Mobilizations in Palestine: between the kinship and the “parties”

For over 30 years now, my research, including fieldwork, teaching and publications, has been focused on the Palestinian national mobilization in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Like any historian I had to bring my own response to the particular situation encountered by the researcher facing the “very contemporary”: the limits of oral testimony as primary sources. In Palestine, perhaps more than elsewhere because of the daily brutality of the occupation, accessing to sources is difficult due to the clandestinity of some actors, the denial of access to entire areas, etc. Moreover no one doubts that the intensity of the engagement in the liberation struggle reinforces the partisan nature of most of the sources. As the purpose of the research is not to reproduce the discourse of different actors but to explain the process that leads a society to the production of these discourses, the quest of “objective” sources is required.

Some observers and many actors have considered opinion surveys as a privileged instrument in the appreciation of the Palestinian political mobilization. Numerous polling institutes were founded in the early 1990s but still appear as nothing else than a component of what must be called the "peace business." In the West Bank and Gaza, as elsewhere in the world, the question of the sincerity of the respondents as the one of the pollsters arises. However, even if this sincerity issue would have been solved affirmatively (but no proof thereof has ever been given), the absence in Palestine of any other reference corpus prevents the pollster to correct the distortions proper to any opinion poll in its raw form. Therefore, none of the polls available nowadays in Palestine seems to be able to constitute a credible source.

Contrary to the opinion surveys, the 1996 and 2006 legislative elections, by their transparency and their exhaustiveness as a popular consultation, constituted obviously a privileged “field” for the researcher interested in political mobilizations (1).

In 1996, the “political factor”, in the sense of belonging to a list or even a simple reputation of proximity with an organization, has never been prominent in the ways of voting. This reality pinpointed by my research, was challenging the usual expectations and analyzes. In almost all cases, the geographical link between the polling station and the origin of the candidate characterized the choice of the voters. Urban dwellers thus voted for inhabitants of their own city (for example Bethlehem, Bayt Jâlâ and Bayt Sahûr each have specific votes). Refugees voted for the candidates originating from their own camp (near Dayr al-Balah, for example, the vote of Nusayrât camp differed from that of Burayj like that of Maghâzî). In the same manner, the villagers voted for villagers, in many cases according to the map of the old Ottoman nâhiyya-s (the smallest administrative district): in the area of Bethlehem, the nâhiyya of al-Wâdiyya was still distinguished from those of al-`Arqûb and Banî Hassan; in Jenin, Machârîq Al-Jarrâr still marked its difference with Bilâd Al-Hâritha and Cha'râwiyya.

At no time, the voters followed a discipline based on list or parties. The Fatah voter from the city of Nablus, for example, abstained from voting for a Fatah candidate originating from the camps and even preferred to vote for non-Fatah candidates “but” from the city itself in addition of the Fatah urban candidates. Both Nabulsi Fatah and Communist candidates directly depended on the urban electorate as their refugee counterparts depended on the camps electorate. None of them relied on the support of a political partisan electorate.

Electoral behavior of this kind led me to note the permanence and the centrality of the kinship in the functioning of Palestinian society of 1996. Solidarities of blood ties, however, were extended to those of geographically delimited spaces made up of the urban neighborhood or the city, the village or the group of villages, of the refugee camp. Ethnolocalism thus seemed to be the key of solidarities (ethno- because of the kinship, -localism because of the geography).

The poll was the channel of expression of this type of solidarity even if the usual discourse made blood ties a vanished phenomenon because archaic, replaced by a solidarity perceived as “modern”: ideological and partisan. In this form, for me the phenomenon has to do neither with the under-development nor with the retardation. Actually the ethnolocalism has perhaps been only the “natural” protection adopted by the population to defend itself from the policies of the occupant aiming at destroying the social link and the coherence of the society itself.

The interpretation of this Palestinian political order of 1996 in its distance to any partisan or ideological mobilization led me to use the notion of “politics of notables” elaborated by Albert Hourani (2) to analyze Ottoman Palestine during the second half of the 19th century. The notion of “politics of notables” refers to a society in which one observes a heterogeneity between population and power. Mediation between the two is ensured by the “notables”. Those thus ensure the representation of the authority near the population and that of the population near the authority.

In 1996, according to my interpretation, the power incarnated by the Palestinian Authority (two years after its foundation) was distinct from the population. Therefore, it was the heir of the Ottomans, who exercised it from Istanbul, the Hashemites from Amman and the PLO from Beirut and Tunis. At the time, the returnees, officials of the PLO in charge of the highest responsibilities within the PA remained “outside” even if they resided in Gaza or Ramallah; they were quickly designated as the “Tunisians”.

While granting to Yasser Arafat more than 87% of its votes in the presidential election, the population showed that it did not perform a choice. Umm Khalîl, moreover, did not constitute an alternative. The population simply recognized at the time the place of the real power within the Palestinian sphere.

With the legislative election, on the ground of my analysis, the electorate sent “neo-notables” to the Legislative council to represent it to the political authority and to obtain what it in just reward of its loyalty and allegiance expressed by the score granted to Yasser Arafat: local infrastructures, positions in the administration, assistances, etc, not to mention security and protection against the occupant. At the time, for the voters, any matter related to the local solidarity sphere could only be defended by deputies originating from this same sphere. Being a member of Fatah, the “ruling party”, was only a “plus” which would facilitate deputy’s access of the authority and would thus improve his capacity to obtain the awaited benefits.

Ten years later, the January 2006 legislative elections resulted in a radical change in electoral behavior that reflects another reality. One can interpret it in terms of radical revolution in the functioning of politics. The bipolarity of the political scene was brilliantly displayed: with more than 80% of the votes, Hamas and Fatah marginalized the totality of the other movements. Between Fatah the “ruling party” and Hamas the figurehead of “the opposition”, the electorate preferred the latter. But much more deeply, it is the mode of mobilization itself and the relation of the population with the authority which has been transformed.

As a whole the Hamas electorate and the major part of the Fatah electorate mobilized themselves on a partisan base and no longer an ethnolocalist one. For these two movements, the city voter joined in a common front with “others”, those of the villages and the camps, in a common partisan allegiance. A Hamas or Fatah urban candidate, for example, no longer only relied on the support of the urban electorate. The electorate thus constituted Fatah and Hamas in real political “parties” even if both have always refused to be regarded as such in the name of an identity of liberation movement or resistance movement.

At the difference of 1996 also, the election constituted a real choice. Power and society thus would not be experienced as radically heterogeneous any more. The dichotomy between "inside" and "outside" that still survived in 1996 thus would have now disappeared and its end would have involved that of heterogeneity between the ruler and the ruled today. In the same movement, the electorate would have appropriate the Palestinian Authority when he dismissed the movement which held it since its foundation.

Ethnolocalist solidarities have not gone away even though they no longer constitute the basis for the choice in the election. The cities like the camps and the groups of villages appear each one as a group with its own personality as they are often coherent in their political choice. Nevertheless, no general sociology is being able to explain these differences: the categories of “urban dwellers”, “villagers” or “refugees of the camps” are not able to account for the diversity of political allegiances. For example, the town of Khân Yûnis as its camp expressed a common support for Hamas. The town of Dayr Balah, at the contrary, preferred Fatah. The camp of Dayr Al-Balah as that of Maghâzî also supported Fatah when the camps of Nusayrât and Burayj preferred Hamas.

This change in the voting behavior reflects a disruption in patterns of political mobilization but there is no indication that it could be directly connected to the separation and fragmentation born from the Oslo agreements. The emergence of party allegiances by-passing ethnolocalist solidarities, however, has opened the door to the violence which occurred in Palestine during the end of 2006 and the first half of 2007. The exacerbated anarchy, which might be considered as the first signs of a civil war, was due on the ground to a transfer of personal and local issues to a national level. It also signified the disappearance of the polysemy of violence. In this dynamic towards a civil war, all the singularity and richness of meaning of any event was “mashed”: a event was immediately positioned on a national level in a bipolarization of organizational allegiances between Fatah and Hamas, other forces being only spectators. A homicide in Nablus, for example, was no longer able to be solved neither by the justice nor by the negotiated price of blood between the families according to the rules of the customary law. It became a national political issue. The victim as his murderer was reduced to a real or imagined political affiliation and the crime in Nablus led retaliation in Gaza. Therefore, partisan and ideological mobilization, described as "modern" by the electoral sociology, cannot necessarily protect a society from violence, a violence from which it has succeeded in preserving itself by the ethnolocalist solidarities.

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