Nationalist Patriarchy, Clan Democracy: How the Political Trajectories of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories Have Been Reversed ...
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386 Die Welt des Islams 57 (2017) 386-403 Tuastad
International Journal for the Study of Modern Islam
brill.com/wdi
Nationalist Patriarchy, Clan Democracy: How the
Political Trajectories of Palestinians in Israel and
the Occupied Territories Have Been Reversed
Dag H. Tuastad
Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo
d.h.tuastad@ikos.uio.no
Abstract
This article discusses how the historical trajectory of patriarchal norms in the political
domain among the Palestinians inside Israel differs from that of the Palestinians in the
West Bank and Gaza, emphasizing the role of regular political elections in reducing the
prevalence of patriarchal-based politics. After 1948, the power of old clan leaders
increased among the Palestinians inside, whereas within the Palestinian national move-
ment founded in the exiled refugee communities, traditional and patriarchal clan-
based political organization was shunned. Today, clans are still important in local
politics among the Palestinians inside. But rather than being controlled by old, patriar-
chal leaders, a young, democratically minded generation have found their way into local
and national politics through the clans. Within the secular Palestinian national move-
ment, on the other hand, an opposite development has been observed, of an increas-
ingly gerontocratic and autocratic leadership.
Keywords
Clan – hamūla – patriarchy – Palestine Liberation Organization – Israeli Palestinians
– Palestinian Authority – gerontocracy – neopatrimonialism – democratization
The influential Syrian Arab intellectual Constantine Zurayk, in The Meaning of
Disaster (1948), put forward ideas that were to have a tremendous impact on
Arab and Palestinian political thought. Zurayk took to task the social, political,
and cultural backwardness found in dogmatic religious traditionalism and
ISSN 0043-2539 (print version) ISSN 1570-0607 (online version) WDI 3-4
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tribal sociopolitical organization. A progressive, radical, industrial programme
was needed in which all parochial identities were transcended. The founders
of the Palestinian national movement adopted Zurayk’s ideas. Palestine was to
be liberated by a progressive, pan-national Arab movement, and sociopolitical
organization founded on patriarchal, kinship-based groups were to be actively
discouraged.1
Nowhere did these ideas have greater appeal in the 1950s than in the Pales-
tinian refugee community. In Gaza, a secular, anti-particularistic, anti-patriar-
chal radical national movement evolved. Within one month in the summer of
1948, the population of Gaza had tripled, from 70,000 to 210,000. Gaza became
the refugee state, a microcosm of the refugee community. Out of the ashes in
the camps of Gaza came the fidā’ī, the Palestinian freedom fighter. There was
no other meaning of life in the camps of Gaza than to be a fidā’ī.2 Meanwhile,
inside Israel, only 10 per cent of the original Palestinian population remained
after 1948. Fearing another wave of expulsions, they found their refuge in ex-
actly what Zurayk had attacked: their patriarchal hamūlas, the tribal organized
clans.
Hence two completely different kinds of political culture evolved, one in-
side Israel and the other in the Palestinian diaspora. Inside, the council of el-
ders within the hamūlas gained increased power over women, as well as over
the younger generation. In Gaza and the refugee community, the situation was
the opposite. The young generation, inspired by Zurayk and also radical anti-
colonial movements across the world, saw the political tradition of their par-
ents’ generation as part of the reason for their defeat and destiny. They
developed their guerrilla organizations based on a conviction that the tradi-
tional Arab political order had to be revolutionized.
Today, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is internationally recog-
nized as the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and
exercises, through the Palestinian Authority (PA), limited control of most of
the areas populated by Palestinians in the West Bank. Meanwhile, inside Israel,
the clans still dominate politics in the Arab towns and villages. In terms of the
patriarchal dimension of politics – the power of male elders over women and
the young – however, the situation has been completely reversed. While the
1 Constantine Zurayk, Ma‘nā al-nakba (Beirut: Dār al-‘Ilm li-l-Malāyīn, 1948); and Helga
Baumgarten, “The Three Faces/Phases of Palestinian Nationalism, 1948-2005”, Journal of
Palestine Studies 34, no. 4 (2005), 25-48 .
2 Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (London: Harvard
University Press, 2004), 243.
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PLO has increasingly taken on gerontocratic features, a youth revolution has
taken place in village politics – not against the hamūlas, but within them.
The main reason for this, I will argue, is that political democratic participa-
tion tends to shatter power hierarchies based on age. Therefore, while Israeli
Palestinians are still organized locally through their clans, the traditional pow-
er of clan leaders has been transcended through the continued practices of
democratic elections. Conversely, within the Palestinian national movement,
democratic practices have been absent and political hierarchy built on age dif-
ferences have emerged.
Patriarchy, Neopatriarchy, and Neopatrimonialism
‘Patriarchy’, as originally outlined by Max Weber, referred to men deriving pow-
er through being heads of (extended) households.3 This implied a dual form of
dominance: male dominance over women, but also the patriarch’s power over
the children.4
Building on Weber, Hisham Sharabi labelled the characteristic way authori-
tarianism in the Middle East was sustained as ‘neopatriarchy’, referring to how
rulers built their power on vertical chains of kinship ties under patriarchal
dominance. Sharabi distinguished traditional patriarchy, as defined by Weber,
from modernized patriarchy or neopatriarchy, where the hierarchal structures
within the patriarchal family are extended to the state. The power of the auto-
crat at the national level, Sharabi asserted, is rooted in the patriarchal values
and social relations of kinship and the clan. In both settings, only vertical rela-
tions exist between the ruler and the ruled. In other words, national political
organization reflects organization at the micro level, or kinship level, because
a similar mentality has been internalized at both levels: that of the psychoso-
cial dominance of the Father (patriarch). At the core of neopatriarchy is a
failed transition from the extended family in one of its various forms – lineage,
clan, or tribe – to the nuclear family, the “democratic family” as formulated by
Sharabi.5 This idea, that embedded in the extended family structure is an auto-
cratic mentality penetrating political culture, is something that I will challenge
in this article: the age hierarchical dimension of patriarchy is not, as has been
3 Max Weber, The theory of social and economic organization (New York: Free Press, 1947), 346.
4 Sylvia Walby, “Theorising patriarchy”, Sociology 23, no. 2 (1989), 214 .
5 Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A theory of distorted change in Arab society (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992), 31.
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argued by Holy among others, what characterizes the Arab clan. Its distinctive
feature is, rather, the solidarity among equals, symbolized by the brother
group.6
Where Sharabi uses neopatriarchy to refer both to macrostructures (society,
the state) and to microstructures (family, individual personality), others have
separated the one from the other. Weber himself distinguished patriarchal au-
thority from patrimonial authority. Patrimonial authority refers to how patri-
mony, originally the hereditary passage of wealth and power in family units
from father to son, is extended into more complex political systems, where the
ruler has a network of subordinates in a hierarchical social pyramid.7 Building
on Weber, Rex Brynen defined neopatrimonialism as a form of rule where the
state’s formal and legal structures are combined with systems of patronage and
clientelism. The patrimonial dimension implies that clients compete for re-
sources and the ear of the patron, and that such rivalry is actively encouraged.8
Such a form of rule, according to Brynen, characterized the PA after its estab-
lishment in 1994. As we shall see below, neopatrimonial rule meant re-tradi-
tionalizing institutions first established towards the end of the Ottoman
Empire in Palestine.
The Historical Roots of Patriarchy in Palestine
During the Ottoman period of rule in Palestine, the clan (or hamūla) was the
basic economic unit and source of social organization in rural Palestine. The
Israeli-Palestinian anthropologist Majid Al-Haj, emphasizing that persons not
related by blood were also included in the hamūla system, defined it as:
a patrilineal descent group composed of all the members related biologi-
cally to the common great-grand-father, or of members who have related
themselves socially to certain hamulas by fictive relatedness in order to
obtain the advantage of hamula protection and rights along with hamula
responsibility and commitments.9
6 Vladislav Holy, Kinship, Honour and Solidarity (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1989).
7 Max Weber, Economy and Society, (New York: Bedmister Press , 1968), 1007.
8 Rex Brynen, “The neopatrimonial dimension of Palestinian politics”, Journal of Palestine
Studies 25, no. 1 (1995), 24-25 .
9 Majid Al-Haj, “Kinship and Modernization in Developing Societies: The Emergence of
Instrumentalized Kinship”, Journal of Comparative Family Studies 26, no. 3 (1995), 311-28, 316
.
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The members of a hamūla share a surname and are related to each other
through patrilineal descent, without necessarily knowing how they are related.
Integrated into hamūla-based organization was the system of ikhtiyāriyya (the
council of elders), constituted mainly by shaykhs, who were elders of respect-
able lineage and hamūla leaders.10 Until the land reform in the late nineteenth
century, shaykhs were responsible for gathering taxes from villagers, which was
changed by the introduction of the mukhtār institution through the 1864 Law
of Vilayets. This was not only an attempt by the Ottoman rulers to increase
political and economic efficiency but also a measure taken in order to increase
control through weakening the power position of the shaykhs.11 According to
the new law, the mukhtārs should not have authority to arbitrate during dis-
putes. They should only perform some duties, such as registering births and
deaths and reporting and collecting taxes at the village level.
Whereas for the Ottomans a main interest was to reduce the power of local
shaykhs and to increase the level of resource and tax extraction (the mainte-
nance of law and order being of secondary interest), these priorities changed
during the British mandate of Palestine (1920-48).12 As elsewhere in its empire,
Britain ruled through making alliances with the local elites. The mukhtārs were
to be appointed and dismissed by the British rulers, according to their effi-
ciency in “getting information”, namely informing on nationalist political ac-
tivities.13 They therefore shaped the mukhtār as an institution for collaboration.
Simultaneously, they sought to preserve kinship-based forms of local adminis-
tration, such as the ikhtiyāriyya, and convert them into the lowest level of local
political administration, in order to increase British control.
Following the end of the mandate and the establishment of Israel in 1948,
the desire to rule what the new authorities termed “the Arab sector” through
kinship institutions was, if possible, even stronger. Only 10 per cent of the orig-
inal Palestinian population remained inside Israel’s borders after the 1948 exo-
dus. They were eventually granted Israeli citizenship with voter rights.
However, Israel’s policy was to encourage the kinship institutions, the only
functioning form of social networks remaining among the Palestinians who
10 Majid Al-Haj and Henry Rosenfeld, Arab Local Government in Israel (London: Westview
Press, 1990), 4.
11 Gabriel Baer, Fellah and Townsman in the Middle East: Studies in Social History (New Jer-
sey: Frank Cass, 1982), 122-23.
12 Al-Haj and Rosenfeld, Arab Local, 16.
13 Ibid.
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had not become refugees in 1948.14 The new Israeli rulers wasted no time in
spinning nets of control through local hamūlas:
in the choice of mukhtars, in granting special privileges to certain indi-
viduals or groups, thereby granting them official recognition as a local
political force, in placing informers in all villages, threatening those who
aligned themselves with radical political parties or movements, and fol-
lowing a policy of divide and rule among kin groups and religious sects.15
The Israeli Palestinians, largely in a collective post-traumatic state of mind,
were receptive of the Israeli divide and rule. Fearing another wave of expul-
sions, they found refuge in the patriarchal kinship institutions that Zurayk had
attacked, their hamūlas, the tribally organized clans. The hamūla elders, noto-
rious for their opportunism and control, literally sold the votes of the hamūla
to the highest bidder among Israeli parties during election time. Nationalist
quarters called them “tails of the government”.16 In one notorious incident in
1963, the Israeli government needed support in the parliament, the Knesset, to
achieve the majority required to extend the period of military emergency rule
over the Arab villages. The Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, appealed
to Arab village elders who had been elected on Zionist parties’ list to acquire
the needed majority. Such an extension was against the interests of the clan
members. Nevertheless, they complied with Ben-Gurion’s request and voted in
favour of the extension, even though it resulted in continued restrictions on
the freedom of movement of the villages they were to represent.17
Contrary to the Palestinians inside, the founders of the Palestinian national
movement adopted ideas similar to the ones formulated in Zurayk’s The Mean-
ing of Disaster regarding the need for developing a progressive, radical pro-
gramme where all parochial identities were transcended. Palestine was to be
liberated by a progressive, pan-national Arab movement, while sociopolitical
organizations founded on patriarchal, kinship-based groups were actively dis-
couraged.
In 1969 the Palestinian guerrilla groups took control of the PLO, with
Fatah leader Yasser Arafat becoming its new chairman. The PLO had been
14 In 1948, approximately 80 per cent of the Palestinians became refugees, and more than
nine hundred populated villages became reduced to about a hundred inhabited villages
and encampments. Al-Haj and Rosenfeld, Arab Local, 22-23.
15 Ibid., 24.
16 Ori Stendel, The Arabs in Israel (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1996), 26.
17 Ibid.
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established by the Arab League in 1964 to represent the Palestinian people.
The PLO’s founding charter stipulated that its supreme authority should be a
representative organ, the Palestine National Council (PNC), whose representa-
tives should be democratically elected. However, Fatah and the various Pal-
estinian guerrilla factions were sceptical of democratic elections. Chairman
Arafat used to say that he did not need the legitimacy of elections because he
had the legitimacy of guns. Elections, the Fatah leaders thought, would allow
the old internal regional and class differences to resurface.18
When the PLO returned to Palestine in 1994, it had declared an end to the
armed struggle. Yet neither Fatah nor the PLO’s other main groups ever made a
full organizational transition from armed guerrilla organization to political
party. Rather, the PA, established to govern autonomous areas in the West Bank
and Gaza, was formally only a subordinate body to the PLO. As will be elabo-
rated on below, the PLO also copied the Israeli policy of re-traditionalizing po-
litical governance.
The Traditionalization of Power in the Palestinian Authority
When the PA was established by returning Fatah and PLO cadres in 1994, it
feared the political competition of the young intifāḍa leaders. The latter had to
be marginalized while an alternative political base had to be constructed.
“There was a lack of confidence”, said Jamāl Zaqūt (Jamal Zakout), a co-found-
er and leader of the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising in Gaza.19 The
PLO leaders trusted only those they had dealt with on a daily basis in exile. Ac-
cording to Zaqūt, this meant that deported intifāḍa-leaders who returned with
the PLO in 1994 were prioritized over local ones. What triggered most opposi-
tion in Gaza, though, was the alliance with Gaza’s former notables and land-
owners, a social class despised by the intifāḍa generation.20 The first intifāḍa
(1988-93) had included elements of a social revolution. Its leaders had wanted
to “do away with anything traditional”.21 Ten mukhtārs, leaders of strong Gazan
non-refugee families, had been accused of collaborating with Israel and were
18 International Crisis Group, “Palestine: Salvaging Fatah” (Middle East Report No.91, Ramal-
lah/Gaza City/Brussels, 12 November 2009)
19 Interview with author, Ramallah, November 2016.
20 Glen Robinson, Building a Palestinian State (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997),
177.
21 Hillel Frisch, “Modern Absolutist or Neopatriarchal State Building?”, International Journal
of Middle East Studies 29, no. 3 (1997), 346, doi:10.1017/S0020743800064801.
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killed by the intifāḍa activists.22 Gaza’s landowner class and notables could,
according to Glen Robinson, be integrated into the PA’s political base without
significant political risk.23 They constituted not an organized PLO faction but
rather bricks in a political system where power relations were personalized
and where proximity to the ruler, or national patriarch, determined one’s posi-
tion and influence.24
Similarly, this form of traditionalization of power was reflected in how kin-
ship-based institutions were formally restored. In October 1995, the Office for
Tribal Affairs was established by the Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat. It was
made mandatory for every person in Gaza to have a mukhtār (a family head-
man) as a representative. This meant that smaller families had to align them-
selves with larger ones, who had a mukhtār approved by the authorities. Even
to obtain basic civil services, like having an identity card, people would have to
apply through their mukhtār.25
Within the judiciary, informal, customary law (ʿurf) was promoted at the
expense of the formal institutions of rule of law. Community-based reconcilia-
tion committees had also widely operated during the first intifāḍa, but they
were then an alternative to the discredited court system of the Occupation
authorities.26 Moreover, the committees had not been dominated by tradition-
al clan elders, as had been the case before the first intifāḍa, but rather by na-
tionalist leaders with a record of confronting the occupation. The PA was
supposed to develop Palestinian state institutions, with the legal system as the
key ingredient. Rather than a modern rule of law, with personal rather than
collective legal responsibility, the legal system was partly retribalized, with in-
creased use of ṣulḥa (agreements) and diya (blood money) between the clans
and families. As the International Crisis Group later noted, the conflict resolu-
tion system pursued by the PA favoured the large clans, who could then get
away with crimes, even murders.27 It also favoured the PA through their role as
22 Brynjar Lia, A Police Without a State: A History of the Palestinian Security Forces in the West
Bank and Gaza (Reading: Ithaca Press, 2006), 55.
23 Robinson, Building a Palestinian State, 179.
24 Glen Robinson, “The Politics of Legal reform in Palestine”, Journal of Palestine Studies 27,
no. 1 (1997), 57 .
25 Muḥammad al-Farra, Ministry of Local Government, Gaza City, interview with author,
July 2005.
26 Robinson, Building a Palestinian State, 112.
27 International Crisis Group, “Inside Gaza: The Challenge of Clans and Families” (Middle
East Report No. 71, Gaza/Jerusalem/Brussels, 20 December 2007) .
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jāha (mediators). The PA would even pay diya themselves when faults were
found within their ranks.28
Furthermore, the system designed for the national elections in 1996 was one
of multiple-member majority voting, implying a majority system in multiple-
member constituencies.29 People did not vote for parties; instead, they marked
the number of persons they wanted to have elected from their constituency.
This favoured groupings with strong internal solidarity. Large families thus
managed to have their candidates elected, either as independents or as Fatah
members. The first Palestinian legislative council in 1996 reflected this: 55 of
the elected members were from Fatah and 33 were independents, mostly from
large non-refugee families who had voted in tandem. According to Marwān
Barghūtī, who came to symbolize the internal opposition in Fatah, PA officials
were chosen “based on the desire to co-opt families and extended clans and
strengthen their roles.”30
To summarize this section, Weber originally distinguished between patri-
archal and patrimonial mechanisms. The former were found at the house-
hold and kinship level; the latter referred to networks of political authorities
through functionaries and subordinates. Both spheres were characterized by
hierarchical clientelism. Neopatrimonialism, Brynen notes, is the combination
of these spheres, in which the political system is held together by a patrimonial
logic, and lower echelon officials in the political hierarchy are not subordinates
with defined functions and powers but rather subordinates who depend on
the leader as the patron of their own kinship groups.31 Hence the distinctive
feature of neopatrimonialism is that it combines informal structures with
the formal and legal ones of the central authority. As we have seen, the form
of rule established by the PA in 1994 clearly had strong neopatrimonial fea-
tures. Similarly, when Fatah changed its strategy following the Oslo Accords
by recognizing Israel and abandoning the armed struggle, it did not reform
its military-oriented organizational structure accordingly, failing to transform
into a political party with internal democratic procedures. As a result, the co-
optation of the inside-based political constituency of former intifāḍa activists
was delayed. To this day, seniority rather than democratic elections constitutes
the main principle for recruiting its leaders.32
28 Ibid.
29 Nils Butenschøn and Kåre Vollan, eds., Interim Democracy: Report on the Palestinian Elec-
tions (Oslo: Norwegian Institute of Human Rights, 1996), 29.
30 Frisch, “Modern Absolutist”, 352.
31 Brynen, “Neopatrimonial Dimension.”
32 Ilan Pappe, A history of modern Palestine: One land, two peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 192.
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The Gerontocratic Features of the Palestinian National
Movement
When Yasser Arafat died at the age of 75 in 2004, he had been the Fatah leader
continuously for 45 years and the PLO’s chairman for 35 years. Following Arafat
in both functions was Mahmoud Abbas, who is now (2017) 82 years old. The
general secretary of Fatah, Farūq Qaddūmī, is 86 years old; the head of the
PLO’s parliament, the PNC, Salīm al-Za‘nūn, also from Fatah, is 83 years old.
This gerontocracy may be regarded as the product of the internal organiza-
tional principles of Fatah and the PLO. Inside Fatah, the main faction of the
PLO, the principle of seniority has been a premise for climbing the internal
power hierarchy since its founding. Fatah was established in 1959, with armed
struggle not only as method but as strategy, according to its charter. Fatah’s
internal organization was designed, according to a military model, for its mem-
bers to operate underground. From the bottom up, this hierarchy comprises
three-man cells constituting local circles, circles constituting wings, and then
branches, district leaderships, and regional leaderships, all the way up to the
central committee at the top. The most important criterion for climbing this
hierarchy was not meritocratic principle or popular legitimacy based on elec-
tions, but seniority (i.e. length of service in the Palestinian revolution). This
was inscribed into Fatah’s constitution: each year of membership, one point;
each year in prison, two points; and so forth. The older one was, the more
points one acquired. Those with the most points would advance to higher ech-
elons in the hierarchy and eventually become eligible for central leadership
positions.
The lack of internal reforms is even more alarming within the PLO than
within Fatah. In the absence of a functioning PNC, the executive committee
(EC) of the PLO, its government so to speak, is not only its functioning decision
maker. The 18 members of the EC de facto represent the organization in all
fields rather than only constitute its executive part. All the way back to the
initial takeover of the PLO by the guerrillas in 1969, the EC came to be orga-
nized through some extraordinary principles. The main challenge of the PLO in
exile always was to avoid infighting and defection and withstand attempts by
various Arab states to co-opt members. As a result, the EC developed an idio-
syncratic form of decision-making: majority rule was abandoned in favour of
rule by consensus. Majority rule could make it possible for a group that had
been outvoted to mobilize both external and internal support and thus threat-
en the PLO’s claim to be the Palestinians’ sole representative. Consensus rule
entailed finding the lowest common denominator, which meant that the
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smallest Palestinian groups were granted disproportionate influence in the
decision-making process.33
The question of political representation thus became an issue of negotia-
tion between the various factions, where the threat that one faction might
leave the organization could put all factions in jeopardy. This opened the way
for the cementing of a quota system among the PLO members, whereby the
constituent PLO groups were represented irrespective of their size or popular-
ity among the Palestinian people at large. Through the quota system, the fac-
tion leaders – not the representatives of the Palestinian communities in the
various geographic areas – were given decision-making power within Palestin-
ian politics. The guerrilla groups, all included, should arrive at acceptable com-
promises which, crucially, included how to allocate key positions in PLO
departments and committees. Moreover, the quota system meant that the
leaders of individual factions, responsible for negotiating their quota, secured
their respective positions.34
Fatah was criticized from time to time by other PLO factions for using un-
democratic means. However, as this was brought forward mainly by factions
such as the PFLP and DFLP,35 who themselves were marked by the very ills that
they were criticizing, having undergone no changes in internal leadership
since their founding, their criticism largely failed to make an impression.36
This situation is, arguably, the result of lack of exposure to political competi-
tion. When elections do take place, which has happened on merely three occa-
sions over the past 35 years, they tend to trigger processes of internal renewal
within the old guerrilla movements.
The Revitalization of Internal Political Organization through
Elections
The short Palestinian “political spring” of 2005/06, when all the main factions,
including Hamas, participated in local elections, and the 2006 national elec-
tions for the PA, were revealing in terms of how political competition served to
33 Yazid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997), 679.
34 Jamil Hilal, “PLO Institutions: The Challenge Ahead”, Journal of Palestine Studies 23, no. 1
(1993), 55 .
35 The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the two main, Marxist-Leninist oriented opposition
groups within the PLO.
36 Sayigh, Armed Struggle, 634.
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revitalize Fatah’s and the PLO’s internal organization. A case in point were the
local elections in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza in 2005. There was a
telling difference in how Fatah and Hamas nominated their candidates. Hamas
established “block committees” in all the camp’s twelve “blocks”, each corre-
sponding to one of its geographical areas. The members of the committees
closely reviewed whom the people in their block liked and respected, and if
they were also religious. They then asked these people if they were willing to be
on Hamas’s list. As for Fatah, the camp’s local branch simply received the
names of the nominees for the local election from Fatah headquarters, without
any preceding local internal nomination procedure. Upset about this heavy-
handed, centralist decision-making, the Fatah members in the camp went on
strike, refusing the nominees appointed by headquarters. They had seen the
list of Hamas candidates in the camp and knew that the old Fatah members
presented by their headquarters could not compete. As the campaign started,
not a single individual represented Fatah locally. The division within Fatah be-
tween the Fatah-PLO returnees, now constituting a PA elite, and the Fatah of
the camps, the former intifāḍa leaders, thus came to the surface. Eventually, it
forced Fatah to reform, as their headquarters in Gaza had to change their list of
nominees to include those wanted by the members in the camp.37
In the 2006 national elections, internal Fatah conflicts again resurfaced. The
two most popular Fatah leaders – from the intifāḍa generation – Marwān
Barghūtī and Muḥammad Daḥlān, even formed their own list, Mustaqbal (“The
future”), protesting about how the intifāḍa generation they themselves repre-
sented had not been nominated by the Fatah leadership. They eventually with-
drew, but the incident clearly demonstrated how deep the discontent within
Fatah went. The lack of internal democratic procedure made numerous Fatah
members run as independent candidates. This produced an abundance of Fa-
tah candidates in the various districts.38 Consequently, as Fatah voters spread
their votes over more Fatah candidates than there were seats, each of the Fatah
candidates received less votes. Hamas did not have more candidates in a dis-
trict than were needed to be elected. Hamas supporters only voted for the
nominated Hamas candidates; each Hamas candidate thus received the same
number of votes as there were Hamas voters. In the mixed election system, at
37 Dag Tuastad, “Local elections in Gaza”, in Political participation in the Middle East, ed.
Ellen Lust-Okar (Boulder/Colorado: Rienner, 2008), 121-139.
38 The 2006 election system was a mixed system, combining list Proportional Representa-
tion (PR) in one electoral district with the so-called Block Vote System (BVS) in multiple
districts. Nils Butenschøn and Kåre Vollan, Democracy in Conflict (Oslo: NORDEM, 2006),
142.
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the level of the district elections, Hamas won 45 seats and Fatah only 17. By the
proportional system, where each party was represented in one national con-
stituency, Hamas gained 29 seats (44 per cent of the votes), and Fatah 28 seats
(41 per cent of the votes). Hamas only won one more seat than Fatah in the list
part of the election, but three times as many through the district election, the
latter reflecting the lack of discipline within Fatah.
The point in this context is that these rare moments of genuine political
competition were wake-up calls for Fatah and the PLO. Hence it is reasonable
to assume that if elections had been held regularly, internal reforms would
have become inevitable. Gerontocracy would no longer be sustainable. Cru-
cially, this is where the situation differs between the Palestinians inside Israel
and those living under the government of the Palestinian national movement.
In contrast to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli Palestin-
ians have experienced regular political competition through national elections
for nearly 70 years, which has even made the clans institutionalize democratic
principles.
Political Transformations among Israeli Palestinians
The Israeli Palestinians, those Arab-speaking people who did not become refu-
gees in 1948 but remained in Israel and were made Israeli citizens, today num-
ber around 1.5 million people. As alluded to above, from 1948 until 1966 their
ethnically homogeneous villages and towns were under the control of a mili-
tary government. The restrictions on free movement in and out of the villages
contributed to an introverted political orientation. This meant that individuals
sought refuge and social security within their clans (hamūlas).
In 1966 military rule was finally abolished. Elected local councils were, from
then on, established in the Arab sector. This led to great political changes. One
was increased political autonomy, with the end of patrimonial governance and
the beginnings of democratic governance. A second transformation was the
rise of non-Zionist parties transcending local particularistic ties and articulat-
ing the national collective concerns of both Israelis and Palestinians. Finally,
the clans were also transformed as they gradually adopted modern forms of
political procedures. Some clans have, as we shall see, institutionalized more
democratic internal procedures than the parties. Politically, the clans are no
longer “tails of the government”; they have become interest groups of their
members, reflecting their political sentiments.
These political transformations among the Israeli Palestinians are clearly
visible in their electoral behaviour during national elections. From 1951 to 1969,
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more than 50 per cent of the Palestinians in Israel voted for one of the Zionist
parties, mainly the Labor Party, in national elections for the Israeli parliament.
This changed after the 1967 war. In the 1970s and 1980s, leftist non-Zionist Arab
parties captured the votes of the Arab electorate. The PLO, while refusing to
recognize Israel, urged the Israeli Palestinians to vote for parties that served
Palestinian national interests.39 The national Arab parties also defeated clan
lists in local elections, dominating both the national and local vote of Palestin-
ians in Israel.40 However, in the early 1990s, this trend was reversed. In 1993 and
1998, an overwhelming majority (72 and 82 per cent respectively) voted for clan
lists – and only 20 and 13 per cent for non-Zionist political party lists in local
elections. At the same time, support for non-Zionist parties in national elec-
tions increased, capturing two-thirds of the Arab votes in 1996 and 1999.41 This
tendency has only been strengthened since.42 In the Israeli national elections
in March 2015, the Arab parties’ joint list received 82 per cent of the votes of the
Israeli Palestinians. However, at the local level, they have, as a rule, simply
stopped to take part in elections due to the costs associated with election cam-
paigns when the outcome is that non-clan candidates fail to be elected.43
An important factor behind the resurgence of clan-based lists in local poli-
tics has been a revolution in youth participation. The ikhtiyāriyya are all gone,
and an emerging class of young, ambitious, and educated men have replaced
them.
The “Youth Revolution”
Back in 1996 the Israeli adviser to the prime minister on “Arab affairs” inside
Israel, Ori Stendel, observed that while the influence of the hamūla remained
strong, the role of the elders had “reached its end”, caused by what Stendel re-
ferred to as a “youth revolution”.44 This trend has only been strengthened since
39 Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, 199-200.
40 As’ad Ghanem, The Palestinian-Arab Minority in Israel, 1948-2000: A political study (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2001), 137-51.
41 Ghanem, Palestinian-Arab minority, 147, 201.
42 Hanna Herzog and Taghreed Yahia-Younis, “Men’s Bargaining with Patriarchy: The Case of
Primaries within Hamulas in Palestinian Arab Communities in Israel”, Gender & Soci-
ety 21, no. 4 (2007), 579-602, doi: 10.1177/0891243207302571.
43 Yakub Halabi, “Democracy, clan politics and weak governance: The case of the Arab
municipalities in Israel”, Israel Studies 19, no. 1 (2014), 98-125 .
44 Ori Stendel, The Arabs in Israel, 42, 54.
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then. Accompanying the increasing power of the hamūla has been a growing
number of young, educated men replacing the older hamūla leadership.45
Young, aspiring university-educated men who want to pursue political careers,
start in local politics – representing clan lists, not the parties that are widely
perceived as being dominated by patriarchal structures. As part of a clan one
could start a list and have the support of sub-clan members and ideological
peers alike. The new generation remains loyal to their kinship group, while
political processes inside the hamūlas have been modernized and democra-
tized. First and foremost, the nomination process has been professionalized.
Internal primaries within the hamūlas have become an institutionalized prac-
tice, with varying degrees of formality, some having formal election commit-
tees to oversee that the primaries are conducted properly.46
To illuminate these processes, I will use a case study of local politics in Dayr
al-Asad (Deir al-Asad) in northern Israel, a Muslim town of some 13,000 inhab-
itants where this author has conducted extensive fieldwork.47 While locals
overwhelmingly support the Arab parties in national elections (the joint list
took 79 per cent of the votes in the Knesset elections in 2015), they vote for the
hamūlas in local elections. In 2013, local elections were held in the town. The
mayor at the time, Aḥmad Dhabbāḥ, from the Dhabbāḥ hamūla, had first been
elected mayor in 2003, at the age of 47. In one polling station inside the town,
Dhabbāḥ won just 1 per cent of the votes. In another, in the neighbourhood of
his hamūla, he won 96 per cent . The turnout in this polling station was 97 per
cent. Dhabbāḥ won again in 2013, but clan solidarity does not fully explain why.
The Dhabbāḥ hamūla is actually smaller than the Asadī clan, the largest
hamūla in the town. In 2013 there were other clan candidates who ran for may-
or in the local elections, and one candidate from the Palestinian nationalist
communist party, the Front (Jabha). The party’s candidate was actually chal-
lenged by his cousin’s son, running on a clan list. That man, Bilāl Asadī, was
also a member of the communist party, and had been a leader of its youth
branch. But he was displeased with its internal democratic procedures. “There
is no internal democracy in the party”, he told this author. “It is not for younger
people. Take Dayr Ḥanā (Deir Hanna), the same guy has been the leader of the
party since 1976!” This is why Bilāl, with the support of peers mainly from his
own hamūla, founded his own list and became a mayoral candidate.
45 Amal Jamal, “Arab leadership in Israel: ascendance and fragmentation”, Journal of Pales-
tine Studies 35, no. 2 (2006), 1-17, doi:10.1525/jps.2006.35.2.6.
46 Herzog and Younis, “Men’s Bargaining”, 591.
47 Dag Tuastad, Primary Solidarity. A Comparative Study on the Role of Kinship in Palestinian
Local Politics (PhD diss., University of Oslo, 2009).
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Bilāl won only 4 per cent of votes in the election. But he nevertheless illus-
trated the political trend referred to above: a simmering youth revolution in
the Arab sector in Israel. Young Israeli Palestinians are politically autonomous
and play an active part in the formal political system through clan lists. This
has contributed to clan lists today almost totally dominating local politics.
Meanwhile, old patriarchal structures within the clans have been severely
weakened. The youth revolution is important in the democratization of clan
lists referred to above. The clans have largely institutionalized democratic
nomination processes with internal primaries, overseen by formal election
committees, clan member lists, and secret balloting. This institutionalization
has also enabled smaller lineage segments to assert themselves inside the
clans.
Another feature of the elections in Dayr al-Asad were the compromises
reached among the different candidates. When Aḥmad Dhabbāḥ failed to win
a majority in the first round of the elections, he made an offer to his opponent,
who was from the Asadī hamūla and the communist party (and thus a rare
exception to the rule of national parties not prioritizing local elections). The
two candidates would share power, and his opponent would become the dep-
uty mayor. By this, they avoided having to make deals with smaller clans to
achieve a majority in the local council. They could now govern by consensus if
tough decisions were to be made.
A political culture of compromise has thus evolved over the years, indepen-
dent of clan or party, where former foes have united. This feature also increas-
ingly distinguishes the politics of the Israeli Palestinians at the national level,
as seen by the success of the Arab parties’ joint list. On the surface, the local
political world of clan-based particularism appears to be totally different from
the nationalist, universalist orientation at the national level. However, as in the
case of Bilāl Asadī – of the youth branch of the communist party at the na-
tional level, but also part of a clan list locally opposing old leaders of the local
communist party – the two levels are interrelated. The experiences of youth
asserting themselves through local clan politics spill into national politics,
where national issues are addressed.
The joint list – the three Arab parties in Israel running a common, unified
campaign and becoming the third largest party in the Knesset – is thus an ex-
pression of a new generation of Israeli Palestinians who have internalized
democratic values. This stands in contrast to the Palestinian national move-
ment, within which a similar development is sorely lacking.
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Conclusion: The Importance of Democratic Practices
“We look to the Palestinians inside for inspiration”, said Aḥmad ‘Azzām, a pro-
fessor of political science at the Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, after the
Israeli parliamentary elections in 2015, when the Arab parties’ joint list became
the third largest party in Israel. Where the Palestinians in the Occupied Ter-
ritories were divided, the Israeli Palestinians were united. Where the national
Palestinian movement has developed gerontocratic features, the Israeli Pales-
tinians have witnessed a youth revolution in political participation. Hence the
paradox is that if clan-based politics constitutes one kind of political culture
and the nationalist movement another, it is the latter that is patriarchal. While
Fatah and the secular Palestinian nationalist movement in the Occupied Ter-
ritories are run by and dominated by old men, the political culture founded in
the local hamūlas of the Israeli Palestinians is no longer patriarchal in terms
of age hierarchy. It is, instead, marked by a high participation rate, democratic
procedures, and youth participation that altogether spill over into national
politics.
This is so because the issue is not really about political content. They all –
Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza – share the same Palestinian
national consciousness. The issue is not clan-based politics versus nationalist
politics and ideology, but political culture and democratic practice. In terms of
political institution building, the main difference between politics organized
inside and outside the 1948 borders is that inside, since 1948, and locally, since
the 1960s, there have been regular democratic elections. A Palestinian born
and raised in 1948 in Israel would normally, from 1966 until today, have partici-
pated in 26 local and national elections (i.e. every second year). In Gaza, or the
West Bank, one would have experienced elections only three times (on aver-
age, there would have been an election only every twentieth year). Similarly,
there is a great irony that the clans have primaries but that the Palestinian na-
tional movement lacks internal democracy. In fact, the PLO has never had in-
ternal elections, and its leadership changes only as a result of funerals.
An election is part of a political education. Returning to the local elections
in Gaza, in the Bureij camp one finds that when Fatah members went on strike,
they actually succeeded. Fatah could not run the campaign without any locals
being part of it, so they were forced to concede. Fatah eventually lost to Hamas,
but the political contest forced upon them a degree of renewal. Democratic
political competition thus improves political organization. Where regular
elections, nomination processes, campaigns, and changes of position are held
every second year, the political system is continuously revitalized, and partici-
pants tend to internalize democratic values and a democratic political culture.
Where elections are held on average only every twentieth year, the population
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has little chance to follow suit. The Palestinian national movement has never
prioritized the institutionalization of democratic practices. The result is that
while the clan-oriented Palestinians inside are united and non-patriarchal, in
the Occupied Territories the Palestinians are internally divided, with a boiling,
lost generation doomed to find an outlet for political frustrations beyond the
formal political system.
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