At the centre of this study stands the organizational array of civic and voluntary entities that represented sectors and subgroups in the Jewish population of pre-independence and formative Israel as they coped with the blow occasioned by the war that engulfed them from late 1947 to early 1949.

As the war unfolded, the voices of ordinary ci¬vilians were heard, expressing along with their personal distress that of the rest of their community, and, above all, the hardships and struggle that were their lot and, at the same time, their proactive approach to this hard¬ship and their unwillingness to be passive and static in view of their plight. By choosing the coping mechanism of self-associating, they demonstrated their capabilities for action and thus became a force to be reckoned with.

The purpose of choosing civic association as an axis for retelling the plot of Israel’s War of Independence is to propose a path of research by which one may understand the depth of the war experience as it was un¬dergone by the variegated community mosaic that makes up a society.

The study analyses the events of the Israeli War of In¬dependence as a humanitarian crisis characterized by the devastation of quotidian life, loss of sources of livelihood, displacement and separation from the familiar community tapestry, and carrying on amid protracted uncertainty. Those who experienced the war had to contend with its impli-cations as it proceeded and create paths to rehabilitation and recovery af¬terward.

By contemplating civic associations in the War of Independence, one extends the discus¬sion to new conceptual and theoretical domains: ways in which communi¬ties cope with crises and, foremost, studies that track the functioning of social networks and civic associations in order to explain why one group displays resilience while another evidences weakness and fragility. Even if such patterns of self-instigated action not always yielded the hoped-for results, they provided casualties of disaster with an instrument with which they challenged the situation imposed on them, and became active casualties whose voices are heard—stakeholders and community members who had a say and whose distress neither blurred their identity nor rendered them into pas¬sive objects on history’s chessboard.