Despite the ferocity and brutality of the Israeli raids during the current aggression on the Gaza Strip, and despite the enormous human and material losses, the people of the Gaza Strip are uniting strongly with the resistance, led by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas).
The current reality takes us back to a special report issued by the International Crisis Group 15 years ago, which concluded that the Gaza Strip’s tribes and their powerful families constitute one of the most important obstacles facing Hamas’ rule after it took control of the Strip.
In this report, we review the steps taken by the Hamas movement to strengthen its relationship with the tribes and families in Gaza in a way that made the Israeli occupation’s efforts to isolate the resistance from its social incubator a difficult task.
The roots of the people of Gaza
Most of the Gaza Strip’s lands are sandy, so it was historically rare to have villages and peasant populations.
Before 1948, most of its population lived in Khan Yunis in the south of the Strip, and in Gaza City in the north, while Bedouin tribes spread throughout the rest of Gaza.
The Gaza Strip was affected by the repercussions of wars and migrations in its geographical surroundings, up to the Israeli occupation in 1948.
Therefore, we find that only about 25% of the current population of Gaza are from the tribes that inhabited the region in the past, while the others belong to expatriate families, whether from Egypt, Turkey, or elsewhere.
The most prominent demographic change occurred with the Nakba of 1948, when about 200,000 refugees came to the Gaza Strip from all over Palestine, especially from South Jaffa, to join 80,000 residents of the Gaza Strip at that time. Thus, a new reality was formed in which refugee immigrants represented about three-quarters of the population.
In that atmosphere, the clan and family emerged as an umbrella of protection in light of the changing social status of many with their loss of land and wealth.
Gaza is a stronghold of resistance
When Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967, it was keen to deal with citizens through senior families through a specific accreditation for each region.
The occupation also saw the refugee camps as a threat to it, given that their residents are adopting the option of resistance in order to achieve the dream of return, in addition to that they have nothing to lose after the occupation robbed them of their homes and property. Indeed, the spark of the first intifada broke out in Jabalia camp in 1987 after a settler ran over 4 workers with his truck. Palestinians.
With the signing of the Oslo Accords and the inauguration of the Palestinian Authority, whose leaders came from outside the Gaza Strip, many jobs were available for the people of the Gaza Strip within the executive and security authorities, and there was an influx of funds that led to a real estate boom, so the process of refugees moving to the wealthier neighborhoods accelerated, and the manifestations of disparities declined. social life among the residents of the Strip.
At that time, certain families were linked to the authorities’ agencies, with some of their members assuming leadership positions in the security services, at a time when the authority established an office for tribal affairs that supervised about 200 branches throughout the Gaza Strip.
The authority adopted a mukhtar for each family of significant size to communicate regarding the affairs of its members, which required small families to ally with a large family that had a mukhtar, and thus the powerful clans became allies of the Palestinian Authority.
The turning point of the second intifada
With the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000, and the occupation forces destroyed the headquarters and institutions of the Palestinian Authority, including police stations in Gaza, under the pretext of supporting its resistance members, the police ordered its members to take their weapons home, which led to a surge in arming the tribes.
In the atmosphere of the repercussions of the Intifada and the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004, a state of chaos prevailed in the Gaza Strip and the influence of families expanded. Some of them raided courts and prisons to release their children, and stormed the headquarters and ministries of the Authority to demand jobs for their children and services such as priority treatment in hospitals.
It happened that some clans held people from their opponents hostage to resolve disputes, and security squares protected by barricades and gunmen were formed in the residential areas of some families.
In light of this situation, cases piled up before the courts, at a time when the police were unable to implement the rulings issued by the judges, who began to fear for their lives. The judiciary was paralyzed, and clans and families became the main umbrella of protection for their members, while the authorities courted them to gain loyalty. Managing the affairs of the sector.
Gaza after 2007
After winning the 2006 elections, the Hamas movement sought to resolve the manifestations of security chaos. It established the Executive Force as an official security body based on competence and discipline, and not on the basis of personal loyalty and family affiliation.
The force’s tasks included rapid intervention in the event of tribal fighting, and it launched campaigns against drug dealers, car thieves, and those outside the regime, in conjunction with activating the role of preachers to talk about the danger of tribal fanaticism and alert to the real enemy represented by the occupation.
After Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, it worked in parallel on the following points:
- The Hamas movement took advantage of the Palestinian Authority’s decision to prevent its members from cooperating with the new government in the Gaza Strip in exchange for handing them their salaries while they were at home, in forming security services with new members of the movement.
- Hamas worked to gain the loyalty of members of the Palestinian Authority who rejected its decisions, such as Khaled Abu Hilal, a former leader of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah), who assumed the position of official spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior. He and hundreds of members of the security services joined the new government in Gaza, and was martyred in the aggression. Current situation on Gaza in November 2023.
- The Hamas government resorted to ending the phenomenon of security squares by besieging them, forcing the militants inside them to surrender, and demolishing the barriers and barricades around them.
- It also worked to impose its control over the land, preventing, for example, the establishment of roadblocks, and members of the security services accompanied electricity and water collectors when they collected bills, and thus the general population welcomed the state of security that was available after years of chaos.
- Hamas supported dispute resolution committees, which settled disputes in accordance with customs derived from Islamic Sharia, and the new security services succeeded in completing the requirements for the success of the judicial session, including arresting perpetrators, securing courts and judges, and implementing judgments.
- The movement retained 608 mukhtars out of 683 mukhtars previously approved by the Palestinian Authority, according to a study by Norwegian academic Dag Tostad published in 2021 under the title “Hamas and the Clans,” but the difference is that the role of the mukhtars shifted to controlling the behavior of their family members instead of playing a mediation role in their favor.
Strengthening the social incubator
In 2011, Hamas urged the tribes to launch a council for each of them according to criteria that included representation of all its branches, so that decisions would be taken collectively without the mukhtar making the decision alone. This increased the involvement of the tribe members in public affairs, strengthened the ties between its members, and strengthened the cohesion of Gazan society.
A “reform” committee was also established in each neighborhood, with a special office connected to the police, to resolve disputes and reconcile disputes. The number of these committees has exceeded 41 throughout the Gaza Strip. Thus, it represented a parallel to the work of the security services and courts, which can issue and implement punishments, but they are unable to reform and remove hatred from the souls of the opponents.
With the prolonged siege on the Gaza Strip, and unemployment spreading to nearly 60% in the Strip, the tribe provided a social protection umbrella for its members through subscriptions paid by able-bodied members, and financial transfers from expatriates among them, which are placed in a fund designated for the needy and the poor.
This was the first time in decades that the Gaza Strip was ruled by members of its population, according to a system that was not based on family loyalty and applied to everyone. Hamas benefited from the fact that its members belonged to the various families and components of Gaza, and directed the compass of hostility towards the occupier, which ensured that no other parties would employ the families. And the tribes to rebel against Hamas.
Strengths
Norwegian academic Taj Tostad concludes that one of Hamas’s strengths is that it is a popular movement with branches in every corner of the Gaza Strip, from rural villages to cities and camps.
It also succeeded, through its security and social work adapted to the local culture, in mobilizing the popular base in Gaza in favor of the resistance approach, and it invested in family and tribal ties in supporting its rule instead of viewing it as a competing entity that should be dismantled or changed.
Then, Islamic and conservative social values spread throughout society, and collective responsibility emerged as an essential component in maintaining order and providing social harmony, which strengthened the state of steadfastness and rallying around resistance in the face of the current aggression.