Poor Condy, she belives it is about ideology...

By Kevin Peraino
Newsweek International

Feb. 26, 2007 issue - The Doqmosh family stronghold is a world unto itself in Gaza City's Sabra neighborhood. The road leading in is blocked off with the burned-out hulk of a minibus. Dumpsters filled with sand plug other entryways, warning away unwanted visitors. The streets around the compound are eerily deserted. At first, that seems like a good sign, considering the gun battles that have been raging over the past several months. But just inside, up a crumbling flight of concrete stairs, Tamam Doqmosh is plotting her revenge.

Late last year her son Mahmoud was murdered. She grips a framed photo of his corpse, punctured with dozens of tiny red pinpricks like mosquito bites. "Sixty-three bullets," she calmly explains. But when talk turns to the recent ceasefire brokered between Palestinian factions in Mecca, her equanimity fades. "We're not part of this deal!" she cries. "After they killed our son?" She blames 18 members of the Islamist group Hamas for the shooting. "First we'll kill the leader," she says. "Then we'll kill the other 17."

That might seem like the empty threat of a heartbroken mother. After all, Palestinian leaders hoped that the low-grade civil war that has killed about 100 Gazans and wounded 300 more since the beginning of the year was coming to an end. At an emergency summit meeting in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, two weeks ago, Hamas and Fatah agreed to share power in a new "unity government," and the Islamists pledged to "respect" past peace deals with Israel. But similar accords have collapsed in the past. Already politicians are squabbling over the thorny issues of who will control Gaza's security forces and key cabinet ministries in any new government.

Even if the two parties manage to agree, the emotionally charged family rivalries could torpedo the deal. In tight-knit Gaza, feuds between the territory's roughly 100 large clans are something of a local sport, even in times of relative peace. Taxi drivers keep the tallies like box scores. Some of the large households line up behind Fatah; others, Hamas. But family ties often trump party affiliation. And because they are intensely personal, the clan wars are even harder to control than sectarian infighting. "You can give orders to a faction," says a senior Palestinian intelligence officer, who didn't want to be identified because of the secretive nature of his work. But "the most important thing is how we deal with the families."

Money might help. NEWSWEEK has learned that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas plans to convene a committee of party officials and family leaders in the coming days to try to resolve some of the lingering feuds. The meetings will focus on the payment of diehs—one-time cash handouts to each of the victims' families. The intelligence officer believes the whole matter could be settled with $30 million; he's hoping the Saudis will pick up the tab. "If they want it to succeed, they'll have to pay," he insists. Still, he concedes, for many of the families "money's not the problem."

He might have been speaking of the Doqmosh family's next-door neighbors, the al-Dires, who have come up with a solution of their own. Each month, the clan's roughly 1,000 men contribute $2 to a communal fund they call the "family box." They use it partly to buy their own supply of weapons. Ibrahim al-Dire, the household's wiry patriarch, clutches a cigarette in one hand and a fistful of rocket-propelled grenades in the other. In January, he says, three family members were assassinated in the street outside his home. He blames the Doqmoshes, and won't rest, deal or no deal among Palestinian leaders, until he has vengeance. "We know their names," says another family member, 33-year-old Munther al-Dire. "If we find them in the street, we'll kill them."

It won't end there, of course. The Doqmosh family has amassed an arsenal of its own. Over the past year, they have become one of the most powerful forces in Gaza. Lately they tend to be allied with Fatah, but they're also something of a free radical. One member says the clan has 3,000 men "above the age of 16" at its disposal. Another of its elders, Momtaz Doqmosh (his first name translates as "excellent") commands a prominent splinter group of Gaza's Popular Resistance Committees. Munther al-Dire insists he's not intimidated. "We'll deal with this thing between the families," he says. "After we take revenge, maybe we'll be friends again." If only revenge were so tidy.
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

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Clan law rules in anarchic Palestinian town

By Haitham Tamimi
Reuters
Sunday, February 18, 2007; 7:29 PM

HEBRON, West Bank (Reuters) - When a car was set on fire in a row between two Palestinian families in Hebron earlier this month, it was not the police who stepped in to restore calm, but a 75-year-old tribal elder.

For Fathi Jadua Oweiwi, head of one of Hebron's largest families, it was the latest in a series of arguments he has helped to resolve in the West Bank town, where Palestinian security forces have effectively lost control.

"If there were any authority here, both sides would have ended up in jail," said Oweiwi. "But there is no authority. So we in Hebron solve our own problems with our own hands."

The Palestinian Authority, set up under interim peace accords in lands occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, is supposed to police the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel's crackdown on the six-year-old Palestinian uprising, an international embargo against Palestinians since the Islamist Hamas group won last year's election, and internal Palestinian warfare have all left Palestinian police impotent.

Faced with what they say is worsening chaos, Oweiwi and other local leaders have stepped into the vacuum to deal with cases of murder and theft, and land disputes.

Their influence stems from the traditional tribal bonds in Palestinian society which mean they can, if necessary, call on support from hundreds of relatives.

"I can make one telephone call, and in a quarter of an hour a thousand people will be here," said Oweiwi, speaking on a cold winter morning in his Hebron home, next to a pen of goats.

When Palestinian Authority forces first came to Hebron a decade ago, they were strong enough to impose law and order, he said. But power has slipped from their hands.

"The situation is bad and it is getting worse," Oweiwi said. "If the heads of the West Bank tribes disappeared, people would be at each others throats."

Oweiwi's work is not confined to Hebron, a city of about 150,000 people. He has helped resolve a murder in Nablus 50 miles to the north, and he is not the only elder to play the role of lawmaker.

SCRAMBLE FOR GUNS

Naji Mustafa Abu Seneineh, head of Hebron's largest clan, said he recently intervened in a dispute over 40 dunums of land in Bethlehem. Both claimants had legal experts backing their case and the dispute could have turned violent.

"I told them no one can use the land until I got a third expert to judge," said Abu Seneineh, a 56-year-old man with a thick gray beard. "In the meantime, both of them were under my personal protection."

He said the insecurity in Hebron was leading to a scramble for guns and driving up the price of weapons as people sought to defend themselves from anarchy.

"There are some families who are not even eating (because they choose instead) to arm themselves," Abu Seneineh said, speaking in a gold dealer's shop in Hebron's central market.

Both Oweiwi and Abu Seneineh said the power of the families has -- for now -- prevented Palestinian factional warfare from breaking out in the West Bank on the same scale as Gaza, where dozens of people were killed in December and January.

Some families have flexed their muscles in more violent ways. In December, a police station in Hebron was attacked in what security sources said was revenge for the killing by police of a member of a leading local clan.

The attackers kidnapped 15 policemen, shot six in the legs and set fire to 16 police cars.

Security officials say they are largely powerless to curb the violence or challenge tribal authority.

Police morale and capability have been undermined by an the economic embargo in place since Hamas came to power in March last year. Many officers have received only a fraction of their salaries.

OWN EXPENSE

"I'm working for the authority at my own expense, paying my own phone bill," said a Palestinian official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Restrictions on the movement of Palestinian police in the center of Hebron, where the Israeli army is deployed around several Jewish settlements, also limited their operations, he said.

For a while after the outbreak of the latest Palestinian uprising in 2000, Israeli troops patrolled the whole town and permitted only unarmed Palestinian security deployments.

"An unarmed security officer can't arrest a drug smuggler, because he can't protect himself," the official said. Police were also increasingly wary that any arrest they make could provoke a revenge attack from one of the clans.

Deep-rooted Palestinian political tensions had taken their toll in the West Bank, even if this was not yet as dramatic as in Gaza, the official said.

"The current internal Hamas and Fatah fighting has led to complete chaos," he said. "In the absence of rule of law...criminals and gangs are expanding and threaten the stability of Palestinian society."

For those who do not have the umbrella of a big family to shelter under, the lawlessness is an even greater concern.

Hatem al-Sharif, who runs a small shoe shop in an alley off one of Hebron's main streets, says he spent 1,000 Jordanian dinars ($1,400) on a pistol recently.

"There's no security here for my car, my shop, myself," said Sharif, whose car was stolen last month. "You need to protect yourself," he said, lifting a sweater to reveal the black, unmarked gun which he said came from Egypt.

"I would have bought it sooner if I'd had the money," he added. "If I had the money, I'd buy an M-16 (automatic rifle)."

(Additional reporting by Dominic Evans)

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