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 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jps.2005.34. 4.25>. 2 Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 243. Die Welt des Islams 57 (2017) 386-403 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:25:51PM via free access 388 Tuastad 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 <http://www.jstor.org/ stable/42853921>. 5 Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A theory of distorted change in Arab society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 31. 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