What these bands share is their concern about Israel’s relations with the Palestinians and, more essentially, its identity as a Jewish state. The frustration and the confusion that dominate their lives also drive their music, producing intense, energized, sometimes manic songs and performances.
Speaking about Israel, Jewish-American documentary filmmaker Liz Nord told me, “It’s a very macho culture in some ways, mostly because it’s always had to be.” Nord, who lives in New York, recently completed a documentary about Israeli punk, Jericho’s Echo. “Every man and woman is trained to be able to fight if there is a war. Israelis are completely surrounded by enemy nations, and everyone knows they will be called upon if the worst happens. That’s why people are so disturbed by the punks. They pose a threat to the traditional way of doing things. They’re dropping out of the overall society because they’re disillusioned with it. And they’re taking a stand by in some sense embracing passivity.”
This passivity is perhaps most visible in a growing movement that seems like a throwback to an earlier era in the West. Throughout Tel Aviv, Israeli youth are fighting the occupation by taking over un-occupied buildings on their own side of the “security fence.” They’re in effect bringing the settlements to the home front.
As in the UK, they’re called “squatters,” and they’re joined together in a loose coalition of leftist politics, anti-militarist apathy, and hard punk rock. Whereas the Stonesy Genders poke gentle fun at West Bank settlers who form the extreme right wing of Israeli society, these bands rage against the machine. HaYehudim (“the Jews,” though the band’s manager translated it for me as the pejorative “the Heebs”) and the now-defunct Deir Yassin (named for the site of an infamous massacre of Palestinians during the 1948 War for Independence) support the growing youth movement by playing shows in abandoned squats. They’re not apathetic in a no-future/nevermind sense. They believe that to drop out of a system that’s headed in the wrong direction is the only option.
“It’s just not right,” says one of the oldest and most committed squatters, a political activist who goes by the pseudonym Cat. “The IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] would love to find me. I regularly go into the territories and help organize Palestinian resistance that is peaceful and non-violent. But the government still doesn’t like it.”
Indeed, the government so disapproves of Cat’s activities that it’s revoked his driver’s license and made it difficult for him to open a bank account. “Yeah, if things continue like this, I guess I’ll have to move to the other side [of the security fence].”
Cat is joking; the situations in which he sometimes finds himself are, however, quite serious. I spoke to him one night after he had spent the day constructing tank barriers from abandoned tires in the Palestinian city of Nablus. He sounded tired but in good spirits. But then I heard what sounded like firecrackers. There was some scuffling and the phone went silent. “Cat? Cat? Hello, are you there?” After a long pause, he returned, speaking in a hushed voice. “They’re shooting.” “Who?” “Who knows? Every night it is like this. They shoot, the army shoots, the army shoots, they shoot.” He sounded more tired than ever, and I cut the call short, suddenly feeling exhausted myself. Yet as I hung up, I heard those last words — “they shoot, the army shoots, the army shoots, they shoot” — repeating in my head like a song’s chorus.
