Civil Guard (Israel)

Most Civil Guard volunteers patrol on foot or in vehicles in their own communities, working with police to improve security and order, prevent crime and terrorism, and assist population groups facing social problems.[1] The organization provides a framework through which residents participate in public security under police administration rather than through independent local security groups.[1][6]

The Civil Guard's neighborhood-security framework includes command centers, armed patrols, and training programs.[2] Its subsequent development brought volunteers into a wider range of police activities, including crime prevention, traffic work, maritime policing, and assistance to bomb squads.[4] Participation has included men, women, and teenagers, while specialized arrangements have enabled volunteers from different religious and community backgrounds to serve.[4][7]

In contemporary discussions of police organization, Civil Guard volunteers working in regular, or “blue,” police stations are distinguished from the Border Police's volunteer force.[8] Broader accounts of police volunteering have also used Civil Guard terminology when reporting volunteers assigned to Border Police and Traffic Police activities.[9] The Civil Guard is not the same organization as the Border Police-based “Israeli Guard,” also called the “National Guard,” announced in June 2022.[8]

The Civil Guard emerged as Palestinian terrorism intensified from the late 1960s onward, particularly after the Yom Kippur War.[10] Frequent terrorist incidents prompted concerned citizens to seek an active role in defending their communities, and the organization was established in 1974 to maintain neighborhood security units.[2] Volunteers were trained to provide an additional layer of civilian protection against terrorist attacks.[10]

The institutional groundwork followed the transfer of homeland-security responsibility from the Israel Defense Forces to the Israel Police.[4] In April 1974, government Resolution 411 called for a Civil Guard, and on July 10 the government decided to establish it amid increasing terrorism and public pressure for its creation.[4] A photograph from 1974 shows a police officer giving firearms instruction to high-school girls volunteering in the organization.[10]

Initially, the Civil Guard was intended to operate alongside the police rather than as an internal police organization.[4] It had separate national, district, and regional commands, a commander at each police station, and separate commanders for quarters in major cities.[4] An amendment to the Israel Police Law in February 1975 set out organizational guidelines and authorized police use of the Civil Guard in operations protecting lives and property from hostile actions.[4]

Its creation formed part of a broader adaptation of Israeli security arrangements to terrorist infiltration and attacks.[10][11] As attacks inside Israel increased, the police assumed domestic-security responsibilities and moved some Border Police companies from the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — inside the Green Line to reinforce regular police.[11] Territorial defense arrangements in border areas, Judea and Samaria, and the Gaza Strip were also reorganized along lines similar to the Border Police model to confront small, lethal infiltration units.[10]

Operation Gate, organized for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's 1977 visit, was the first significant operation integrating Civil Guard volunteers into local police-station activities.[4] With local stations almost emptied of regular officers, volunteers helped maintain station activity while large numbers of officers secured routes and performed homeland-security duties associated with the visit.[4]

A pilot project for special units of uniformed volunteers began in 1981 under the name MATMID and became a permanent feature in late 1982.[4] These volunteers joined police patrols, detective work, traffic activities, and crime-prevention operations, subsequently assisting in both homeland security and crime prevention.[4] An amendment to Section 49 of the Israel Police Law took effect in January 1989, defining volunteers' powers and jurisdiction and permitting police to enlist their assistance in protecting citizens' lives and property.[4] Amendments passed in 1996 specified activities including patrols, traffic duties, detective work, maritime policing, rescue of injured people, and assistance to police bomb squads.[4]

The Civil Guard's integration into the police developed in stages. One report dates its incorporation into the Israel Police to 1986.[12] In 1998, Police Commissioner Yehuda Vilk made a further decision to treat it as an integral part of the police, linking the change to community policing, improved public service, operational effectiveness, and greater public participation.[4] Volunteers subsequently assumed a more active role in the Community and Civil Guard Division and in community-policing centers.[4] By the end of 2011, responsibility for police volunteers was concentrated in the Volunteers Department within the Police Operations, Policing and Community Division of the Operations Directorate.[12]

A renewed recruitment drive followed the March 29, 2022 attack in Bnei Brak.[9] Within about two weeks, 1,500 people had applied, compared with 1,000–2,000 recruits in a successful year during the preceding decade.[9] The police linked this response to the recent wave of attacks and demand for a greater security presence in city streets, and announced a goal of recruiting 6,000 volunteers in the following month.[9]

A separate rehabilitation initiative envisaged 6,000 additional volunteers within six months and efforts to reduce bureaucratic obstacles to joining.[6] After six weeks of the “Guard the Home” campaign, nearly 4,000 people had joined, an increase described as 16 percent over a force of about 24,000.[13] Most new volunteers were assigned to assist the Border Police and Traffic Police.[13]

Police recruitment procedures distinguish several security-volunteering tracks: classic security volunteers, youth security volunteers, neighborhood or locality guards, bicycle units, and parent patrols.[14] Israeli citizens and permanent residents may generally apply, with age limits varying by assignment; the listed tracks include security volunteering from age 17 for youth and adult security activity at ages 18–64.[14] Recruitment requires suitability checks, role-specific training before placement, and an oath of allegiance before service.[14]

The basic preparation for security duties reported in April 2022 consisted of nine hours of police instruction, alongside firearms training and a shooting-range qualification.[9] Volunteers seeking traffic, detective, patrol, or Border Police assignments could undertake further training.[9] New recruits in the 2022 campaign were expected to contribute at least four hours weekly, and most reportedly exceeded that minimum.[13]

Assignments extend beyond ordinary neighborhood patrols.[4][15] A 2004 description listed standby units for factories, commercial premises, industrial parks, schools, and other educational institutions, as well as security activities for 11th- and 12th-grade students.[15] It also identified jeep, horse, and dog units and special security units serving major state and government enterprises, including water and electricity networks.[15] Police activities reported in 2022 included security and public-order duties, patrol, detective work, Border Police service, and specialized units such as divers.[9]

Civil Guard volunteers and community-policing officers have worked together using field intelligence and crime-fighting programs in crime prevention and homeland security.[4] Professionalization measures included an operating code for Civil Guard units and technical specifications for vehicles and other equipment.[4] In Jerusalem emergencies, trained volunteers joined regular emergency services and Magen David Adom in responding to incidents.[15] Unprepared spontaneous assistance, by contrast, could duplicate work, waste resources, and sometimes hinder emergency responders.[15]

Police-supervised urban rapid-response teams provide another application of Civil Guard service, with members volunteering for security-specific roles.[5] Recruitment follows police criteria, and operational control rests with the local station commander or operations officer through a volunteer coordinator.[5] The relevant regulations describe these teams as an operational reserve of Civil Guard volunteers available to support police during security incidents in both routine and emergency conditions.[5] As of April 2024, 906 police-supervised rapid-response teams were fully operational; this figure counts teams, not individual volunteers.[5]

These arrangements should also be distinguished from the broader history of readiness squads, which were institutionalized over time by the IDF and Border Police in their respective areas to provide a first response until regular forces arrived.[10] Following October 7, the Israel Police and Ministry of National Security established more than 900 new readiness squads.[10] That figure concerns newly established squads rather than the membership of the Civil Guard.[10]

Local organization connects volunteering to municipal and neighborhood institutions.[16] In Tel Aviv-Yafo, around 3,500 volunteers work from Civil Guard and community-policing bases whose locations are determined jointly by the municipality and police.[16] Their work supports law enforcement and public order and provides a link between police and the community; teenage service may also form part of a high-school Personal Commitment project.[16]

Training and assignments have accommodated ultra-Orthodox volunteers, including nighttime security work.[4] In Bnei Brak, volunteers guarded synagogues, rallies, weddings, and events organized by Hasidic groups and yeshivas.[4] These activities formed part of an organization whose membership spanned religious, ethnic, age, and ideological backgrounds across the country.[4]

In the 1990s, the Civil Guard was Israel's largest volunteer organization, with tens of thousands of members, a description that remained applicable in 2008.[4] Its development connected voluntary neighborhood protection with routine police work, community-policing centers, and specialized security assignments.[2][4]

Historical membership estimates illustrate the scale of participation at different points.[3][15] A study completed in 1988 described the force as having more than 100,000 volunteers.[3] A 2004 account reported about 75,000 volunteers, including 45,000 actively engaged in neighborhood patrols; about 8,000 of those patrol volunteers served in uniform with the Border Guard as MATMID volunteers, undertaking operational and combat duties from 65 bases.[15] Another published description gives a strength of 50,000 armed volunteers without specifying the date of the estimate.[17]

Figures for the wider police volunteer system likewise show its substantial contribution, without necessarily measuring the Civil Guard alone.[12] In March 2015, about 36,600 volunteers served in the police, whose work the police estimated as equivalent to approximately 2,000 police officers per month.[12] The reported 2015 budget for the volunteer system was approximately NIS 11.6 million.[12]

In April 2022, about 25,000 Civil Guard volunteers were reported across police activities, including 7,500 serving with the Border Police and 2,300 with the Traffic Police.[9] Another account that year placed the total at about 26,000, down from more than 50,000 a decade or 15 years earlier, and connected the decline to neglect of the volunteer system.[6]

The 2022 recruitment campaign brought participants from different demographic groups.[13] Among its new volunteers, 85 percent were men and 15 percent women; 77 percent were Jewish and 12 percent Muslim.[13] People aged 20–29 accounted for 35 percent, those aged 30–39 for 28 percent, and those aged 40–49 for 22 percent.[13] Interviewed Jewish recruits described wanting to help provide an initial response to attacks, while interviewed Muslim recruits cited personal security amid crime and violence in Arab society.[13]

The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs presents citizen watch groups as an element of Israeli resilience, describing armed and unarmed surveillance patrols supplied with police training and equipment and exercising limited powers to stop people, verify identity, and make arrests when necessary.[18] Its account gives more than 70,000 participants in the watch groups it discusses, with women making up 28 percent and men aged 40–55 the most common demographic.[18] It also reports more than 500,000 citizens volunteering during the Second Intifada, without specifying the precise period or limiting that number exclusively to the Civil Guard.[18]

The organization has also been a subject of academic study.[19] Dganit Manor's 2009 Hebrew-language doctoral thesis, “Guarding home, volunteering for the civil guard”: a view towards the recruited civil discourse in Israel, was supervised at Ben-Gurion University by Yishai Tobin and Andre Levy.[19]

Debate in 2022 centered on how civilian volunteering should supplement professional policing and whether informal armed groups could operate safely outside established frameworks.[6] Retired Deputy Commissioner Amnon Itzkovitz, a former head of police volunteers, described the Civil Guard as a force multiplier but warned that volunteers could not replace permanent police staffing, particularly because some might remain with their families during emergencies.[6] Ministry officials and representatives of Hashomer Hachadash urged would-be volunteers to join supervised police or Border Police frameworks, warning that unregulated armed groups could complicate police work or endanger people.[6]

The June 21, 2022 announcement of an Israeli Guard within the Border Police followed the May 2021 disturbances and proposals for a stronger response to serious public disorder.[8] Increasing Civil Guard volunteering at existing regular police stations was a separate component, intended in part to strengthen public security in routine conditions.[8] The proposals also raised questions about strict procedures and close professional supervision when volunteers were deployed during extreme disturbances.[8] Public Security Minister Omer Bar-Lev sought to address concerns about loss of control by stating that shift firearms would remain in police custody and pass between shifts rather than being personally issued to every volunteer.[9]

Management of the wider police volunteer system also drew official criticism.[12] A State Comptroller review found that earlier deficiencies had not been addressed, identified volunteer patrol vehicles used inconsistently with their operational purpose, and noted shortcomings in instruction and uniform supplies, including constraints on Border Police volunteers during Operation Protective Edge.[12] Police responses included professional training at the National Police College and field units, supervision of volunteer activity, and an equipment allocation exceeding NIS 3.5 million; these findings and responses concerned the wider volunteer system rather than exclusively the Civil Guard.[12]