This march is about Iraq, not Palestine

"You can't make sense of this," one of the many perplexed characters announced towards the end of last week's teleplay about the Messiah dropping in on Manchester. "No one can."

Full marks for candour.

I wasn't watching myself. Someone else attends to telly matters in our house. She surfs the channels, I taste the wine. Thus do we divide the domestic chores. But this unexpected confession of bafflement brought me up from the cellar. In a world of polarised certainties – no war in my name, and no peace in yours – it was good to be reminded that there's a third position.

We march, anyway, whether we are making sense of it or not. By "we" I mean humanity, since nearly all of it, we're promised, will be on the move this weekend. I won't be marching. Call me fastidious, but I've never liked the intellectual chaos of protest culture – marching to stop one war while your neighbour is marching to stop another, confusing foxes with persons, assuming that there is a daisy chain of ideologically sound causes, all with the same cast of heroes and villains. Today, for example, if I march to stop a war against Iraq, I will also be censuring Israel, and though I think there is much to censure Israel for, I think there is much to censure other parties to that conflict for as well. Too vexed for banners, the question of Palestine – as are most questions. Nor do I think the one issue has anything, except in the matter of manipulated perception, to do with the other.

Which is precisely, Andrew Murray, the chair of the Stop the War Coalition, is going to tell me, where I am mistaken. Though he calls "Justice for Palestine" a "secondary slogan" to "Don't Attack Iraq", the two issues, he says, "are inextricably linked".

Inextricably? As in incapable of being disentangled? As in too elaborate ever to untie? As in so intricate and labyrinthine that no exit can be discovered? We cannot under any circumstances understand or avoid war with Iraq unless we take what the Stop the War Coalition considers to be the right side in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict – is that what Andrew Murray means?

Here is rigorousness of historical thinking indeed! Here is effect in the most pitiless pursuit of cause. But shouldn't we equally insist, so as not to lose any of this ratiocinative momentum, that some among the Stop the War Coalition also carry banners remembering the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds, chant slogans against the evils of dictatorship, call for the resumption of parliamentary democracy, and otherwise draw attention to human rights abuses in Iraq? Rail against Israel if you must, but aren't Saddam's links to the fate of Iraq a little closer – let alone a little more inextricable – than Sharon's?

It is a stern taskmaster, inextricableness. Would Andrew Murray have it that I and people like me, who are unable to agree with him about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, cannot possibly agree with him about Iraq? By the logic of his "inextricably", this must follow. For you cannot be a bit inextricable. You cannot pick and choose which parts of which knot you would like to be bound by.

Attach yourself to the daisy chain and you lose the right to choose; someone else has already done your choosing for you.

Just how compromised you can find yourself, when you march to inextricabilities which have been fashioned elsewhere, was demonstrated embarrassingly last week when the Evening Standard columnist AN Wilson recommended to his readers' attention a book by Michael Hoffman, the prominent white supremacist and Holocaust denier – author of a comic book entitled Tales of the Holohoax, among other works of undisguised ill-intention.

So that readers should experience no difficulty laying hands on Hoffman's book, Wilson considerately included in his column an address from which it could be ordered. In mitigation of which act of incendiarism, the Evening Standard took the unusual but wise step of printing an apology in its leader column, explaining that Wilson had not realised the status of the writer about whom he had enthused. Which can only mean, considering the openness of Hoffman's virulence, that Wilson had either not read him or can't read.

Let Wilson himself decide, when night falls, which is the greater offence, which the deeper shame. Both, anyway, point in the same direction – to Wilson's need to join the ranks of the like-minded at all costs, to dance daisy-chained in the circle of the righteous, to prove his peace credentials by speaking incontinently of Israel, whatever the source of his information.

Given that the subject of the book which Wilson endorses so unreservedly is Jewish falsification of its own history, there are reasons to ask Wilson himself for an apology. So far I have determinedly resisted believing that those who hate Israel must hate Jews. Faced with examples of this kind, there are those who would be tempted to think along the lines of Andrew Murray and to wonder whether the two are not "inextricably linked".

It's a connection I would still prefer not to make. One thing is not another thing. I, too, accept that no man is an island, and go along with everyone's favourite meditation on human interrelatedness – John Donne's devotional "never send to know for whom the bell tolls, etc"; but a little separation every now and then honours us no less. "There is no perplexity in thee, my God," Donne wrote in another Devotion; "no inextricableness in thee, my light and my clearness... that directest me as well in the night of adversity and fear, as in my day of prosperity and confidence."

A touch too devotional maybe, even as devotions go, for an age with no appetite for theology. But this is also an age of adversity and fear, and an end to the ideology of inextricableness – everything I hate driving everything else I hate – might help. Unless we just like being lost in the labyrinth.