I've told you many times that Tel Aviv is the most happening city in the West, save possibly Barcelona. Maybe I'm wrong. But it's just possible that I could be right, despite the fact that the press almost never covers the lively part of TA life. In any event, along with Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, Madonna has arrived for a Kabbalah conference which begins today. (The second day of Rosh Hashanah is only observed in the Diaspora.) Already there is dancing and singing in the streets. Yes, and the kind of dancing and singing that needles the Arabs. Not deliberately, to be sure. But since Palestinians live abutting a much freer culture but within a repressive one, the young among them, many young men especially, fill with resentment. Still, it's much easier to turn your resentment against the other than against your own. I thought of this when I read Steve Erlanger's New York Times piece on the young scavengers in the West Bank. It is a sad life they lead, to be sure. But it is a life, alas, very much like lives led by young Arab and Muslim boys all over their orbit. Reading Erlanger you would think that this situation was determined by Israel and, if it weren't for the conflict, these boys would be on their way to being nuclear physicists. I don't mean to be hard-hearted, really not. And certainly not during these days of penitence and reflection. Still, if people want a society of their own they'd better build it and not make war on their neighbors. After all, Israel cannot possibly be responsible for the fact, as detailed in the U.N. Report on Arab Development, that more English books are translated into Spanish in one year than have been translated into Arabic since the invention of the printing press.