Introduction

The Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, together with the violence in mixed cities and on roads in southern and northern Israel during Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021, exposed a fundamental shortcoming in Israel’s national security doctrine. Israel had spent years building offensive strike capabilities, advanced intelligence, and multilayered defenses, especially in the aerial domain. Those capabilities, however, failed to solve or even address a different problem: security forces could not react quickly enough during large-scale infiltration of communities, raids, roadblocks, domestic unrest, or serious crime with potential to spill over into nationalist disturbances. When minutes can mean the difference between life and death, communities and neighborhoods must themselves form part of the national defense system. The war also produced a broader conceptual change wherein enforcement was added to the principles underlying Israel’s national security doctrine. This was expressed in efforts to dismantle threats and terrorist capabilities ahead of time and to establish buffer zones beyond the border.

A future surprise attack could unfold simultaneously in the north, the south, Judea and Samaria, and population centers in the interior, and would not necessarily be confined to a cross-border attack. The enemy could seek to exploit the concentration of forces in one arena to ignite other areas where troop deployments are thinly spread. Enemy actions could include disruption of reserve mobilization, slowing the movement of forces, and forcing police and rescue services to respond at hundreds of locations. The security establishment would then have to set priorities, leaving some areas without timely assistance. Local defense capacity is thus essential. It must provide an immediate response and work with the forces that later arrive on the scene.

We propose that territorial defense should once again play a major role in Israel’s national security doctrine, not as a nostalgic revival of the early-state model but as a modern, integrated system. The territorial defense array should be composed of three layers. The first is community defense including emergency response squads, civilian security coordinators, protective measures, intelligence, command and control, continuous communications with the security forces, and the ability to operate independently in the initial hours of any attack. The second is territorial defense forces made up of local reservists who can mobilize quickly and join the response. The third is a strong territorial National Guard trained to respond to a wide range of civilian and security emergencies.

The home front can no longer be treated as a passive arena in which warnings are received, and civilians take shelter and wait for the fighting to end—it is itself an arena of operations that directly affects national security and the IDF’s ability to fight elsewhere. Homeland defense therefore includes protecting civilians and infrastructure, maintaining order and continuity of operations, and responding to infiltration and terrorism. Community defense is where these functions converge.

How the Threat Has Evolved

The threat to Israeli communities is no longer confined to border and frontier areas; it has become a multi-dimensional threat. Territorial defense once focused largely on border communities, stopping infiltrations by terrorist cells and limited raids, or delaying an enemy until IDF forces arrived. Over the past several decades, however, the threat has expanded to include violence in mixed and non-mixed cities, roadblocks, disruption of economic activity, the isolation of communities, and attempts to block access to IDF bases. Armed criminal organizations can also provide weapons and help spread violence, while external enemies may seek to turn the interior into an additional theater. The State Comptroller’s report on Operation Guardian of the Walls recorded hundreds of focal points of domestic unrest that led to casualties and extensive property damage. The report also highlighted shortcomings in police and Border Police preparations for simultaneous incidents in multiple arenas.

October 7 exposed the consequences in stark terms. Where community emergency response teams were organized, equipped, and well led, they delayed attackers, disrupted their movement, and saved lives.[1] Elsewhere, deficiencies proved deadly. An IDF History Department study notes that in the opening hours of the attack, emergency response teams were the only force confronting Hamas terrorists in many western Negev communities. The lesson is not simply to improve the readiness and equipping of these teams; Israel needs to rebuild its broader doctrine around the community as a basic unit of defense.

The threat has become systemic, with several elements designed to reinforce one another. One is the infiltration of border and frontier communities by organized forces equipped with small arms, antitank weapons, drones, explosives, and communications equipment. Another is high-trajectory fire directed against the frontlines and the interior, intended to disrupt command and movement while keeping civilians rooted to protected spaces. A third is the activation of violence inside the country, from rioting and roadblocks to deliberate attacks on infrastructure and facilities. A fourth is the information warfare dimension, which includes fake news together with attempts to create panic by impersonating security forces. The security establishment must be able to confront all these dimensions at once.

The danger lies not only in an infiltration itself, but in the possibility that the local system may collapse. A handful of attackers can appear far more formidable when no one has a reliable picture of events, communications are not shared, weapons are inaccessible, and defensive sectors have not been assigned. An organized local force changes that equation; it can identify the direction of attack, warn residents, close gates, hold key positions, direct arriving forces, and treat casualties. Numbers alone do not determine the outcome. Preparation, leadership, drills, and a simple plan understood by all stakeholders are equally important. Another issue that Israel cannot afford to ignore is the large stocks of illegal weapons held by criminal organizations capable of linking criminal, nationalist, and terrorist actors. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, senior reserve officers helped organize and strengthen community defense, but this effort did not lead to a permanent dedicated headquarters within the Home Front Command and primary responsibility remained with the regional commands. Equipment, personnel, and training improved substantially, but reserve duty days were later cut in some communities as the situation stabilized.

Planning assumptions should vary by location. A border community may have to face an organized enemy force on its own for hours. Second-line communities may also be attacked and isolated, although they may receive somewhat more warning than communities adjacent to the border. Farther inland, the threat is more likely to combine mass unrest on the scale of Operation Guardian of the Walls, terrorism, serious crime, and attacks on national infrastructure and industrial plants. Rural and interurban areas present another vulnerability: roadblocks can prevent reinforcements from reaching incident sites and impede movement between sectors, while IDF camps themselves may also be infiltrated.

Israel therefore needs an integrated operational doctrine that allows organized, professional forces to stop incidents before they spread while providing the additional capacity needed to reinforce defenses nationwide.

Community and Neighborhood Defense as the Foundation

Community defense should be the foundation of homeland defense because these threats demand, first and foremost, strong capabilities close to the point of attack. The aim is not to reinforce a community only after an incident begins, but to prepare it in advance as a local defense unit able to detect danger, warn residents, delay attackers, and protect the population until the National Guard, police, and IDF arrive.

Frontier communities need a local force that can fight effectively through the opening hours of an attack. It should combine an expanded emergency response squad with a civilian security coordinator or community defense commander who has clear authority; observation, medical, rescue, and firefighting teams; communications that do not depend on cellular networks; accessible weapons and ammunition; gates, obstacles, defensive positions, and a local warning system. Its purpose is to provide the initial defensive response, and its mission is to warn residents, block entry points, occupy key positions, delay attackers, treat casualties, and provide reinforcements with the most accurate possible picture of events.

Second-line communities require the same basic response capabilities as frontier communities, but their defense must also extend to approach routes and the ability to delay attacking forces along these routes. Because an enemy force can move quickly, these communities need control over entrances, observation of approach routes, and the ability to block or delay forces moving on foot or by vehicle. That effort cannot stop at the community perimeter; it should be able to delay or, where possible, prevent entry before the attackers reach it. Planning should also provide for local reinforcement and mutual support among neighboring communities.

Community defense cannot stop at the border region. Towns, cities, and neighborhoods deeper inside Israel face a different mix of risks. Enemy infiltration remains possible, but the more immediate threats may be terrorism, serious crime, mass unrest, roadblocks, and attacks on critical infrastructure, industrial plants, and educational institutions. Neighborhood- or district-level structures are therefore needed to detect incidents and provide immediate protection. Their purpose is not to privatize security or militarize the civilian domain, but to act as a stopgap before police or military forces can establish an adequate operational presence in the event of a security incident.

An urban neighborhood is not simply a rural community on a larger scale. It is denser, more socially complex, more dependent on municipal infrastructure, and in constant contact with the police and local authorities. Mixed cities require particular care and protect residents and property without damaging the fabric of civilian life. Local defense cannot substitute for policing, law enforcement, intelligence, or civilian measures to reduce alienation and crime. It must operate under a police commander or another clearly designated authority, involve community leadership, minimize unnecessary friction, apply strict rules for opening fire, and provide specialized training for operations in densely populated civilian areas.

Non-mixed cities also need neighborhood-level arrangements. Outlying neighborhoods, areas bordering open ground, industrial zones, educational institutions, and infrastructure facilities all require a security response at the local level. Local authorities are central to home-front management, but usually lack a suitable operational force of their own. Each should therefore establish a neighborhood security force coordinated with the police, Home Front Command, and the National Guard.[2] This would not be an independent, unsupervised force, but a regulated framework bringing together volunteers in municipal roles, medical and rescue personnel, and command-and-control staff to shorten the time required to detect, report, isolate, and initially respond to an incident. The model would build on Home Front Command’s YAKLAR units, which connect local authorities with the military during emergencies.

In cities, the neighborhood or district, rather than the municipality as a whole, should be the basic unit for early response. Different districts have different densities, institutions, access routes, and operating conditions. A district administration can therefore provide the basis for a neighborhood control center, supported by volunteer teams for observation, assistance to residents, traffic direction, medical care, and rescue. Armed missions should remain with screened, licensed, and trained units under police authority. Mixed cities also need channels to local community leaders, mechanisms to identify rumors and distinguish violent actors from the wider public, and arrangements to help protect sensitive institutions belonging to all communities.

The National Guard

Local emergency response teams cannot carry this burden alone. Israel needs a trained, available territorial tier between the community and national forces, that is anchored in law. That role should be filled by a territorially organized National Guard rather than a national reinforcement force. Each district should have a brigade that is coordinated with local authority heads, police stations, territorial brigades, and Home Front Command, and can respond rapidly alongside local defense units in communities, cities, and neighborhoods. The force should eventually comprise about twenty territorially organized reserve brigades, each with roughly 3,000 combatants and a small regular cadre.[3] Manpower need not be an insurmountable constraint. Before the war, only a small share of the relevant population served actively; ending exemptions, returning exempt personnel to service, accepting volunteers, and issuing call-up orders could restore tens of thousands of service-age personnel to active duty.

The National Guard’s principal function would be to provide readily available trained manpower and scale that local forces lack in major civilian or security emergencies. It should reinforce communities and neighborhoods, reopen roads, secure mobilization and movement routes, protect vital infrastructure and facilities, help restore control during large-scale unrest, confront terrorism and serious crime with nationalist characteristics, and support local defenders until additional forces arrive or responsibility passes to the relevant authority.

To do this effectively, the National Guard must be territorial by design and oriented toward defined sectors and built around reservists who live in the area and know the terrain. Only a territorial structure as described above would be able to create a clear operational continuum from community to local authority, district, and state, while allowing the IDF to preserve most of its combat power for decisive missions in external theaters.

Government Decision 442 of April 2023 instructed the Ministry of National Security to establish a dedicated, skilled, trained force for emergencies, nationalist crime, terrorism, and strengthening governance. It also mandated staff work on the force’s mission, authorities, chain of command, relations with the IDF and Israel Police, reserve recruitment, staffing, and budget. According to the Israel Police website, the National Guard currently has about 900 fighters and other personnel in three brigades deployed in the north, center, and south, along with roughly 3,000 reservists. That is far short of the force proposed here: about twenty brigades of some 3,000 fighters each. Reaching that scale would require Israel to make much fuller use of its available manpower, including ending the practice of releasing personnel from reserve duty while they are still of service age, as occurred in the past.

A February 2026 report by the Knesset Research and Information Center indicates that the National Guard’s authorities, procedures, structure, budget, and operational concept had not yet been fully settled. The force therefore still exists more as a developing organizational and budgetary undertaking than as a complete, regulated, operationally ready territorial system. It is certainly not yet on the scale of territorial reserve brigades required to provide rapid, sustained coverage nationwide.[4]

Policy Recommendations

Territorial responsibility should be the organizing principle of homeland defense. Every community, urban district, local authority, administrative district, and operational area should have a designated commander, mission, and supporting force. Chains of command should be established in advance and adapted to potential incidents: police command for crime or civil unrest, military command for border infiltration, and a joint mechanism for combined incidents. Even in the latter case, however, each arena must have one commander.

Legislation and binding orders should formally establish community and neighborhood defense as a foundation of homeland defense. Every community and local authority, and every relevant neighborhood, should maintain and drill an up-to-date defense plan. Communities should also be classified as frontier, second-line, or home-front communities, with personnel, equipment, training, and readiness requirements tailored to each category. The classification should be based on planning scenarios and the expected response time by security forces for each specific location, not simply on its distance from the border.

Large cities should create neighborhood defense systems tailored to each district’s physical layout, density, infrastructure, and population, with specific arrangements for mixed cities and particularly sensitive neighborhoods. These frameworks must operate under clear authority both to protect all residents and to prevent the emergence of unsupervised armed groups. Communities and neighborhoods should also have standardized equipment immediately available, including communications, weapons, protective gear, drones, night-vision devices, warning systems, and medical supplies, with distribution tied to regular training and readiness checks.

The Ministry of National Security should conduct a nationwide mapping of existing forces, identify shortcomings, and prepare a plan to rectify them. The same process should define the capabilities each framework must maintain under the arrangements proposed above.

Integrating the National Guard into this architecture is essential and requires that it be formalized as a territorial system of about twenty reserve brigades built around small regular cadres, with its chain of command, authorities, and oversight clearly defined. The objective is a single defense array in which emergency response teams, Home Front Command, the police, and local authorities operate as parts of one structure rather than as separate bodies that coordinate on an ad hoc basis.

People are the core of the system. Mechanisms should be established to enable those with military or police experience to help defend the areas in which they live, subject to screening for professional competence. Basic training should cover firearms, urban combat, first aid, communications, civil unrest, and operating among civilians. Personnel should receive short, focused refresher training at regular intervals, tailored to each force’s required capabilities and threat level.

Finally, each local authority and territorial area should also conduct an annual integrated exercise simulating infiltration, roadblocks, unrest, damage to infrastructure, and isolation of the community. The exercise should test how local forces perform before reinforcements arrive, how command transitions between civilian, police, and military authorities, whether the situational picture is reliable, and whether essential services continue to function. Repeating such exercises would turn theoretical preparedness into measurable operational readiness, expose shortcomings early, and allow them to be corrected before a real emergency.

Structural reform will not be enough; community defense also requires a change in institutional culture. Community defense cannot remain a volunteer activity sustained by goodwill without authorized staffing and organized force buildup. The state should regard those who serve in the system as part of the security force, protect their employment rights, insure them, and formally recognize their service. Local authorities, for their part, should incorporate community defense into urban planning, budgets, and drills. Israel should also establish a national lessons-learned mechanism that gathers after-action reviews from communities, the police, the IDF, and local authorities and translates them into doctrine, equipment, and training. Too much of the necessary knowledge required to combat such threats currently remains local. The repository should cover real incidents, drills, failures, problems involving authority, and examples of successful action.

Conclusion

Israel can no longer base its defense doctrine on the assumption that communities under attack will wait passively for outside forces to arrive. The home front has become an active front, a complex civilian arena in which external attack, domestic terrorism, civil unrest, and serious crime can converge. The required conceptual shift is straightforward: homeland defense must begin with the community and the neighborhood.

This article therefore argues for making community and neighborhood defense the foundation of Israel’s homeland defense doctrine. The threat has changed: it is no longer confined to rocket fire or isolated incursions into border communities, but may involve coordinated action across several theaters, attacks on communities, roadblocks, infrastructure damage, widespread unrest, terrorism, and serious crime with nationalist characteristics. In the face of such threats, waiting for the IDF, police, or Border Police is not enough. Israel needs an integrated, institutionalized, and regularly drilled defense array in which communities, neighborhoods, and local authorities can respond immediately, delay attackers, protect residents, maintain control and functioning, and provide reinforcements with a reliable picture of events.

We propose a homeland defense doctrine that integrates local defense in communities and neighborhoods with a large, trained, regulated territorial National Guard capable of reinforcing them rapidly and linking local and national defense. Homeland defense, in other words, must be a complete operational system with clear responsibility and authority, authorized staffing, training, equipment, command, and regular drills.

Territorial defense should be judged not by how many weapons have been distributed or how many emergency response teams exist on paper, but by whether every domain- communities, access roads, infrastructure sites – can operate independently and effectively in the first minutes and hours of a security incident.

When trained, organized local forces can protect communities, roads, and critical infrastructure, the IDF has less need to divert maneuver units from the frontlines to security in the rear. A properly built array therefore gives both the government and the military genuine freedom of action. Decisions can be made with resilience and initiative rather than under the pressure of local collapse that force a chaotic response.

The effect on public confidence is equally important. When residents know that their community can defend itself quickly and professionally instead of waiting for outside help that may be late in arriving, they gain a sense of control and capability. Anxiety and helplessness give way to greater confidence in the system and a reduced sense of vulnerability.

[1] Boaz Zalmanovitz, “The Emergency Response Squad—Introduction,” Yesodot 7, IDF History Department, 2025 (Hebrew).
[2] Ministry of Interior, Home Front Command, and National Emergency Management Authority, “Master File for Municipal Emergency Preparedness,” December 2025 (Hebrew).
[3] Gabi Siboni and Erez Winner, “The Need for Territorial Defense and a National Guard,” Podcast 50, ICGS, June 1, 2026 (Hebrew).
[4] “The National Guard—Preliminary Information,” Knesset Research and Information Center, February 17, 2026 (Hebrew).