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.

And so, 30 years after punk sprang up in recession-ridden New York, 25 years after it did the same in deteriorating Britain, close to 15 years after it “broke” again in Seattle, and less than a month after another round of deadly “they shoot/we shoot” in Gaza (Israel) and Jerusalem (Hamas), it’s back, much as it was in the beginning, freaked out and head-shaven, ready to take on society by rejecting it. But this time it might be here to signal a change in Israelis’ attitudes toward their Palestinian neighbors. In the meantime, frustration and alienation are once again fueling a vital punk explosion.