Localized State Failure and Civil Society Mobilization in Israel After 7 October

Abstract

Does civil society mobilization supplement or entirely supplant the state during crises? This distinction remains theoretically significant yet empirically underdeveloped. An empirical framework based on the State-in-Society theory is applied in this study to analyze state–civil society relations in Israel following the 7 October 2023 attacks. Using qualitative interviews with 19 civil society leaders from 12 organizations conducted in January 2024, we examine the comprehensive substitution of state functions by non-state actors across security, welfare, and logistics domains. Findings reveal that protest organizations rapidly transformed into primary service providers, creating hybrid governance structures that persisted for months. Unlike government failure (dysfunction within intact institutions) or chronic state failure (gradual erosion in fragile contexts), Israel experienced “localized state failure”—a rapid, geographically constrained yet comprehensive collapse of core state functions in a high-income democracy, with immediate substitution by organized domestic civil society rather than international actors. This mobilization, based on a preexisting protest movement, demonstrates how robust civic infrastructure, even when mobilized against the government, creates latent governance capacity that can be activated during crises. The study advances the state-in-society theory, hybrid governance, and institutional resilience, offering a new perspective for distinguishing temporary dysfunction from fundamental collapse in democratic contexts.

1. Introduction

When civil society mobilizes to provide emergency services in the wake of a crisis, what do we see? Is it filling temporary gaps in an otherwise functioning state, or evidence of something more disturbing—a collapse in the state’s very capacity to govern? This question matters profoundly for our understanding of state durability, state–society relations, and the conditions under which political authority becomes contested—and for crisis management and recovery.

Government failure involves deficiencies in policy implementation or political leadership within otherwise intact institutional structures—failures that are domain-specific and reversible [1,2]. State failure, by contrast, signals the collapse of the state’s most basic functions: maintaining a monopoly over legitimate violence, delivering basic services, and earning citizens’ trust [3,4]. While government failure prompts political contestation within existing institutions, state failure can trigger alternative governance structures that reconfigure the distribution of authority across society.

The question of whether civil society supplements or substitutes for the state is itself a long-standing one in political sociology. The state-in-society tradition rejected both the Weberian image of an autonomous state and the society-centric reaction to it, arguing that state power is always conditional on, and produced through, ongoing transactions with social forces [5,6,7]. Tendler’s [8] study of effective service delivery in Brazil similarly disrupted the binary of “state versus NGO,” documenting a three-way dynamic in which central government, mission-driven frontline workers, and organized civil society co-produced public goods. This tradition has since been extended into work on hybrid political orders [9,10], areas of limited statehood [11], state–society co-production [12,13], the politics of non-state welfare provision [14], and renewed analyses of state capacity in the developing world [15]. What remains underspecified is the question this paper takes up: under what conditions do mutually constitutive state–society relations invert, with society no longer constraining or supplementing the state but substituting for it?

The conceptualization of failed states remains a work in progress [16]. Current definitions cover only low- and lower-middle-income economies and are predominantly applied to chronically failed states, omitting fragility in otherwise stable states resulting from sudden political or economic shocks. Most scholarship also examines state failure retrospectively in contexts of prolonged civil war or humanitarian catastrophe [9,10], overlooking how it emerges and how it differs from government dysfunction. Distinguishing supplementation from substitution aids early detection of state failure and advances theorization of disaster response, hybrid governance, and institutional collapse.

Yet we lack empirical models to distinguish between these two forms of breakdown. This gap limits our understanding of when and why civil society supplements state efforts (implying government failure) or supplants the state entirely (signaling state failure). We propose a Concentric Rings analytic framework of state–society relations as an empirical frame of analysis and apply it to dissect civil society responses to a dramatic shock in a high-income country—Israel in the aftermath of the 7 October attacks. We interviewed civil society leaders to study the wholesale replacement of state functions by non-state actors across security, welfare, and logistical domains in the affected regions.

2. The Main Concepts: State and Government Failure

The conditions under which political systems malfunction have long attracted scholarly interest. Two often conflated concepts—state failure and government failure—feature prominently in these debates; distinguishing them is foundational to diagnosing the nature of institutional breakdown, understanding civil society’s roles, and identifying points of intervention.

State Failure denotes the collapse of the state’s structural capacities, authority, and legitimacy, whereas government failure refers to deficiencies in policy-making, implementation, or political leadership within otherwise intact state institutions [1,3,5,17]. The state is not a monolithic actor but a set of competing organizations, norms, and practices embedded within social structures [5,7]. State failure thus emerges when these structures lose coherence: the state cannot enforce rules, extract resources, or maintain a monopoly over legitimate violence. Call [4] defines state failure through three “gaps”: the capacity gap (inability to deliver basic public services), the security gap (inability to protect the population from armed threats), and the legitimacy gap (rejection of state authority by elites and citizens). Rotberg [3] identifies indicators such as pervasive insecurity, loss of territorial control, institutional decay, and severe declines in welfare provision. These symptoms reflect not merely a malfunctioning government but a collapsing state.

State failure is usually associated with developing nations, where institutions are weaker; however, a major crisis such as war or natural disaster may induce state failure even in developed democracies. State failure is also normally conceived as a dichotomy—a state either persists or fails—but it can occur in a specific area when the state loses control and government services stop functioning.

Government Failure has a more technocratic lineage, associated with public choice theory, policy sciences, and administrative sociology. Wolf [1] defines government failure as the inability of governmental interventions to yield efficient or desirable outcomes, due to information asymmetries, incentive misalignments, or political imperatives. Dunleavy [18] and Peters [2] highlight bureaucratic pathologies and coordination problems, while Bovens and Hart [19] emphasize the dynamics of policy fiascos driven by leadership failures, organizational blind spots, or inadequate accountability. In this tradition, the state’s legitimacy and coercive capacity remain intact; what fails is the government’s effectiveness in specific domains, services, or vis-à-vis certain populations.

The context of this study requires exploring these concepts in humanitarian crises. Crises serve as stress tests for political systems, revealing the robustness or fragility of state structures and state–society relations [20]. They also help distinguish analytically between government and state failure. Hurricane Katrina (2005) and post-earthquake Haiti (2010) anchor the two ends of this distinction. Katrina exposed serious flaws in U.S. federal, state, and municipal response—bureaucratic rigidity, slow FEMA mobilization, inadequate evacuation planning, and inter-governmental coordination breakdowns—but the American state’s coercive monopoly, fiscal capacity, and legitimacy were not in question, and its institutions, though stressed, were rapidly reconstituted [20,21,22,23]. Civil society, faith groups, and community networks acted as gap-fillers, supplementing the state while implicitly affirming its authority [24]. Katrina is therefore read as multi-level government failure within a high-capacity state: domain-specific, reversible, and bounded by intact institutions.

Haiti illustrates the contrasting case. The 2010 earthquake landed on a state already weak, fragmented, and short of legitimacy [25], and “violently undermined the precarious capacity and functionality of national institutions” [26] (p. 15). Police forces were reduced, gangs asserted territorial control and communities improvised governance through neighborhood committees, customary leaders, or gang-affiliated groupings. Tax extraction and the management of reconstruction funds collapsed [27], leaving households to rely on remittances and informal economies. Public utilities, schools, and healthcare were taken over—temporarily or permanently—by international NGOs and the UN stabilization mission. With local NGOs, they became the de facto state, supplying security, shelter, healthcare, and food [28]. The contrast with Katrina is clear: where government fails, civil society fills gaps within a still-functioning state; where the state itself fails, civil society is pulled into a substitution role it was not designed for [26]. Although direct comparisons with the two cases are limited and must account for multiple contextual variables, they help bracket the conceptual space the present study seeks to extend.

3. The Analytic Framework: The Concentric Rings of State–Society Relations

To empirically examine this distinction, we propose a Concentric Rings analytic framework of state–society relations. The model is an empirical operationalization of the state-in-society intuition that the boundary between state and society is permeable, and the locus of social control is contested. It conceptualizes society as organized around nested rings of institutional proximity to the state:

• Ring 1: Core State Institutions (executive, legislature, judiciary, bureaucracy, coercive apparatus).
• Ring 2: Public Sector and Para-State Bodies (municipalities, quasi-government agencies, Quangos).
• Ring 3: Civil Society and Associational Life (nonprofits, advocacy organizations, unions, voluntary groups).
• Ring 4: Communities, Informal Networks, Social Movements.
• Ring 5: Households and Individuals.

Under normal conditions, interactions between rings are regulated by formal and informal mechanisms of coordination, accountability, and legitimacy, with Ring 1 anchoring authority and Rings 2–5 providing societal compliance, participation, resources, and normative support.

Government failure occurs within Ring 1, and its effects radiate outward:

• Ring 1 dysfunction: Poor policy design, bureaucratic fragmentation, regulatory capture, or political gridlock.
• Secondary effects on Ring 2: Implementation gaps in municipalities or para-state agencies; service delivery failures.
• Societal responses in Rings 3–5: community-based social services, advocacy, protests, public criticism, or electoral mobilization.

Crucially, the structure and linkages between rings remain intact—the state still commands legitimacy and societal actors still orient themselves toward it—which is why government failure often catalyzes reform rather than collapse.

State failure originates when Ring 1 collapses as an anchor, leading to cascading dysfunction:

• Breakdown of coercive and administrative capacity: Loss of territorial control (complete or in specific areas), inability to enforce laws or extract revenue.
• Disintegration of Ring 2: Public-sector bodies become autonomous, predatory, or cease functioning.
• Rise of alternative governance systems in Rings 3–4: Non-state armed groups, religious authorities, clans, NGOs, or international actors assume functions of security, welfare, and adjudication.
• Fragmentation in Ring 5: Households rely on informal networks, kinship structures, or external patrons for survival.

In this scenario, the architecture of the concentric rings is reconfigured: authority becomes dispersed and contested, and new centers of governance emerge outside the formal state. The model conceptualizes state failure not as an instantaneous collapse but as a progressive decoupling of rings, in which the state loses its anchoring role and societal actors reorganize governance in hybrid or competitive forms.

Bringing together the literature and the Concentric Rings analytic framework offers at least three theoretical contributions:

• A multi-level perspective: Distinguishing state failure from government failure clarifies whether dysfunction originates in the core (Ring 1) or in the ‘connective tissue’ between rings.
• A sociological account of diffusion: The framework illustrates how failures propagate through social structures—either as performance dissatisfaction (government failure) or as systemic reordering (state failure).
• A basis for comparative empirical research: The model can guide case selection and hypothesis development about variations in resilience, hybrid governance, and civil-society substitution across contexts.

4. Context of the Study

State–society relations in Israel are widely described as dense, historically rooted, and shaped by both nation-building imperatives and enduring social cleavages. Unlike many Western democracies, core societal institutions—political parties, labor organizations, and voluntary associations—emerged prior to statehood and played a central role in creating the state [29]. This sequence produced a “strong society–strong state” configuration, characterized by blurred boundaries between state and society. Early governance was dominated by centralized, quasi-corporatist arrangements, though these structures gradually eroded in favor of greater pluralism and marketization [30].

Israeli society’s deep heterogeneity—across ethnic (Jewish–Arab), religious, and socio-economic lines—generates persistent contestation over state policies and identity. Within this context, civil society occupies an important but ambivalent role: it is both highly developed and deeply entangled with the state. Governments have long relied on non-state actors for welfare provision while also regulating and funding them, producing a hybrid model that combines cooperation with tension [31].

Scholars also emphasize the impact of ongoing conflict and security concerns, which reinforce state centrality while simultaneously stimulating civic mobilization and protest. Civil society organizations frequently operate at the intersection of partnership and opposition, especially around issues of democracy and minority rights [32]. Overall, prior to 2023, Israeli state–society relations are best understood as dynamic and contested, marked by strong interdependence alongside increasing institutional differentiation.

In 2023, Israel had been convulsed for nine months by the most acute domestic political crisis in its history. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s plans to restructure the judiciary threatened to upset the balance of power between the executive and the courts, prompting hundreds of thousands to mobilize for thirty-seven consecutive weeks in the largest sustained protest in the country’s history [33]. The mobilization was notable for its organizational architecture: multiple groups organized distinct movements under shared logistical infrastructure, and the twelve organizations in this study were among the most prominent nodes in this ecosystem.

On 7 October 2023, the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, Hamas and allied Palestinian militant groups launched the deadliest attack on Israeli soil in history, breaching the security barrier and massacring civilians across more than twenty-one communities in the Gaza Envelope. Many analysts argue that the attack was driven by a combination of strategic and ideological factors, including opposition to Israel’s existence, efforts to disrupt regional normalization processes, and a desire to reposition itself within Palestinian politics. Others situate the attack within the broader context of the long-standing Israeli–Palestinian conflict and Israeli occupation, including ongoing tensions, blockade conditions in Gaza, and cycles of violence.

Approximately 1200 Israelis and foreign nationals were killed, and some 251 individuals were taken hostage [34]. By November 2023, approximately 253,000 Israelis had been displaced from their homes in the south and north, distributed across improvised arrangements throughout the country [35]. The attack left hundreds of thousands of citizens in the north and south of Israel under rocket fire, without security, welfare, or basic logistical support.

Within hours, protest organizations redirected infrastructure built during nine months of demonstrations toward emergency relief [36]. By 8 October, a Civilian Operations Hub had been established, drawing some 15,000 volunteers to coordinate evacuations, identify missing persons, and distribute medical supplies and psychological support to displaced families [37]. In the weeks and months that followed, these organizations remained the only or primary providers of welfare and logistical support in the affected regions and were publicly recognized as supplanting state institutions [38]. Notably, the actions of these organizations were limited to Israelis and confined to the sovereign borders of Israel. Humanitarian aid on the Gazan side is beyond the scope of this study.

5. Methods

We used a qualitative methodology primarily based on in-depth interviews, acknowledging the value of knowledge production from below in the study of civil society, with its ethical and political liberating purposes [39], and emphasizing the discursive and reflective nature of activism [40].

We interviewed 19 leaders from 12 organizations (Table 1). These organizations were central actors in the protests against Netanyahu’s government’s attempt to alter Israel’s judicial system (see below). Most were established for this purpose, while others have been protesting Netanyahu’s alleged corruption for several years. On 7 October, these organizations became pivotal actors in the aid efforts in the northern and southern war zones.

Table 1. Organizations in the study.

Organization	Brief Description
Brothers and Sisters in Arms (Achim LaNeshek)	Organization of reservists from the IDF and other security forces.
Women Building an Alternative (Bonot Alternativa)	A feminist activist organization promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment and fighting violence toward women.
No Academy without Democracy	Academic leaders from all universities, colleges, and other scientific institutions.
No Education without Democracy	Organization of educational institutes’ educators, students, and their parents.
White Coats	An organization of health professionals led by the doctors’ union chair.
First Line Med	An organization of health professionals providing medical assistance to demonstrators.
Hi-Tech Protest	Leaders of the Hi-Tech community concerned about the future of that industry.
Local anti-Judicial Reform Nuclei	Protest nuclei organized in over 60 locations outside of the main cities.
Crime Minister	A movement protesting Prime Minister Netanyahu’s alleged corruption.
Black Flags/Kaplan Force	A movement protesting Prime Minister Netanyahu’s alleged corruption, later renamed Kaplan Force.

5.1. Organizations Studied

General Character of the Protest Organizations

The protest movement against the 2023 judicial reform in Israel is characterized in emerging academic literature as a large-scale but socially skewed, cross-sectoral, and politically liberal mobilization within a highly polarized context.

Demographically, participation was broad yet uneven. Evidence points to overrepresentation of Jewish, secular, urban, and highly educated groups, particularly from economically central sectors such as high-tech, academia, and the professions, alongside notable involvement of reservists and former security elites [36,41]. Participation by Arab citizens and more peripheral or religious populations was comparatively limited, reflecting enduring social cleavages and ethno-national tensions related to the occupation and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict [42].

Socially, the protests combined grassroots digital mobilization with participation from established civil society organizations and professional groups. Their scale and persistence, together with engagement from economic, medical, legal, and former military sectors, mark them as a form of cross-sectoral civic mobilization, though one still shaped by underlying inequalities [36,43].

Politically, the movement is best understood as part of intensified polarization and regime contestation. It was largely aligned with centrist, center-left, and liberal-democratic orientations, framing the Judicial reform as a threat to institutional checks and balances [41]. More broadly, scholars interpret the protests as reflecting a clash between liberal-democratic and majoritarian-nationalist visions of the state [44,45]. Overall, the protests can be seen as a mass yet socially differentiated mobilization led by core Jewish liberal sectors, organizationally hybrid, and politically anchored in a broader struggle over the character of Israeli democracy.

5.2. Instruments and Procedure

In January 2024, we conducted videoconference interviews with 1 to 2 interviewees per organization, either at home or in the workplace. Interviews lasted one to two hours. Both authors participated in all the interviews. While one researcher led the interview, the other asked supplementary questions and took field notes. We began the interview by introducing ourselves and the study’s purpose, obtained verbal consent to participate and record, and recorded via Zoom.

The interviews were open-ended, guided by three questions:

• Tell me about your organization or group from the beginning until October 6th (the protest phase).
• What happened since 7 October (the start of the Gaza war)?
• What are the plans for the organization from now on?

We let interviewees speak freely, prompting with clarifying or expansion questions as needed.

Besides the interviews, the study also used four more sources of information:

• Field notes from researchers’ participant observations in multiple protest events, demonstrations, and support activities of a few target organizations.
• Observations in the headquarters of one of the larger organizations.
• Written materials of and about the organizations, including news interviews, blog posts, and websites.
• Previous participants’ interviews recorded in the media.

We transcribed all recorded materials using Hebrew-enabled AI with human review (https://thetranscriber.net/) (accessed on 26 February 2024).

We conducted thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke’s [46] structured process at the semantic level [47]. Repeated reading identified key and recurring arguments within and across interviews; both authors coded independently, then merged their analyses into a single coding system. Analysis was assisted by Quirkos v2.5.3 [48]. Interviews were conducted and analyzed in Hebrew. Translation was AI-assisted (ChatGPT 4) and human-verified. Quotes are attributed to organizations rather than individuals, as requested by some participants.

6. Findings: Civil Society and State Failure in Israel After 7 October

The thematic analysis found six major themes, each with 2–3 subthemes.

6.1. Theme 1: Immediate State Absence and Spontaneous Civil Society Mobilization

The most striking theme across all interviews was the immediate and comprehensive absence of state institutions in the first hours and days following 7 October, creating a vacuum that civil society actors rushed to fill—not as a supplementary force but as the primary, and often only, responders. This pattern reflects a fundamental collapse of Ring 1, forcing Ring 3 to assume responsibilities far beyond its traditional scope.

The Collapse of Ring 1: Participants described a complete absence of state presence in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. A central figure from Brothers and Sisters in Arms described the shocking reality:

“In the first days, there was nothing. The state simply was not there. We had soldiers calling us, saying they don’t have equipment, they don’t have food, and they don’t even know where they are supposed to go or how to get there. The army was not functioning; the government was not functioning.”

(Brothers and Sisters in Arms)

This state absence was not limited to the military sphere. One of Brothers and Sisters in Arms’ founders emphasized the breadth of the vacuum:

“The state disappeared in every dimension—security, welfare, logistics. Communities in the south had no food, no water, no medical supplies. Evacuated families were wandering with nowhere to go. And there was no one from the government coordinating anything.”

(Brothers and Sisters in Arms)

A doctor from The White Coats described how medical professionals found themselves operating in a complete institutional void:

“As doctors, we expected the Ministry of Health to coordinate the medical response. But they were nowhere—a somewhat concerning absence during a mass casualty event. Hospitals were overwhelmed, ambulances could not reach communities under attack, and there was no central coordination. We had to create our own command structure.”

(The White Coats)

Civil Society as Primary Responder—Ring 3 Substituting for Ring 1: In the absence of state institutions, civil society organizations found themselves not supplementing state efforts but entirely replacing them. A leader of Brothers and Sisters in Arms described this transformation:

“We went from being a protest organization to running a national logistics operation within 48 h. We were supplying army units with equipment, evacuating families from the south, providing medical care, and coordinating volunteers. These are all things the state should have been doing—and would be doing in any functional democracy, but we were the only ones doing them.”

(Brothers and Sisters in Arms)

A Crime Minister activist emphasized how his anti-government protest organization immediately pivoted to filling state functions:

“On 7 October, we stopped being protesters and became emergency responders. We coordinated rescue operations, we evacuated communities, and we supplied equipment to soldiers. The state infrastructure had collapsed, and we stepped in because there was no other choice.”

(Crime Minister)

A Women Building an Alternative interviewee described how civil society’s role fundamentally changed from advocacy to service delivery:

“Before 7 October, we were advocating for change. After 7 October, we were delivering services that the state couldn’t or didn’t want to deliver. We provided psychological support, legal aid, housing coordination—all state functions that state institutions just didn’t perform.”

(Women Building an Alternative)

6.2. Theme 2: From Gap-Filling to State Substitution

A critical distinction emerged between civil society as a ‘gap-filler’ (supplementing state efforts) and as a ‘state-substitute’ (replacing state functions entirely)—central to distinguishing government from state failure in the Concentric Rings framework. In government failure, Ring 3 supplements Ring 1 while the institutional architecture remains intact; in state failure, Ring 3 entirely replaces Ring 1’s functions.

Complete Functional Replacement: Participants explicitly articulated that they were not filling gaps but taking over state functions:

“This was not about filling gaps in state services. There were no state services to fill gaps in. We were not supplementing the government response—we were the response. The entire welfare infrastructure in the south was being run by NGOs and volunteer organizations.”

(Brothers and Sisters in Arms)

Another elaborated on how civil society organizations found themselves performing core state functions across multiple domains:

“We were doing everything the state is supposed to do. Security coordination, welfare distribution, healthcare provision, and housing allocation. Not only did we substitute for the welfare state, but we also added services that it had long neglected. We became the de facto government in the south.”

(Black Flags/Kaplan Force)

A leader from a local protest nucleus described how agricultural communities had to create entirely parallel governance structures:

“The kibbutzim and moshavim in the south essentially became autonomous entities. We coordinated our own security, managed our own evacuations, and distributed our own resources. The state had no presence whatsoever. We were self-governing out of necessity, not choice.”

(Local nuclei)

Recognition of Fundamental Reconstruction: Participants related that this substitution was not merely an emergency measure but a deeper reconfiguration of state–society relations. A leader from the Hi-Tech Protest described this realization:

“At first, we thought this would be a few days or weeks until the government got its act together. Spoiler: it wasn’t. Weeks turned into months, and we are still running these operations. The state has not returned to fulfil these functions. We have essentially become permanent substitute institutions.”

(Hi-Tech Protest)

An activist from the Hi-Tech Protest reflected on how this fundamentally altered the relationship between civil society and the state:

“We are not temporary helpers anymore. We are the primary service providers. The state has ceded these functions to us, whether intentionally or through sheer incompetence. This is a fundamental shift in how governance works in Israel.”

(Hi-Tech Protest)

In a mixture of pride and disappointment, a few told how government ministries and local governments, even the military, turned to them for help:

“I got calls from military units asking if I had this or that medical equipment. A few hours later, they would arrive in their Humvee and load even the most basic items. Later, we were the ones to equip army units with new technologies that the army didn’t have yet.”

(White Coats)

“Mayors came to us… They said, ‘Guys, listen, we have a crisis with the youth, our youth. They’re turning to violence and alcohol and drugs, and all kinds of things… and they said, ‘Come keep our youth busy for us.’ So we established afternoon educational centers for the youth in the evacuation centers.”

(Brothers and Sisters in Arms)

“The Ministry of Health approached us. They placed a project director on the mental health issue. He called us and said, ‘Please come save me. I have chaos… Some people meet with three therapists one after the other, while others are not seen by any therapist. Please come make order.’“

(Brothers and Sisters in Arms)

6.3. Theme 3: Organizational Transformation from Protest to Service Delivery

A remarkable theme was how protest organizations—groups that had spent months opposing government policies—rapidly transformed into service delivery organizations performing core state functions. Ironically, organizations accused of undermining the state proved to be the ones performing its most basic functions, shifting from external critics to internal operatives of governance.

From Opposition to Operation: One Academic Protest Movement leader described how protest organizations immediately suspended their political activities and redirected their resources:

“We were supposed to have a nationwide school strike on 15 October. Instead, we mobilized our entire network to support displaced families, coordinate volunteer efforts, and provide educational services to evacuated children. The protest infrastructure became a service infrastructure overnight.”

(No Democracy without Academia)

The organizational capabilities developed during the protests proved invaluable:

“All the skills we developed organizing protests—logistics, communications, volunteer coordination, fundraising—we applied them to emergency response. We had networks spanning the entire country, we knew how to mobilize people quickly, and we had established trust with communities. These became critical assets when the state failed.”

(No Democracy without Academia)

Leveraging Protest Networks for Emergency Response: The infrastructure built during months of protests—WhatsApp groups, volunteer networks, funding mechanisms, media connections—became the backbone of emergency response efforts. One interviewee described the transition this way:

“We had spent a year building a network of thousands of activists. On 8 October, we sent out a message: “We are no longer protesting; we are responding. Within hours, we had volunteer centers set up across the country. The same people who were demonstrating against the government were now doing the government’s job.”

(Local nuclei)

A No Education Without Democracy interviewee highlighted how educational activists became emergency educators:

“Teachers who were protesting against government education policies suddenly found themselves creating emergency schooling for displaced children. We set up learning centers in hotels where evacuees were staying, we developed online curricula, and we provided psychological support. The Ministry of Education was nowhere to be seen.”

(No Education Without Democracy)

6.4. Theme 4: Emergence of Hybrid Governance Structures

The interviews revealed hybrid governance structures in which authority and service delivery were reshuffled—consistent with the Concentric Rings framework’s prediction that state failure leads to reconfiguration, with Rings 3, 4, and 5 assuming functions previously centralized in Ring 1.

Decentralized Command Structures: Participants described how decision-making and coordination occurred through informal networks rather than formal state hierarchies:

“There was no centralized command. Different organizations coordinated among themselves through WhatsApp groups and informal meetings. We handled logistics in one area, Crime Minister in another, and local governments in another. It was completely decentralized, but it worked better than any government coordination would have.”

(Brothers and Sisters in Arms)

Another described how this created a new form of distributed governance:

“We were not following government directives because there weren’t any. Each organization identified needs and responded based on its capabilities. Local mayors became de facto regional coordinators. NGOs became service providers. Hi-tech companies became logistics operators. It was chaotic but functional—a new ecosystem of governance.”

(Brothers and Sisters in Arms)

Competition and Cooperation Among Non-State Actors: The hybrid governance environment created both cooperation and competition among non-state actors. A veteran activist noted the tensions:

“Sometimes we cooperated beautifully—different organizations complementing each other’s work. Other times, there was duplication and competition over resources and recognition. Without a central coordinating authority, inefficiencies were inevitable. But even with those inefficiencies, we delivered more than the state could have.”

(Crime Minister)

Local communities became autonomous governance units:

“Each kibbutz [of the attacked and evacuated communities] developed its own system. Some worked with certain NGOs, others with different ones. Some established their own emergency protocols. There was no standardization, but there was innovation. Communities found what worked for them without waiting for government direction.”

(Local nuclei)

6.5. Theme 5: Long-Term Implications and Sustainability Questions

Participants expressed deep concern about the sustainability of civil society assuming state functions—and uncertainty about whether the reconfiguration is temporary or permanent.

Burnout and Resource Constraints: Participants described the unsustainable burden placed on civil society organizations and volunteers. One explained:

“Medical professionals are exhausted. We have been working double shifts for months—our regular jobs plus volunteer emergency response. This cannot continue indefinitely. This seems obvious, yet here we are. Civil society organizations run on volunteer energy and donations, not endless government budgets. We will burn out.”

(The White Coats)

Another highlighted the organizational strain:

“People are exhausted. The same individuals who led protests all year are now running emergency operations. Many have their own trauma from the attacks. The motivation is still there, but the capacity is declining. If the state does not return to its functions soon, these civil society networks will collapse.”

(No Democracy without Academia)

Legitimacy and Accountability Concerns: Participants also raised legitimacy and accountability concerns:

“Who elected us to make these decisions? We are volunteers and NGO workers, not elected officials. Yes, we are effective, but are we accountable? Are we legitimate? These are state functions being performed by unelected actors. That is a democratic problem.”

(Hi-Tech Protest)

A women’s rights activist questioned whether civil society should continue performing these roles:

“There is a danger that by doing the state’s job so effectively, we’re enabling state failure. Maybe the state needs to feel the pressure of its own absence. By filling every gap, are we preventing the systemic reform that is desperately needed?”

(Women Building an Alternative)

Future of State–Society Relations: Several participants contemplated whether this represented a fundamental restructuring of Israeli governance:

“I do not think we can go back to how things were. The state has proven that we can’t rely on it. Civil society has proven it can deliver. This is a permanent shift in who holds power and responsibility in Israel. The question is whether we can formalize this hybrid model or whether we will remain in this chaotic in-between state.”

(Brothers and Sisters in Arms)

Another activist expressed hope for a reformed relationship:

“Maybe this crisis will force a rethinking of state-society relations. Maybe we will develop new partnership models in which civil society is formally integrated into emergency response systems, with our capabilities recognized and supported by the state rather than substituting for it. That would be the ideal outcome.”

(No Education Without Democracy)

6.6. Theme 6: Political Implications and Government Legitimacy

The final major theme concerns the political implications of state failure. Participants described how 7 October undermined government legitimacy and raised questions about the future of the already fragile Israeli democracy.

Loss of Government Legitimacy: Participants argued that the state’s failure on 7 October represented a complete collapse of governmental legitimacy:

“The government failed at its most basic function—protecting its citizens. Not a minor detail, as it turns out. Then it failed at its second-most basic function: responding to the catastrophe. The social contract is broken. People no longer believe the government can or will protect them.”

(Crime Minister)

A professor connected this to the pre-7 October political crisis:

“We were protesting the government’s assault on democracy all year. Then, on 7 October, it proved that it is not just undemocratic—it is incompetent. The judicial coup distracted them from security threats. The internal political crisis weakened the military. And when disaster struck, they had no capacity to respond. This government has no legitimacy left.”

(No Democracy without Academia)

Persistent views of the state–society relations: The disillusionment with the current government doesn’t mean that they support a wholesale change in expectations from the state. The participants recurrently express expectations that the state will resume its responsibilities, seeing their role in replacing it as ideally temporary:

“We entered every place where we saw a vacuum, tried to give the solution. The moment we saw that the state—the IDF Home Front Command—took responsibility, we told them, ‘It’s yours, continue.’”

(Brothers in Arms)

“If a wonderful government is established now that changes the conditions of the State of Israel, then they will tell us: ‘Friends, this government… don’t do the government’s work. It’s not necessary. Why should you do education? There is a Ministry of Education.’”

They actively sought to transfer the work they had done to the hands of the government. An activist from Brothers and Sisters in Arms detailed a clear transition in the search for missing persons. After weeks of gathering and analyzing social media data, the organization submitted its database to the Shabak [Israel’s internal intelligence agency] and the Ministry of Defence. Once the state’s security apparatus took over the mission, she stated that her team “ceased to be relevant” and left the task to the authorities.

Another activist who set up Kindergartens for the displaced noted a shift in the Ministry of Education’s attitude. After initially “pushing away” civil society efforts, the Ministry eventually integrated these efforts, recognizing their kindergartens as “official kindergartens of the State of Israel.” (Brothers and Sisters in Arms)

Civil Society as Alternative Authority: Participants described how civil society organizations gained authority through their effective response, creating an alternative power structure to the formal government. They explained:

“People trust us more than they trust the government. When they need help, they call NGOs rather than government hotlines. When they want information, they turn to civil society networks rather than government communications. We have become the de facto authority.”

(Black Flags/Kaplan Force)

An activist reflected on the implications for Israeli democracy:

“This creates a paradox. Civil society is unelected, but it is more legitimate than the elected government because it actually delivers. This is both a triumph of civic engagement and a crisis of democratic governance. How do you sustain a democracy when the government has no credibility?”

(Hi-Tech Protest)

Pathways Forward: Several participants argued that this moment requires fundamental political reform:

“7 October revealed what the protests already showed—this government cannot govern. We need new leadership, new institutions, and new frameworks for state-society cooperation. Civil society proved we can organize ourselves effectively, but we should not have to. We need a state that works.”

(Brothers and Sisters in Arms)

A local mobilizer suggested that civil society’s success might paradoxically enable continued government dysfunction:

“The better we do at filling the gaps, the less pressure there is on the government to reform. Maybe we need to step back and let the system fail more visibly so that political change becomes inevitable. But that means people suffer in the meantime. It’s an impossible ethical dilemma.”

(Local nuclei)

7. Discussion

Israel’s response to the 7 October crisis is a case of a localized state failure rather than government failure, with profound implications for understanding state–society relations during acute crises. This discussion examines the theoretical and empirical dimensions of these findings, situating them within broader sociological debates about governance breakdown, civil society capacity, and the transformation of state–society relations.

7.1. State Failure in Democratic Contexts

The Israeli case challenges conventional assumptions about where and how state failure occurs. Scholarship has predominantly focused on post-colonial states, conflict zones, and economically underdeveloped regions [3,4]. Israel’s state response capacity in the attacked regions collapsed despite its status as a high-income democracy with sophisticated institutions. This shows that state failure is not confined to traditionally “fragile” contexts. Rather, what we’re seeing here might be termed “localized democratic state failure”—a rapid, comprehensive yet geographically limited collapse of core state functions triggered by a singular catastrophic event, occurring within a democratic system with robust civil society infrastructure. It is exhibited as loss of state control in catastrophe-affected regions.

This form of state failure differs fundamentally from both gradual state erosion in authoritarian contexts [49] and government dysfunction in stable democracies. It has: (1) sudden onset triggered by a catastrophic external shock; (2) comprehensive collapse across multiple state functions simultaneously in the affected areas; (3) immediate substitution by organized domestic civil society rather than international actors; (4) preservation of democratic norms and institutions even as state capacity evaporates; and (5) uncertain sustainability of civil society-led governance.

The simultaneity of the crisis—combining security threats, mass displacement, and humanitarian emergency—overwhelmed institutional response capacity across multiple domains. This left a governance vacuum; civil society actors rushed in not as a supplement to but as a substitute for state capacity. The speed of this transformation suggests that civil society’s governance substitution capacity may be more developed in democratic contexts than previously theorized, emerging from existing civic networks rather than requiring lengthy institutional development.

The transformation reflects what Colona and Jaffe [50] describe as hybrid governance arrangements, in which boundaries between state and non-state actors blur. Unlike hybrid governance in developing contexts—where non-state actors gradually assume functions alongside weak states—Israel’s case shows how such arrangements can emerge suddenly and comprehensively, even where the state previously monopolized authority. The protest movements had already created organizational capacity, network structures, and operational expertise rapidly redeployable for crisis response [51]. Robust civil society—perhaps especially when mobilized in opposition to government—thus creates latent governance capacity activatable when state institutions fail, revealing an underexplored link between contentious politics and institutional resilience.

7.2. Refining the Concentric Rings Analytic Framework

The empirical findings enable theoretical refinement of the Concentric Rings framework, advancing its capacity to analyze how dysfunction propagates through social structures and how authority relocates during governance crises.

First, the model requires temporal dimensionality—the rings do not reconfigure instantaneously but pass through identifiable phases: (1) initial shock and state paralysis; (2) civil society mobilization and gap-filling; (3) establishment of parallel governance structures; (4) normalization of hybrid arrangements; and potentially (5) state reassertion or permanent hybrid governance. Understanding these phases helps explain variation in civil society response capacity and state recovery trajectories. In our case, the substitutes were committed but reluctant; they viewed their roles as the state’s responsibility and actively encouraged the state to reclaim what they had achieved.

Second, the model must incorporate power asymmetries within rings. Ring 3 organizations do not uniformly possess the capacity to assume Ring 1 functions; variations in capacity, resource access, political connections, and domain expertise create hierarchies shaping which organizations successfully assume governance roles. Well-resourced, professionalized organizations dominated, while smaller community-based ones played subordinate roles—with significant implications for whose interests are represented.

Third, ring permeability exceeds initial conceptualization: government employees volunteered with civil society organizations, military reservists worked through NGOs, and local officials coordinated with community groups. Governance capacity is not rigidly bounded by institutional location but flows through network relationships spanning rings.

7.3. Comparative Sociology of Governance Breakdown

Comparison with Hurricane Katrina and Haiti illuminates distinctive characteristics of different governance failure types. In Katrina, the U.S. federal response exhibited classic government failure—coordination breakdowns, bureaucratic rigidity, and inadequate resource allocation [21,23]—while state institutions remained intact: citizens could appeal to functioning legal systems, officials remained accountable through democratic processes, and civil society targeted specific agencies rather than fundamental state capacity.

In Haiti, state fragility preceded the earthquake [25,27]; the disaster exacerbated it, leading international organizations and NGOs to assume primary governance roles in what Schuller [26] terms a “republic of NGOs.” The international community, rather than domestic civil society, became the primary service provider.

Israel’s case differs. Unlike Katrina, the Israeli state’s capacity to respond in the frontier areas collapsed. Unlike Haiti, domestic civil society—not international actors—assumed primary governance responsibilities, reflecting robust civic infrastructure and organizational capacity. This suggests a new category in the sociology of governance breakdown: localized democratic state failure, where well-developed but overwhelmed state institutions rapidly lose their anchoring role in crisis-stricken areas, triggering immediate substitution by organized domestic civil society.

The comparison also highlights how different pre-crisis state–society relationships shape post-crisis governance. Where civil society is weak or suppressed, state failure creates openings for international actors or armed groups [9]. In contexts with strong civic infrastructure, state failure may instead trigger “civil society governmentalization”—the rapid transformation of advocacy organizations into governance actors adopting governance logics, decision-making structures, and accountability relationships traditionally associated with the state.

The Israeli 7 October case extends Risse’s [11] framework of “areas of limited statehood” to include acute, localized state collapse with domestic civic substitution—that the limited-statehood literature has not yet theorized, and that is particularly relevant to risks of armed conflict, and is increasingly relevant as climate, security, and political shocks generate sudden, bounded ruptures in otherwise capable states.

7.4. The Legitimacy and Accountability Paradox

The sustainability and legitimacy challenges identified by participants raise fundamental questions about the conditions under which non-state actors can exercise governance authority legitimately. While civil society organizations demonstrated greater effectiveness and responsiveness in addressing immediate needs, their democratic legitimacy remains questionable—including in their own eyes. Unelected organizations making decisions about resource allocation and service priorities raises accountability concerns unacceptable in normal democratic contexts.

This tension reflects a legitimacy paradox of crisis governance: civil society derives legitimacy from its effectiveness and responsiveness during crises, but this performance-based legitimacy differs fundamentally from the procedural legitimacy of democratic authorization. Moreover, the transformation of protest organizations into service providers raises questions about civil society’s political autonomy and critical function—its role in the “public sphere” [52]. As organizations become embedded in service delivery, they may lose capacity for advocacy, oversight, and contentious politics [53,54], enabling the state to co-opt actors who might otherwise pressure for reform. Cammett and MacLean’s [14] comparative analysis of non-state social welfare provision is instructive here. Organizations that supply welfare during state absences accrue a politically consequential legitimacy that outlasts the provision episode. It reshapes their relationship with the state in ways neither party fully anticipates. In their cases, this dynamic produced enduring sectarian, partisan, or clientelist dependencies; in ours, it raises the open question of whether the protest-turned-service organizations will retain, recover, or relinquish their critical political voice. Our case thus illuminates a fundamental tension: a robust civil society’s capacity for governance substitution during crises may undermine its capacity for independent political action in normal times.

7.5. State–Society Bidirectional Embeddedness and Substitution Capacity

The study contributes to theories of state–society relations by demonstrating how the relationship between state and society can invert during crises. Migdal’s [5,7] state-in-society approach emphasizes mutual constitution, with the state embedded within and constrained by social structures. The Israeli case shows this embedding works both ways: just as society constrains state power in normal times, it can substitute for state power during crises.

This finding both extends and stress-tests the state-in-society tradition. What looks like a “strong” state is in fact a coalition of competing organizations whose power is produced through continual negotiation with social forces [5,6,15]. Our case fits this image precisely: the formal architecture of the Israeli state remained intact, but its capacity to act collapsed in the affected zones, and what filled the gap was not foreign actors or armed groups but a dense civic infrastructure already mobilized for contentious politics. The “weblike” social structures Migdal described, far from undermining the state, here functioned as its functional equivalent. The case thus identifies a mode of state–society relations the original tradition did not theorize: not domination, complementarity, or contestation, but temporary substitution sustained by domestic civic capacity.

Our findings also speak to Tendler’s [8] “good government” thesis, which others refer to as state–society co-production [12,13]. Effective service delivery in resource-constrained settings depends on a three-way coupling among central government, mission-driven frontline workers, and organized civil society. We found the limit case of that dynamic. When the central node failed, the residual coupling between frontline actors (reservists, teachers, medical professionals, local officials) and civil society networks was strong enough to sustain governance for months. A legacy of state–civil society co-production enabled rapid mobilization, but the substitution carries with it the risks Tendler’s framework was designed to avoid: erosion of accountability, blurring of roles, and the displacement of advocacy by service delivery.

Finally, the localized character of the failure—comprehensive in the affected regions, intact elsewhere is consistent with a growing literature on the territorial unevenness of state capacity [55,56,57]. Our case adds a temporal dimension. The unevenness operates across space and across crisis time, with state reach contracting and civil society reach expanding rapidly within hours of the shock. Adopting Soifer’s [57] distinction, while the legal-coercive authority of the state (despotic capacity) was preserved, infrastructural reach into the frontier zones evaporated and was reconstituted through civil society networks before being gradually reabsorbed. This temporal-spatial pattern of capacity displacement may be a feature of localized democratic state failure that warrants comparative investigation.

This substitution capacity depends on three conditions: (1) comprehensive state incapacity across core functions; (2) urgent unmet needs requiring immediate response; and (3) sufficient civil society capacity to mobilize alternative governance structures. When these converge, state–society relations shift from complementarity to substitution, with civil society assuming direct governance responsibilities. These threshold conditions help explain variation in civil society response and the conditions under which non-state actors can challenge the state’s governance monopoly.

The study also illuminates the importance of pre-crisis social infrastructure in shaping post-disaster governance. The protest movements of 2023 created organizational capacity, coordination mechanisms, and mobilization networks that proved invaluable for disaster response, suggesting that investment in civic capacity—even capacity mobilized for contentious politics—creates governance resilience. This defies functional approaches that view social conflict and solidarity as opposed forces; contentious mobilization can simultaneously strengthen civil society capacity and national resilience.

7.6. Summary of Theoretical Contributions

Taken together, these analyses point in a direction the failed-states literature has largely missed. State failure is not only a chronic condition of low-income polities; it can also be an acute, bounded, and reversible event in wealthy democracies. The Concentric Rings framework makes that distinction analytically tractable: when Ring 1 functions are not merely degraded but absent, and Ring 3 actors take them over while the formal architecture of Ring 1 remains in place, we are looking at substitution rather than supplementation.

The case also pushes the state-in-society tradition into territory it had not theorized. The theory describes state power as conditional on negotiation with social forces, and effective service delivery typically depends on state and civil society working together. Our interviewees’ experience suggests a further mode: when one side collapses, the residual coupling between frontline state actors and civic networks can sustain governance for some time. But the resulting hybrid is not stable; it is transitional. Where it goes depends on whether the formal state reasserts itself. Also matters whether the civic substitutes consolidate, and what their stance towards this reassertion is. Finally, the outcome will differ depending on whether either side will tolerate the role-blurring once the immediate emergency passes. We argue that this case should unsettle some accepted notions. The vocabulary of fragility, capacity, and breakdown developed for chronic conditions in low-income states does not map neatly onto acute ruptures in wealthy ones.

It is important to note the considerable demographic, ethno-national, and political homogeneity of the organizations studied and of their members and leaders. They represent Jewish, liberal, left-leaning government opposition groups and their views. We must also acknowledge our own positionality, as our political views align with those of our participants and as Israeli scholars within the politically and emotionally laden context of this study. A more diverse picture will require additional research of government supporters, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Orthodox-Religious Jews.

7.7. Policy and Practical Implications

We are wary of generic prescriptions, both because each case is singular and because our interviewees were themselves uneasy about the policy lessons that might be drawn from their experience. With that caveat, three observations from the interviews seem to go beyond the case. First, the speed at which civil society absorbed governance functions was driven not by preparedness for emergencies but by pre-existing, dense organizational networks built for other purposes. Investment in pre-crisis civic infrastructure may matter more for crisis response than investment in formal emergency-management protocols, even though the former is harder to justify on emergency-management grounds. Second, the organizations that performed best in the response were those whose existing missions made the pivot intelligible to their own members; those who tried to assume functions far from their identity reported the most strain. The implication for civil society organizations is not “prepare for crises” but “know what you are, and what you may be called on for.” Third, our interviewees raised concerns about legitimacy and accountability. The state’s will need to grapple with the fact that the organizations now performing public functions did not seek a public mandate, and most do not want to retain one.

These are partial answers. The interviews were conducted during the crisis, and the questions of accountability, autonomy, and reabsorption that our participants raised will only become tractable in retrospect.

7.8. Future Research Directions

Several important questions remain. First, under what conditions does state reassertion occur following acute state failure, versus permanent hybrid governance? Longitudinal research could illuminate the factors determining whether states successfully reclaim governance roles.

Second, how does crisis governance affect long-term democratic accountability and civil society autonomy? Does it normalize the fusion of civil society and state, undermining civil society’s critical function?

Thirdly, how do different pre-crisis state–society relations shape response patterns? This question is a direct response to the comparative agenda in Centeno, Kohli & Yashar [15] and Soifer [57]. Comparative research could reveal which factors most powerfully enable governance substitution—contentious politics experience, professionalization, resource availability, network density, or perhaps others.