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 [email protected]
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
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/15700607-05734p06Die Welt Downloadeddes Islams from 57 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 386-403 05:25:51PM via free access Nationalist Patriarchy, Clan Democracy 387 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
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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
Die Welt Downloadeddes Islams from 57 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 386-403 05:25:51PM via free access Nationalist Patriarchy, Clan Democracy 389 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
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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.
Die Welt Downloadeddes Islams from 57 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 386-403 05:25:51PM via free access Nationalist Patriarchy, Clan Democracy 391 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.
Die Welt des Islams 57 (2017) 386-403 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:25:51PM via free access 392 Tuastad 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)
Die Welt Downloadeddes Islams from 57 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 386-403 05:25:51PM via free access Nationalist Patriarchy, Clan Democracy 393 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
Die Welt des Islams 57 (2017) 386-403 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:25:51PM via free access 394 Tuastad 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
Die Welt des Islams 57 (2017) 386-403 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:25:51PM via free access 396 Tuastad 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
Die Welt Downloadeddes Islams from 57 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 386-403 05:25:51PM via free access Nationalist Patriarchy, Clan Democracy 397 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.
Die Welt des Islams 57 (2017) 386-403 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:25:51PM via free access 398 Tuastad 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,
Die Welt Downloadeddes Islams from 57 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 386-403 05:25:51PM via free access Nationalist Patriarchy, Clan Democracy 399 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
Die Welt des Islams 57 (2017) 386-403 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:25:51PM via free access 400 Tuastad 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
Die Welt Downloadeddes Islams from 57 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 386-403 05:25:51PM via free access Nationalist Patriarchy, Clan Democracy 403 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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