What Israel’s activists can learn from Australian firefighters

A few years ago, I spoke with a Country Fire Authority volunteer about how bushfires are actually fought. It’s not all brute force and hoses, he explained, but reading the terrain, choosing where to stand, and acting before heat and wind make the decisions for you.   

After returning from a New Israel Fund conference in Israel and the West Bank, that lesson feels uncomfortably relevant. Civil society there is battling multiple fire fronts of another kind — both political and physical: settler violence in the West Bank, a headlong rush toward annexation, a government assault on judicial independence, the on-going disaster in Gaza, the rise of organised crime in Palestinian towns inside Israel and a refusal to confront the systemic failures that led to the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023.   

Yet amid this burning season, ordinary people are working with precision and courage. They are applying the firefighter’s art — assessment, containment, and, when needed, controlled burns — to keep a fragile hope alive. 

Firefighters begin by asking not where the flames are highest, but where conditions are most dangerous. Israeli civil society groups are doing the same.