Last week, a group of pro-Palestinian activists met at "ArRum" in Clerkenwell. Sophia Desai, a lobbyist for Green Ribbon, the Muslim human rights organisation, welcomed me to "the Arab Groucho Club". The dinner guests waited somewhat anxiously for the arrival of Afif Safieh, the Palestine Liberation Organisation's UK delegate. The London Evening Standard had run disturbing reports of tanks rolling into civilian areas, and of ten more Palestinian deaths. Would Safieh turn up? Had he heard even worse reports and been called away?

The questions hung in the air and no one was really in the mood for talk-lite. I looked around the inner sanctum of Arab-London life. The bar and restaurant are marble-chic.

After half an hour, we were still waiting for Safieh to arrive. Waiters served strong coffee and exotic fruit cocktails. Talk turned to Afghanistan. "Have you seen the evidence against Bin Laden?" I was asked rhetorically by Bilal, the young internet entrepreneur. He specialises in "Arab information" sites and, along with Sophia, monitors the British press for untrue, unfavourable or biased reporting against Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians. It's a full-time job, by all accounts.

I felt unusually nervous at the prospect of meeting a PLO delegate. The media monitoring against prejudice seems entirely justified when you consider what most of us feel we "know" about the PLO and Palestinians. I ran through my mental list: a) according to Bush, the PLO is a terrorist organisation that maliciously and without provocation seeks out Jewish children to kill; b) the PLO is made up mostly of Muslim extremists; c) members are sometimes killed during (fully understandable and internationally condoned) attacks by Israeli forces. Er, that's it. No wonder I was biting my nails at the thought of sitting next to one of Arafat's trusted envoys.

Suddenly, Safieh bowled towards us. He was a small man in a very smart business suit, with the clean-cut looks of a US senator. He was mortified at being so late. "Sorry, sorry, sorry," he said over and over. Safieh lit a cigarette, despite the no-smoking rule. "My friend," he began when asked about the current situation, "my friend." It had clearly been a long day. Indeed, it seemed to me that, this evening, Safieh felt he had had a long life.

A third of his time is spent in various news studios trying to convince broadcasters that the PLO is not "to blame" for every death in the Middle East. On days when Hamas bombs city centres, he is torn in two. He is torn between the need to project his people's fury, and the anger he personally feels at having to justify the actions of terrorists he neither agrees with nor represents.

Now Safieh and Joseph Naijar, a Palestinian radical activist, became locked in a quarrel.

"The west doesn't give a shit about us." Joseph nodded my way, a small "sorry" for his language. "We are pawns to them and nothing more. Look at the human rights abuses we have suffered. Nothing has ever been done. Tell me, has 'diplomacy' ever, ever returned a single Palestinian to his home? No. Has 'diplomacy' even let you return home? No."

Afif Safieh explained that he had spent the day rushing between BBC studios, being called on "to defend those bloody idiots" who had killed 26 Israeli civilians in two suicide attacks. "I don't expect them [US or British politicians] to help our people out of some sense of kindness. Self-interest only will inspire America to help the Arabs."

The group agreed on one vital point: that the battle they face in the west is to get the Arabs' plight on to the front pages and to win equal column inches for Israeli state-authorised killings of Palestinians.

Safieh used a well-known phrase several times: "We are the Jews of the Jews. We are the unrecognised victims of the Holocaust."

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