Within one hour of putting out their call for volunteers as the wildfire in the foothills of Jerusaleam began to spread earlier this month, the Brothers and Sisters in Arms protest movement had a list of 1,500 volunteers ready to lend a hand. Within three hours, they had to close the list because they already had more volunteers than would be needed. 

“We have gained a lot of experience — unfortunate experience, but still experience — since Oct. 7[, 2023,] in helping the population in scaling up from zero to whatever, so [coordination of the volunteers] was relatively easy,” said board member Liat Weiss. “Although people have given so much of themselves since Oct. 7, despite their desire to rest and to recharge their batteries — when they see a catastrophe or crisis, they rise to the occasion. In practically no time we closed the list because we had to assess and see if our help was still needed because we saw that [the fire] was under control.”

Brothers and Sisters in Arms was among many civilian groups that mobilized quickly to assist as the fire continued to spread. The religious-Zionist Bnei Akiva youth movement also put out a call for volunteers, which was answered by many. The Magen David Adom deployed its ambulances and other vehicles during the wildfires to transport people with mobility and health issues to safety. The medical assistance nonprofit Yad Sarah too had an overwhelming number of volunteers to staff its hotlines and ready to transport people with mobility issues. And organizations such as Yedidim, the Or Movement, the Israel Volunteer Council and the Israel Association of Community Centers — all of which have received funding and training from Jewish Federations of North America and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies in the wake of Oct. 7 for just such crisis management needs — put their training into motion as well.

Yet the significant volunteer effort that sprang to action shines a light on what critics decry as the “limitations in governmental support and planning” that exposed “vulnerabilities in crisis management practices” and still leaves the country reliant on nonprofits and ad hoc civil efforts, rather than organized and official responses, according to Shay Attias, a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University.

Begun as an organization of Israeli IDF reservists opposing governmental judicial reforms, Brothers and Sisters in Arms suspended those protests on Oct. 7, 2023, to focus on aid efforts under the name Brothers and Sisters for Israel following the Hamas attack, though they are still better known by their former name. (The group has since returned to participate in demonstrations against the government.)

The aftermath of Oct. 7 required immediate and intense volunteer efforts as the organization was forced to grow from one moment to the next, Weiss said. As a result, the group has taken steps to improve how it can handle future crises, including the creation of a dedicated volunteer coordinator and installing a computerized customer relationship management (CRM) system to efficiently manage volunteer information and engagement.

“The infrastructure is there, the organization is there,” she said.

With a new volunteer management system in place, Yedidim — an organization that mainly helps Israelis with car troubles — was able to quickly send out volunteers with jeeps to help evacuate people in the line of fire and transport firefighters from one location to another. The Or Movement brought one of its four JFNA-funded mobile command units to the Eshtaol command center to assist the first responders organizing both their civilian and firefighting logistic response and also organized families in case there was a need to host displaced people. The Israel Community Centers prepared a number of teams from the north trained in emergency preparation response to be deployed to the south if necessary.

“In the months after Oct. 7 we identified a need, together with the Schusterman [Philanthropies], to be prepared for further conflict… and we worked with Israeli civil society organizations to make sure that they were prepared,” said Benjamin Rutland, JFNA managing director of program and planning in Israel and overseas department. “We also provided funding at that time for key organizations that we had identified as being able to take a key role in responding to further emergencies very quickly.”

Rutland noted that JFNA is committed to helping Israel, particularly during crisis situations that it continuously monitors. Following the Oct. 7 attacks, JFNA launched its Israel emergency campaign, raising nearly $900 million, some of which went to emergency preparedness programs.

“As soon as the fires were reported in the media, we reached out to all of [these] organizations,” he said. “We have our own ability to speak to the government, but the organizations we work with are already integrated into government responses, so it’s most comfortable for us to start with them… Although [the fire] had the potential to be terrible, thankfully the weather was on our side and it was relatively small and relatively short in duration.”

To Attias, the limited damage caused to populated areas by the month’s fires was primarily a function of luck, not proper crisis management. He hailed the many civic initiatives that sprung up after Oct. 7, which he said were real game changers and once again stepped in admirably to fill in gaps left by the government, and the Israeli civilians who were willing to assist their fellow countrymen. But he said he saw “so many failures” on display, such as the videos of Israelis abandoning their cars and escaping flames on foot on the major Route 1 highway.

“Overall, while the civil response was commendable, the limitations in governmental support and planning exposed vulnerabilities in crisis management practices in Israel,” he said. 

“[The fire] didn’t turn into a catastrophe. But I know that it easily could have been one of the largest catastrophes that Israel ever had,” Attias told eJP, a day before more brush fires broke out in southern and northern Israel amid a heat wave. “There was no intelligence on the fires, not enough troops. You heard the fire chief commander say that he is lacking 2,000 firefighters, which is almost 50% of the fire troops. [Israel] asked for help [from other countries], and the help came very late, which means that something in the working relationship doesn’t work. … And they saw that the helicopters that were supposed to be there weren’t. Who is the one who is supposed to be managing all this?”

Following the 2006 Second Lebanon War, the government created the National Emergency Authority (NEMA), known by its Hebrew acronym RAHEL, Attias said. However, he maintained that NEMA has for the large part been ineffectual. The ability to execute and follow the protocols that Israel itself established a few years ago simply don’t exist, he said, because, Israel “unfortunately” believes in improvisation rather than in a strategic way of thinking.

“One of the reasons that we’re so shocked and we’re so sad from the October catastrophe is that we’ve realized that many fundamental guarantees just weren’t there on Oct. 7,” said Attias, who has developed and teaches the “Simulations in Crisis Management” course at Bar-Ilan University’s School of Communication and department of political studies. “You try to find out if some things have changed after Oct. 7 and you see that these things have remained the same, give or take. I believe that the contract between Israel and its citizens was deeply broken on Oct. 7.”

As Israel nears its 80th birthday, relying on the loose improvisation style that Israel has so prided itself on is actually detrimental for the state as it prevents the country from establishing systematic solutions, said Attias. The method, he said, was “one huge, big, amazing improvisation” but is not suited to the modern “hybrid age” world that blurs the lines between the home front and the battle front because it can’t be systematic and can’t forecast or project some future crisis. The events of Oct.7 underscored this issue, illustrating the need for a more cohesive and strategic crisis management framework, he said.

In recent years, he said, the role and significance of civilians in warfare has risen dramatically. One key reason for this is that civilians are now being targeted more than ever — whether through digital means like the internet and social media, where panic, disinformation, fake news, and election interference are rampant, or due to the widespread erosion of governmental sovereignty in many countries around the world.

“Civilians are being targeted, whether through the virtual tools and the digital tools, or even with the special terrorism like we had in Oct. 7, that brings a great necessity for citizens to jump into the ring and to participate in this crisis management that’s supposed to be led only by the government,” he said. “So bottom line, we have a cultural problem of not being prepared and not being able to build strategy.”

It is not a coincidence, he added, that Israel already experienced another catastrophic fire in the Carmel Forest in 2010. “We’re still now, in 2025, asking the same questions: Do we have enough helicopters to channelize water? And then the fire troops are complaining that they don’t have enough human resources. This is [something] that should have ended many, many years ago,” said Attais. “One of the reasons it doesn’t end is that we have a constant crisis in Israel since its establishment in 1948. That creates a very bad culture of handling and managing crises.”

But, he said, Israel is not much different than most governments in this as there is an inherent challenge for human beings to deal with crises. Though it is part of human nature to distance oneself from the possibilities of a crisis ever happening to us, crises need to be viewed not as a matter of “if” but of “when,” he said.

So while at the level of civil society Israel has done great with volunteers engaging and wanting to help, at the governmental level there is something fundamentally missing, he said.

“Israelis jump in immediately and honestly, that’s very impressive and goes against the 21st century selfish human nature. That’s something really magical,” said Attias. “But from the governmental perspective, unfortunately… in 24-hours I learned there is not enough manpower, not enough helicopters, not good cooperation with other governments… and that was enough for me to understand that, Houston, we definitely have a crisis.”