Protest group now backing war effort
Political concerns put aside for now
TEL AVIV — Made up largely of veterans and reservists, the group that calls itself Brothers in Arms started nine months ago as a protest movement against the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. It helped to organize giant weekly demonstrations against his plans to give the government unprecedented control over the judiciary. And many of its members vowed that they would not serve in the army if called.
But everything changed after Hamas brutally attacked Israel on Oct. 7. Not only did the reservists show up for duty, but Brothers in Arms has become the largest nongovernmental aid agency in Israel to help those affected by the war.
It is helping the military secure protective vests and helmets. It is feeding and clothing some of the perhaps 60,000 Israelis displaced from the area near the Gaza Strip after the Hamas assault. It is providing therapy to some and feeding the livestock and picking the produce of others.
It has worked with artificial intelligence experts and volunteers to comb videos and social media accounts to try to verify whom Hamas took as hostages and work out who survived and who did not. It has also provided any intelligence it can gather to the Israeli military.
But the more the group is seen positively by the Israeli public, the more those who support Netanyahu and his policies see it as a growing political force, even a threat.
On a recent day, at its main headquarters at a Tel Aviv convention center, several hundred volunteers worked on their computers and phones, using an internal app to match requests for aid and to figure out how to ship supplies to where they are needed. This is a civilian “war room,” effectively operating like a hightech company.
It is also providing volunteers a sense of belonging and a way to serve their country — almost in spite of the current government, which they oppose. About 15,000 people a day across Israel offer help to Brothers in Arms, the organizers said.
Eyal Naveh, 47, is one of the founders of Brothers in Arms. He is a veteran who served five years with Sayeret Matkal, an Israeli Special Forces unit in which Netanyahu also served.
When the government announced the legislation to overhaul the courts, Naveh considered it a “judicial coup,” he said in an interview. With fellow reservists, he quickly decided to fight the changes. “We want a Jewish and democratic state for generations to come,” he said.
But within hours of the Hamas attack, Naveh said, Brothers in Arms called on all reservists to show up for duty. “And then we created this civilian war room, or crisis center, with others from the protest, to try to do everything that civil society needs in a war.”
Naveh, who wore his dog tag over an army-green T-shirt with the group’s logo in Israeli blue and white, runs Brothers in Arms with four colleagues. Together, they decide priorities and delegate tasks to help the military and aid civilians.
They set up regional centers, too, including one near Beersheba, about 30 miles east of Gaza, in a region where they helped rescue and rehouse 2,000 families who were in hiding, he said, including people who had been holed up in fear at the site of a Hamas attack on a rave.
And they worked to retrieve DNA samples from the Israeli villages that were attacked to help identify the dead and the missing, so the army could inform the families.