The band was formed in December 1990 by 2 pairs of brothers: Yonni and Oded Tal (bass and drums) and Santiago and Federico Gomez (guitar and vocals). We all attended the same boarding school in the rural wasteland of the upper Galilee in the north of Israel and had discovered punk and hardcore 3 years before. Back then, we were writing to literally hundreds of people all over the world - to any address we could find on an LP or a ‘zine or a demo - abusing the fact that we could send mail anywhere for FREE (because we lived in a Kibbutz). Most people we wrote to were quite surprised to find out that there were punks in Israel (remember: it was the era before the Internet and punk on MTV...), and the vast majority of them were nice enough to send us free tapes, zines and records, even though we could not afford to pay for them, what with us being poor kibbutzniks an’ all...
Even at the very beginning, the band suffered from what would become our chronic torment: months of inactivity. We became more serious in late 1991, being able to play our first show at a huge young bands’ rock contest in the city of Haifa, which took place in the parking lot of a shopping mall. The very large crowd (probably more than a 1,000 - some magazine even reported 3,000!) was entirely made up of regular mall-rats, but little did we know that among that crowd were a handful of unsuspecting punks and hardcore kids (which YEARS later, we met again after they started Public Domain).
Before that we managed to record a demo, which we never actually released properly. By then, we had enough songs for a set but couldn’t find any punk bands anywhere to play with (remember, we’re talking about Israel here). In early 1992, Itai joined the band on drums, as Oded wanted to switch to bass and also to sing a couple of songs. We had met Itai in a purely coincidental way: while Santiago was on some kind of 3-day trip with his class, Itai’s class (from a different school) stayed in our boarding school and used our sleeping quarters. Santiago had lotsa stuff written in his room and on his things (including the complete text from the gatefold cover of the "Emma" Dutch compilation LP), and Itai saw it and left him a little note saying that he’s also into punk and that he should call him. And we did (that’s how punk worked back then I guess...). The band sounded better with Itai, but we still kept the band on hiatus for like half a year. Yonni, who had joined the army (unlike the rest of us who refused the compulsory draft), moved to second guitar but was actually kinda disinterested in the band (he loved playing music but punk, at least our kind of political punk, wasn’t really his thing; he just wanted to have fun and I think we wanted more). Although he kept rehearsing and playing, he wasn't really part of the song writing or the decision-making. He did drive us a lot as a band, though (because he was the first one to get his license), falling asleep on the wheel and nearly killing us a couple of times, or taking “shortcuts” and getting stuck with the van in the middle of nowhere...
In late 1992, we went to see a show by our friend’s noise-rock band Nisrefet in a Tel-Aviv club and met some punks there who told us they had a band and know other bands in the Tel-Aviv area and in Jerusalem. They invited us to their show which was held some weeks afterwards and then decided we should play a show together: their band ( Kuku Bloff Ve Hayetushim), Nekhei Naatza, a band from their area called Oi Vaavoi, a Jerusalemite band named Sartan HaShad, and we invited a punk band made up of Russian immigrants we met only a couple of days before that. A couple of hundred punks showed up and we were truly shocked to see so many people being into punk. In fact, I would argue that in terms of the punk scene that night was, at least for us (Federico & Santiago), the most special and exciting night ever. We had visited so called "punk" clubs in the late 80's but had never seen so many mohawks, spikes and leather jackets! We gave out some political flyers we had printed a few hours ago (with Crass quotes and everything), and even though these punks weren’t very politicized, no one spit in our faces as would probably happen if we gave out those flyers today (now, the same kind of punks who attended that first show tend to be much more right-wing).
Our set went bad with the crowd for a number of reasons: generally speaking, we were ‘outsiders’ to this scene (even though we had been into punk longer - as a band and as kids - than most of them). We had come with our little crew (10 - 15 people including the band) and we weren’t about fitting in as much as we were about being confrontational. When we played, we had a lot of anarchist flags, symbols and slogans hung on the wall behind us, which apparently turned-off some people and was ‘too much’ for their liking. these flags and symbols, coupled with the fact that we were overtly political, strangers, and that our bands name was kinda vague and hard to understand (plus ‘naatza’ sounds a lot like ‘nazi’) even made some people think we were a nazi band, although no one confronted us at the time. Also, Federico made fun of one of the bands (Oi Vaavoi) that sang what appeared to be racist lyrics (amidst the confusion, one of the band members had actually told us they were!). They were singing “1, 2, 3, shoot the Arab in the head!”, and we could not know they were describing this as an immoral military policy and not suggesting it as a solution (like lots of people in Israel do). The singer of that band  (who later on became our friend) was yelling at us “Go back to your Kibbutz!”.
The band we bonded with the most was the Russian band (Epidemy A), which lent us their instruments at the last minute and, just like us, paid the price of not being part of the close-knitted punk clique that night. They ended up playing last, around 3:00 AM I think, and the few people who had stayed were heckling them.
However, it must be admitted that, beyond all the various factors that made us unpopular that night, we did play a lousy set - simple and plain. We sucked musically and socially (not that we craved to be popular but it still hurt). We ended up sitting on the pavement outside the club disappointed, disillusioned and with our spirits temporarily broken. Ironically, after playing a rock contest in a mall in front of a thousand regular kids we had felt excited and enthusiastic, while after playing a punk show with punk bands and a punk crowd we were left feeling the exact opposite. Still, the new "movement" was launched off and for the next couple of years, expanded considerably.
In February 1993 we recorded a new demo but , just like the first one, didn't really released it. By then, we were friends with most of the bands and scenesters around the central area and shows had become somewhat regular - about one every couple of weeks. The now legendary "Penguin" club (which was the center of the main ‘Israeli new wave’ bands in the early 80s and hosted such foreign bands as Bauhaus) re-opened and had “punk nights”, sometimes letting live bands play. We were invited to play in one of those and kinda won the crowd over, which wasn’t such an easy thing for an ‘outside’ band. It looks like punks had a lot of respect for us for some reason, maybe because we seemed really serious about things (which I guess we were). Our music was unique  (influenced more by HC bands than by anarcho-punk bands) and our politics never quite fit the ‘leftist’ label, which was an amazing achievement on our part because that is something that’s really hard to do in Israel. Israeli politics are very ‘black & white’ oriented, and although we were clearly political and clearly not on the right-wing side (we had plenty of songs against THOSE guys...), we were never perceived by the punks as leftists. Maybe because we were aggressive in our politics and in Israel, ‘leftist’ equals 'bleeding heart'. We certainly weren’t THAT.
We also managed to play in the hellhole city of Naharia (one of our greatest achievements I guess...) and twice in what was then the biggest venue for rock bands in Israel: the Roxan club, located in the industrial area of Tel-Aviv and run by some rip-off scumbags. At the time, punk bands were the biggest crowd drawers in the Israeli underground circuit. Just to put it in perspective: the show we played with Kuku Bloff at the Roxan was practically twice as packed as the one that took place there a week before, a Rami Fortis show (who is a big, "legendary" local rocker).
Little by little, more bands were formed, like Punkcake, Anusand Public Domain. We started to develop a good relationship with the latter band, which was the only one from the city of Haifa and also the only one that, just like us, was more into American hardcore than the common British punk that most of the punks in the rest of the country were caught in.
We decided to do a split cassette (with our side being that 2nd demo we had recorded in February) which came out in October 1993. It's hard to say how many we sold, but definitely more then 300, an astonishing amount for bands like us in Israel. It was the first release in any format of the crop of local hardcore/punk bands from that time - and sadly, one of the very few. One of my pen-pals liked the demo and wanted to do a 7" on his new label, Beer City Records. But we had to record it very soon because our drummer Itai was about to get drafted into the army. On top of being in a rush, the studio guy was inept and Oded, at that point, wasn't into hardcore or punk anymore. Also, we basically didn’t know what we were doing; we were treading on new ground (as we did more than once with this band) and did not have the common sense to  realize that what we hear through the studio’s PA is NOT how it will sound on a 7”. The whole experience of recording each instrument separately was also difficult for us. I think those are the main reasons for the disappointing (at least for us) “Renounce Judaism” 7"EP released later that year on Beer City. On the bright side, we had just released the FIRST EVER punk/hardcore 7-Inch EP from Israel (not to mention the fact that we were the first Israeli punk band who had a ska song [“Sell the settlers to slavery”]! In fact, apart from one band, I think we were the first band to play ska in Israel AT ALL, even on a nationwide level, outside of the punk scene! Then again, playing ska is not something to be proud of these days...)
At the beginning of 1994 we played two shows: one in Rishon Letzion and the second one at the first of the now almost institutionalized "Purim Punk" shows in Tel Aviv (‘Purim’ is the Jewish equivalent of Halloween, kind of), along with Kuku Bloff, Sartan HaShad, Oi Vaavoi, Anus, Liquid Sky and Tisifona. That was probably our best show at that point, but it was also to be the last for 2 years. Itai was unable to play due to his military service and Oded and Yonni gave up hardcore for good...
In 1994 Santiago and Federico (and also Oded, before he went ‘solo’) tried in vain to find other people to keep the band going, and actually joined a new hardcore band with other people from our area but both projects failed. We still kept on writing songs and were supposed to play 2 shows (one in mid 1994 and one in early 1995) with people from the bands Kuku Bloff and Mefageretfilling in, but for some weird reason it didn't worked out (who remembers?!?).
In mid-95 Beer City released "Breaking The Cultural Curfew" , an Israeli punk/ hardcore 7" compiled by Federico which included a track  by us. Around the same time Itai decided that heavy duty army wasn't for him and moved to a non-combat unit so he had time to practice with us once in a while. Now all we needed was a new bass player, and in late 1995 we recruited Keren, which was probably our biggest fan (as a matter of fact, for her birthday we once recorded 3 songs which came out as a "limited edition" tape of 2 copies, one obviously for her and the other got lost...).
By early 1996 we had a new set made up of mostly new songs, faster then the previous ones & heavily influenced by early 80s American/Euro hardcore like Articles Of Faith, BGK and Rattus. Our first show with the new line up was at the 2nd "Purim Punk" show in Tel-Aviv. When we played at the first one the previous year, a couple of hours after we made our way back to the Galilee, a Jewish settler (a doctor) went into a Muslim site in the occupied territories, equipped with an M-16 assault rifle, and as the Arab believers were praying, started shooting at them, killing almost 50 Arabs and injuring many others (this incident is known as "the Hebron massacre"). This time, the day of the 2nd “Purim punk” show a bomb planted by a Palestinian terrorist exploded in a bus in Jerusalem, killing more then a dozen Jews and some foreigners; this was followed by another bus explosion in Jerusalem and a bomb in the center of Tel-Aviv (this gives you a good taste of the reality in Israel, both punk and non-punk...). That day, a lot of shops closed down all cross the country and most events were canceled, but strangely enough, our “Punk Purim” show still went on. By then, it was obvious that a lot of things had changed and that the punk scene had kinda died out. Maybe not in the number of punks who were around, but in its potential. Our hopes of steering Israeli punk into good directions, of shaping it into something meaningful and positive, had completely died. It had become stale and predictable (yeah, we know Israel’s not the only place where THAT happened...). It was our impression that the winds of this Tel-Aviv centered scene were drifting between a simple disinterest in politics or apathy to downright nationalism and racism. Many punks had become born-again Jews, discovering the religion they supposedly fought against before. A lot more dropped out of the scene, only to show up like outsiders at the big shows to reminisce and compare it to their ‘old days’. Money and profits had become a factor uglier and bigger than ever before, and the machoistic, senseless gang-style violence which often erupted at shows wasn’t something we were willing to be associated with any longer for the sake of changing this scene ‘from  the inside’. We felt pretty isolated among the idolization and rockstar status-seeking of bands like Kuku Bloff and Sartan Hashad. Their filthy promoters, managers and attitudes made us sick to our stomachs; they would argue for hours about who gets to play first or second and would squabble like hungry rats for whatever little money they could scam (out of the club and out of other bands’ cut). While we would drive for three hours to play a show in Tel-Aviv and often come out with no gas-money at all, bands who lived 10 minutes from the shows would get paid generously due to their friendship with the organizers. At the 2nd “Purim Punk” show the gap between us and this scene was for the first time fully visible, and although the crowd didn’t officially ‘hate’ us (we still had that aura of 'respect' for some reason), the animosity was showing and our politics were met with more than one right-wing remark from members of the crowd. We kind of made sure ourselves to emphasize the gap between us and them any way we could (including wearing straightedge shirts, which did not work because no one knew what straightedge was back then). But the real target of the crowd’s hate was a new ‘outsider’ band from Haifa called Useless ID , with a melodic hardcore style that did not go well with a crowd that was so stagnant and caught up in British anarcho-punk that they hadn’t even heard of bands like Green Day or Nofx. The crowd spat, spilled beer and threw firecrackers at the band and at any of the bands’ friends who tried to stagedive. Some poor guy got beaten-up by like 50 people and literally kicked down the stairs of the club for bumping into the wrong person at the pit (or maybe just for looking at someone the wrong way). We were both mad and sad.
And so, even before the show was over, we decided once and for all that this 2nd “Purim Punk” would be our last show in that scene (which we refer to as the ‘mindless scene’, a label they proudly accept and live up to).
Some time after that, Useless ID organized a show at the roof of their guitarist house in Haifa, an event that can be seen more or less as the beginning of the Israeli DIY hardcore scene. There, overlooking the city of Haifa and the Mediterranean sea, surrounded by a small crowd of friendly Haifa hardcore kids and Tel-Avivian punks who had hitch-hiked to see us, we had a great time with no violence, no competition between bands or talks of money and no right-wing bullshit. We even did our Negative Approach cover (!). Meanwhile, a new label from the US called Take Out The Trash asked us to do a 10" with our new songs and in that summer we recorded 15 tracks in Federico and Santiago's Kibbutz, Lehavot Habashan. It was recorded on a 4-track, down below in a bomb-shelter by Gadi, the singer of Public Domain (who had already split up). These songs ended up sounding much better then the tracks we recorded in a "professional" studio.
A little bit before this the right-wing, led by Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyau, had won the Israeli elections. In most countries, the difference between a right-wing and a left-wing government aren’t that significant, but for Israel - a country constantly engaged in  military conflicts - the outcome of these elections could very well mean war. In this context, a failed wake-up call to resist the ultra-nationalistic menace was made by Useless ID, Not For Sale (a short lived band from Haifa), USF (which eventually became our ‘brother band’, with 2 members of our band playing in it) and Nekhei Naatza at the "Left Bank club" in Tel-Aviv. This club, which belongs to the Israeli Communist Party, has since become the main place for organizing DIY shows in Israel.
Keren, our bass player, had left for the US for some months in late 1996, causing yet another period of inactivity for the band, although we played 2 shows with Ishay (from Useless ID) playing bass. By then, Take Out the Trash records had difficulties and kept postponing the releasing of the 10", until they eventually asked Beer City to release it instead. Mike from Beer City agreed, and the release (our "Hail The New Regime" LP) was scheduled for spring 1997. The cover showed an authentic photo of the Israeli right-wing leader "Bibi" caught in a Sieg-Hail like position during one of his speeches. After Keren came back we played 2 more shows, but when she started talking about the possibility of her going abroad again for a couple of months, we decided that it would be better for all of us that she would quit the band. By early 1997, USF and us decided to do a US tour in the summer; it had been a lifelong dream for some of us (namely Federico & Santiago), something we talked about since we were 15, and now it seemed more realistic than ever, greatly due to the influence of Useless ID who had gone to the US as a band and stayed there for several months. We then decided to ask Adi (former guitarist of Public Domain who also played bass with Useless ID in the US) to be our bass player. He came back to Israel and we started working on new songs for a 7".
At the same time a split tape with an Italian band called Muddle was released; it was recorded live in the studio at a rehearsal room in Tel-Aviv and was composed of new versions of old songs as well as of songs that appeared on the Beer City LP. We played several shows in Israel, the last one being in late July in Haifa along with Kuku Bloff,Sartan Hashad, Useless ID and Shma Israel (which was Adi our bass player and members of Useless ID & Wackout doing fast hardcore).
It was somewhat ironic and annoying that our last local show included the two main bands whose attitude and crowds we left behind in the mindless scene, but fuck, when you have only like 6 or 7 punk bands in the whole country it can be more difficult than you think. Besides, I guess we did have our small victory as this time the crowd was fairly oblivious to their sets; it wasn’t entirely our court but it was more ours than theirs. Another part of our small victory was that we were the first Israeli band EVER to put out an LP (as well as a 7"), which by then had already been released and was getting good reviews (it never got a bad one, as far as we know...).
Had it not been for us being so excited over the fact that we were soon to tour the US  (something which, unless you’re from Israel, you simply can’t imagine how big a deal it is), I think our last show in July 1997 would’ve been much more depressing. The two bands from the mindless scene spent, as always, a vast amount of time and energy arguing about who’s playing first or second or last. If my memory serves me right, the argument went on for about two hours and was rather intensive, but because this was our last show in Israel we agreed that this time we weren’t gonna give up and insisted on playing exactly when we want to. On top of that, the security people were, as always, former members of military combat units who are constantly looking for a chance to prove their masculinity, and although they didn’t beat anyone up, their machismo and general treatment of the crowd left a bitter taste. The price at the door ended up being higher than we were told, and for a while we contemplated going back home and not playing, but since it was to be our last one ever and people did come from different places just to see us, we compromised ((our consolation was that the person who organized this show, who happened to be the same inept studio guy who recorded our first 7”, actually lost money on the show!). There were one or two mindless punks who, when we said onstage that we were going to the US, said “good, don’t come back!”, but overall the atmosphere was not hostile and we spoke about politics and about the things which are important to us (again: you have to remember this is Israel we’re talking about, where political punk bands aren’t merely preaching to the converted and political content is worth much more than in the American or European scenes). Like I said before, the overall excitement of the US tour made our last show much more tolerable, but retrospectively it really was an awful show.
On the 31 of July 1997, Nekhei Naatza and USF arrived in Boston, MA. When the immigration jerks found out we were a band (something we didn’t declare ‘officially’) they gave us hell, interrogated us, and assured us we were gonna be sent back to Israel for lying to them and whatnot. As we sat there being questioned and searched, we were pretty sure that would be the case. However, for some reason we still don’t know, they finally let us in; but with a one-month visa only (as opposed to the standard 6 months visa).
The tour was to be chaotic and sort of ill-organized from our part, but was improved by the skills of Ben (from the band Dropdead), who was our driver, roadie and pretty much tour manager. We played 12 shows in 11 cities (Boston, Providence, Albany, New York, Newark (DE), Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Lima (OH), Grand Rapids , Chicago (twice), Au Claire (WI) with great bands like Huasipungo, Los Crudos, Monster X, Profits of Misery, Youth Against, Kill the Man who questions, Human Investment, Devola, Short Hate Temper, Hellnation and others. Unfortunately for us, the show in St. Paul, MN with React and Brother Inferior was shut down by the police...
We decided beforehand that after the tour, the band would split up never to reform. Santiago stayed in Minneapolis and Itai went to the Bay Area. Adi and Federico went back to Israel and started a new band called Dir Yassin , with Fede and Kobbi from USF and Haim from Wackout. The songs we recorded for the 7" just sort of laid around and were forgotten for a while but now we are hoping that, sometime next year (namely in the year 2,000) these songs will be finally out, on some 7" or somethin', and we think that will be our best release.