"THEY" call them "the Sheinkin brigade'' and wonder how that defeated rag-tag unit is taking the bad news.

"They'' are people who have been savoring their fond fantasies of mass hara-kiri outside Cafe Tamar as the lean and lank-haired lefties, the liberals and the limp-wristed respond in despair to the election of Bibi Netanyahu and the dark forces of religious fundamentalism.

Yes, poor old Sheinkin Street has been getting it in the neck again as the living example to frighten the children of what dreamers and New Middle Easterners have done to this once proud and God-fearing etc., etc. nation.

Take Yosef Lapid this week, for example. "The Sheinkin brigade,'' he wrote, "the round-spectacle band, the Bohemians, the academics, the journalists, the Dedi Zuckers of this world'' are "panicky and offended'' because "democracy has let them down.''

Wow! All that vast variety of people one could idly spy this week on sunny Sheinkin Street - bikers, families, pony-tails, skate-boarders, kiddos, middle aged newspaper readers - can suddenly be classified by another Lapid catch-all - "the kings of the swamp?''

Is that somehow a reference to the swamps of antediluvian times where the mighty dinosaurs roamed? "Yep,'' said Roni with the way-out-of-fashion ponytail, cheerfully sweeping his arm over the sidewalk cafe clientele. "There they are - the dinosaurs of the swampish left, but don't tell Bibi's new fundamentalist buddies. They don't believe in dinosaurs so they'll just ignore us.''

One wonders when some of the haters of all that is "Sheinkin'' last bothered to climb down from their favorite point of order and actually order a coffee at Cafe Kazeh. They might notice something oddly out of sync with their smug theories, especially around Friday afternoon.

It was a Friday afternoon some years ago when I first discovered the Cafe Tamar on the corner of Sheinkin and Ahad Ha'am - late afternoon, so the cafe was closing, as was just about everything else on Sheinkin. Shabbat was approaching.

It was plain to see this would be of concern to many residents, for there they were, on the street or in the little fountain park donated by some faraway Mr. Fingerman, dressed in the garb of the orthodox, strolling with their above average number of little kids.

Only much later I became aware that "Sheinkin'' actually meant hippie, yuppie, trendy, arty - Tel Aviv's alleged pathetic attempt to copy-cat Greenwich Village.

Sure it zings with arty types, odd boutiques (one named No Name) and those trendy cafes and quirky ancient shops from another world. But the haredi residents choose to live there too, apparently in a quiet and relaxed peace agreement with the secular trendsetters.

So what is this "Sheinkin brigade'' so easy to sneer at from distant newspaper columns? Nothing more, perhaps, than a barely existent hint of true Israeli national character - colorful, integrated, tolerant.

The Mediterranean writer Lawrence Durrell explored the image or legend some physically dull places acquire - a "spirit of place.'' Such locations gather, for a limited time, the essence of their surrounding cultures.

Geographically dull places that have generated an enduring spirit of place would include Left Bank Paris, the city in Durrell's own Alexandria Quartet, Zorba's Crete, the Dublin of James Joyce.

Tuesday afternoon this week provided a little cameo of Sheinkin taking all in its stride. On the threshold of this new dawn of security with peace, an "incident'' was in full progress near the entrance to Sheinkin. Allenby Street was sealed off, a forlorn and abandoned No 4 bus was isolated in the center of the cordoned area, and the gathered crowds murmured darkly about a suspect `pigua'(terrorist incident).

The Sheinkin coffee houses were packed and lively. Signs of panic and offence were woefully absent - granted, everyone jumped a little when the anti-terrorist squad blew up whatever was suspicious across the road in Allenby, but there was an unseemly levity about it all.

"Things are different now,'' said Haris (one of those awful "academics'') with a wink over the top of his Ha'aretz. "That was a pigua with peace.''

Sure there is a new government on the way, but there was some cheer too - the prospect of a fresh crop of David Levy jokes. (In the meantime - "How many new ministers does it take to change a light bulb? As many as can get past the attorney general.'')

Pinko lefties were not tearing their thinning 60s hair out along Sheinkin sidewalks. "You're mistaking me for someone who gives a f....,'' said a world-weary 25-year-old resting his coffee cup on an Apple laptop. "They're only politicians, not real people.''

And Sheinkin is only a street, and a pretty dull one, with a park and some cafes and a few useful little shops. Menahem Sheinkin's only real claim to fame (he died in a car crash in Chicago in 1925) was to suggest the new Jewish suburb of Jaffa be named Tel Aviv, after the translation of Herzl's Altneuland. Sheinkin (an ultra-conservative who even hated shops appearing in the city) named Tel Aviv, and Tel Aviv took Sheinkin Street to its heart to be its rickety spirit of place.

To decry Sheinkin as the spirit of lefties, dreamers and corrupters of youth (weep, Socrates) is to fail to observe the haredis in the park, the Internet cafe round the corner, the yuppie business women hard at work over their coffee, two gay actors discussing their play.

There was a terse news brief in The Jerusalem Post a couple of years ago: "A man was shot in the legs from a speeding car as he left a tattoo parlor in Sheinkin Street.'' Probably not a drop of coffee was spilled or an eyebrow raised in the entire street in that few seconds. "Election panic grips street'' just wouldn't cut it as a headline, or even a brief.

In Cafe Tamar, among the chess boards and free newspapers, someone had gone to the ladies' room, leaving a slim book of poems by Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heany. It was open at his description of a place called "the republic of conscience'' and with politics in the air, a couple of lines caught the eye:

"At their inauguration, public leaders must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep to atone for their presumption to hold office...''

You wish! But it might make a headline in Sheinkin.