind in the line carrying crumbs. Well now those worries are over." Or it will say "Do the stones in your garden seem lifeless? Then brighten them up with a massage. Our highly trained pebble masseurs specialise in de-knotting the clogged up anxiety that collects in a stone's 'antagonism zone'."

One morning I was watching one of the customary sugary pairs that front the news channels, when the woman said "And we'll be looking at the disastrous consequences that can follow some plastic surgery." Then came a clip of an interviewer leaning earnestly towards someone you couldn't see, and saying "So one morning you woke up with four breasts." Then back to the studio where the pair put on their distraught look, and one said "More on that shocking story later. But first here's Anthony with the sport."

So New York can't help but make you laugh. But that's tested if you try to go up the Statue of Liberty. In a rare attempt at prior organisation I booked up tickets in advance, which is the only way now that you can go up the statue, rather than just visit the island. But you still have to queue for about forty minutes at a security check before boarding the boat, as a series of officials in purple jackets yell at you - "REMOVE all watches, cell-phones, camera equipment and other electronic devices and PLACE THEM IN THE TRAYS PROVIDED, REMOVE belts, jackets and any metallic equipment..." and you wonder if you've joined the wrong queue and you're being shipped out to Alcatraz. Eventually you're searched, far more thoroughly than at an airport, and this entitles you to get on the boat. Then at the island you have to join another queue and do it all again, presumably in case someone's managed to get there without going through the first check, perhaps through a series of underground tunnels. But this time they're far more stringent, so the queue moves slower and the yelling is more ferocious. You daren't even turn your head away as they're likely to bark "DO YOU THINK THIS DOESN'T APPLY TO YOU, ASSHOLE, NOW GIVE ME TWENTY PRESS-UPS."

After about an hour you make it to where you have to deposit all your belongings in a locker, which you operate by placing two fingers on a machine that takes your prints, then giving it a dollar. Then there's another queue until you're ushered into a plastic doorway that looks like the thing that beams you up in Star Trek. Then you move one pace forward and an automated voice snaps "Air puffers ON." There's a wait of around two seconds, which is just long enough to ponder whether air puffers is a term that sounds so innocent but then so is waterboarding, then there's a big 'Whooosh whooosh' noise and a bloody great puff of air comes up from underneath and goes up your trouser leg as if it's the thing they used to make that scene with Marilyn Monroe.

By now it's clear there's nowhere in the Western world in which there's less liberty than at the Statue of Liberty. My son said "If immigrants still came here by boat they'd look across at all this as they were passing and shout 'Can we go to Canada instead'?"

And yet somehow it still seems funny. They CAN'T mean it. On the subway going back we must have had six friendly conversations. Then, in the clammy stifling bustle of several thousand people trying to get out of the station, everyone pressed against five other people like when you're leaving a massive rock gig, the woman in front yelled "Some ASSHOLE'S PUSHING me, well FUCK YOU." And I thought about the equivalent in London, which would be a disgruntled sneer of contempt and a muttered 'Do you mind', and realised the New York version was much more engaging, and it just made me laugh.

One of the most uneasy feelings you can experience is when someone claims to speak for a group you're a part of, and comes out with something excruciating. Someone you barely know might put an arm round you in a pub and yell "We South Londoners are the world's best at pulling chicks, aren't we Mark," and you're left muttering 'Well er oh blimey'.

As a member of the far left I would often be embarrassed by another member making a speech that included something like "Us revolutionary socialists want nothing less than to literally rip the heads off every living parasite of the bourgeousie and fling the rotting corpses to the dogs."

But nothing can compare to the experience of being a Jew who doesn't approve of the antics of Israel, or the ideology of Zionism. Because the great trick that Israel has accomplished over its sixty years has been to reach a point where it globally claims to stand for all Jews. To be against Israel is to be against Jews, so opponents of Israel's etiquette are derided as 'anti-semitic'. One snag resulting from this tactic is how to label the many Jews who vociferously oppose the antics of Israel, so the answer is they must be 'self-hating Jews'.

This is why it's such a liberation to read 'If I Am Not For Myself', the new book by Jewish socialist Mike Marqusee. It's a joyous meander through history, theory and personal memoir, that bounces from a section about the book of Amos in the Old Testament, (who turns out to be one cool multicultural prophet), to an account of his grandfather's journey from dedicated socialist to devout Zionist, then onto Mike's upbringing in New York, and his later experiences in London.

The memoir begins with a poignant account of Mike's introduction to the term 'self-hating Jew'. He was immensely proud of his father, not least because he'd travelled to Mississippi with the civil rights movement, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan were murdering white activists as well as blacks. But one day, at his Jewish Sunday school, there was a talk given by a lad who'd fought in the Israeli Army that had crushed the Egyptians in 1967. The language the soldier used to describe Arabs, referring to them as animals who used the street as their toilet and so on, reminded Mike of the drivel aimed at black people by racists. But when Mike mentioned the incident to his father, he got the reply "I think there's a bit of self-hatred in you there."

The account that follows performs the marvellous service of disentangling Jewishness from Israel. And that means countering an idea that many Jewish organisations repeat as an incontestable fact. For example, Mike quotes a new sabbath prayer added to the repertoire of the United Synagogue, that goes "Heavenly Father: Remember the Israel Defence Forces, send blessing and property upon all the work of their hands."

And yet this is an account that celebrates the Jewish traditions and mannerisms that formed his background, revelling in words like shtetl and yiddishkeit, while remaining forever inclusive. The accounts of the customs, the food, the language, and the arguments made me wish I'd been Jewish; maybe because in contrast to my own stifling semi-suburban upbringing everything in this New York Jewish environment seemed to matter.

But nothing mattered more than the fault-line of Zionism, the belief that Jewish safety was bound up with the security of a militaristic Israel, kept in place by the requirements of a militaristic America. Mike recalls how he learned about the holocaust, saying "The teacher explained in a quiet voice that the lesson of all this horror was that 'never again' should such a thing be allowed to happen. I assented with my whole being, it seemed the most undoubtedly truthful big truth I had ever heard.... Back then I thought it meant 'never again' to anyone, anywhere, not just never again to the Jews."

This is an account that aims higher than just to counter the defenders of Israel, it also seeks to explain how so many people, including many spirited opponents of injustice, somehow ended up accepting and justifying the horrors that Israel routinely carries out in the name of the world's Jews. It does however include the story of a friend's Jewish nephew who, when accused of being a self-hating Jew by a Zionist student, replied "I don't hate myself. I hate you, you fucking bastard."

A fleeting glance at recent events will illustrate that the state of Israel, and the Zionist cause that created it, have proved something of a nuisance to many Arabs. But this book displays a further consequence of the Jewish state; that by creating a notion that someone can only be properly Jewish if they align themselves to a nation that acts with such contempt for humanity, and that depends for its existence on the American establishment responsible for atrocities from Vietnam to Fallujah, Israel is also an insult to Jews.

'If I Am Not For Myself' by Mike Marqusee is published by Verso.