‘Kids Are Alright’? Youth Violence and Protest in the Young State of Israel

The article explores patterns of rebellion, delinquency, and violence among teenagers in the young State of Israel, focusing primarily on the central region and middle-class neighborhoods. This phenomenon was part of a broader pattern of youth rebellion observed worldwide in the postwar period. In the first part of the article, I examine the characteristics of youth gangs and their resistance to parental culture in the public sphere (the neighborhood) and the private sphere (the bourgeois home) within the context of new urban lifestyles developing in Israel. In the second part, I discuss crime and delinquency among teenagers and the response of the parental culture, which suffered from moral panic. To conclude, I offer some thoughts on why the global youth rebellion of the late 1960s largely bypassed Israel, despite the seeds of rebellion that had sprouted there prior to the Six Day War.