Monday night I met my friends Adi, Shira and Yoav for drinks at Evita, a new gay bar in Tel Aviv. Despite its mildly cheesy name, Evita is a seriously cool place. The owners obviously put a lot of thought and effort into the details: the result is sleek, ultra-modern but warm and inviting decor, good music that is not too loud to prevent conversation, friendly but detached service and very good food to go with the drinks. There's even a ventilation system that sucks up most of the cigarette smoke, which was a must in New York - before smoking in public places was banned - but is still pretty unusual in Israel; for a change, my eyes didn't start to tear up after the first half-hour. Unlike gay bars in New York, Evita did not feel like a pick-up joint. Most of the guys came in couples or small groups, and seemed to be there for the simple pleasure of drinks and food in a congenial environment.

Shira and I arrived at the unfashionably early hour of 10 P.M., when the place was still quite empty. We wanted to enjoy a drink and chat with Adi and Yoav, who both work at Evita, before their shift started. Yoav is a teaching assistant and full-time student at Tel Aviv University's law school; he's also an actor who graduated from Beit Zvi, Israel's most prestigious acting school. Adi writes a regular sex column for an Israeli women's magazine; she also spends a lot of time chasing freelance writing jobs for any Israeli publication that's interested in paying.

I include these little details to illustrate just how difficult it is to make ends meet in this country. Salaries are ridiculously low, so many uber-talented people like Adi and Yoav can't rely on their earnings from a single job to make ends meet. For awhile, before the hi-tech bubble burst nearly simultaneously with the outbreak of the second intifida, there was an atmosphere of money to burn; today, most of my friends (including this blogger) are earning about 50% of the salaries they could command from the late 1990s through the end of 2000. Prices, however, remain high - for everything.

But even though a lot of people are broke and/or struggling, places of entertainment are full. My old friend A., whom I've known since we were students in New York, is a native-born Israeli who is currently visiting the country for the first time in many years. On his first night back we had dinner at Louisa, a cafe on Basel Square; at one point he sat back, surveyed the bustling outdoor cafe and the many people walking the streets, and said, "Look at all these people! It's a weeknight, it's past 11 P.M., and the place is full. In the States, the restaurants are the first to suffer in an economic downturn." And it's true: having a good time is really important in Israel, and I guess a lot of people would rather go out with friends than buy a new rug for the livingroom floor.

So back to the other night... The four of us were drinking beer and sharing goose liver pate (which we jokingly called "feta", because pate and feta are spelled the same in Hebrew), and having a Sex and the City moment: there was Yoav the gay actor/law student/waiter; Adi the sex columnist; and me and Shira, who work for the same newspaper. Of course our conversation got a bit - er - randy (shall we say). Shira kept interrupting to ask Yoav if there were any straight guys at the bar (one: the bartender), and I kept telling her to relax and enjoy not having to fend off the neanderthals for a change. Our vow to make it an early night was quickly forgotten, especially after the bartender started sending over free drinks. Since my definition of a lot to drink is the average Brit's idea of pre-dinner cocktails, by the time we left - a little after midnight - I was practically staggering. Note to self: perhaps alcohol and pate are not the best things to ingest following a two-week ayurvedic cleansing diet of rice, lentils and vegetables.

So what's the point of this seemingly pointless story? The point is, when I got home I read the article in the Guardian that Imshin linked to and commented on, I thought about my enjoyable evening out with friends in Tel Aviv, and concluded that the journalist who wrote this article is a really good example of a hopelessly provincial hack. Because he chose Lansky, one of the ickiest, tackiest pick-up bars in Tel Aviv, to hang out at; because he writes that the Hebrew word for celebration is hagigat, when in fact it is hagiga; and because he couldn't even spell the URL for Layla, a website about Tel Aviv nightlife, correctly. And because he's a lazy, lazy journalist: he makes no attempt to go for nuance, and he totally overreaches in making this tenous connection between "the situation" and the natural human desire to have a good time.

All of my friends are politically aware, and some of them are political activists. But none of them says, "Good God, the misery of the Palestinian people is too much to bear. I simply must go out and get drunk in order to forget the horrors of this awful world."

We are all aware of our reality, and many of us try to make it a better reality, but mostly we just live our lives. To imply that this is callous is as ridiculous as saying that New Yorkers who live in nice apartments and eat at good restaurants are ipso facto indifferent to the thousands of homeless people on the streets.