Published: 27 February 2026<\/p>\n
Last updated: 27 February 2026<\/p>\n
A few years ago, I spoke with a Country Fire Authority\u00a0volunteer\u00a0about how bushfires are\u00a0actually fought.\u00a0It\u2019s\u00a0not 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
After returning from a New Israel Fund conference in Israel and the West Bank, that lesson feels uncomfortably relevant. Civil society there is battling\u00a0multiple fire fronts of\u00a0another kind \u2014 both political and physical: settler violence<\/a> in the West Bank, a headlong rush toward annexation<\/a>, a government assault on judicial independence<\/a>, the on-going disaster in Gaza<\/a>, the rise of\u00a0organised\u00a0crime<\/a> in Palestinian towns inside Israel\u00a0and a refusal to confront the systemic failures<\/a> that led to the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet amid this\u00a0burning season, ordinary people are working with precision and courage. They are applying the firefighter\u2019s art \u2014 assessment, containment, and, when needed, controlled burns \u2014 to keep a fragile hope alive.\u00a0<\/p>\n Read the fire <\/p>\n Firefighters begin by asking not where the flames are highest, but where conditions are most dangerous. Israeli civil society groups are doing the same.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Published: 27 February 2026 Last updated: 27 February 2026 A few years ago, I spoke with a Country…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":312218,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-312217","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}