Hamula

A Palestinian village was rarely a single undifferentiated community. It was a set of hamayil, clans, each tracing descent from a common forefather and each occupying its own quarter, hara. In Salama, near Jaffa, the Mandate-era village was divided into quarters, one to each hamula or sub-clan, with the houses of each group built around a large shared courtyard, the hawsh, entered through a single common gate. The courtyard was where women worked, children played and families gathered in the evening — architecture as an expression of kinship.

The hamula was not only residential. It was the unit through which land was held and inherited, particularly where fields were held collectively under musha’ tenure and periodically redistributed among households. It was the unit of protection and liability: an injury done to one member obliged the whole group, and reconciliation, sulh, was negotiated between clans rather than individuals. Marriage was largely endogamous, most often to a cousin, which kept land within the group and reinforced its cohesion. Village politics were clan politics, and the mukhtars who represented the village to the state were the heads of its leading hamayil.

The Nakba broke the geography of the system without destroying the system itself. Families dispersed across camps and countries, and where they could, they reassembled: refugees moved between camps to rejoin relatives, and the camps’ neighbourhoods came to be named after the families and villages that filled them. In Jordan’s Jerash camp, where the population came overwhelmingly from Beersheba and Gaza, the tribal structure of the community shaped where tents were pitched, how disputes were resolved and how the history of particular places was kept alive; families and clans still cluster together there, and many neighbourhoods have not changed since 1968.

Sociologists have long argued about whether the hamula survived as a living institution or persisted as a political convenience — Israeli military government, and later Israeli and Jordanian party politics, both worked deliberately through clan leaders. Overcrowding, wage labour, education and displacement have weakened its authority in every generation since 1948. But the vocabulary remains: to ask a Palestinian family where they are from is usually to be told the name of a village that no longer exists and the name of the hamula that lived in one quarter of it.

Sources

• Salama, Jaffa subdistrict — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Jerash Refugee Camp (Gaza Camp) — PalQuest