Sunday, February 25, 2007

No room for family vendetta

February 25, 2007

No room for family vendetta


IT seems that Fatah-Hamas rivalry has taken a backseat and personal vendetta rules the day in the Palestinian territories. In a society like that of the Palestinians, family and clan loyalties run high, and this has emerged as the key factor in the latest eruption of intra-Palestinian violence in the Gaza Strip.
The leaderships of both Fatah and Hamas have accepted that they do not have a real blood feud and it is in the best interest of their common cause of liberation from Israeli occupation to join hands instead of taking up guns against each other in a senseless war that benefits no one but Israel.
The latest flare-up of violence is seen to be the result of families seeking revenge for the killing of their loved ones, whether Hamas or Fatah or any other group. The political leaders of the various groups do not really have a dominating role to put an end to the trend where a brother or cousin takes up arms and seeks to exact revenge from the group suspected of having killed a member of the family.
This is what is emerging in the latest clashes, which killed at least three Palestinians and wounded 15 others on Friday and Saturday, threatening to quash the calm in the occupied territories and undermining the power-sharing agreement that Fatah and Hamas agreed in Makkah this month.
A case in point is that of Mohammed Ghelban, a 28-year-old commander from Hamas' military wing, who was killed in a drive-by shooting outside of his home apparently in revenge the murder of a family member. Hamas accused "suspect figures hiding behind the cover of Karouah family" of executing Ghelban. The group called on the Karouah family "to stop protecting the killers" and said Hamas fighters reserved the right to punish the killers. Several hours later, a 22-year-old man from a Fatah family, Hazem Karouah, was killed, along with a bystander, and the cycle of killings does not seem to have ended there either.
Similar tales of family vendettas are becoming the order of the day in the Palestinian territories.
Parallel to the killings and violence, the political leaders of Fatah and Hamas are pursuing their efforts to form a Palestinian national unity government and pressure the West to accept it as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. They could do without the cycle of killings and counter-killings. Preventing emotionally driven individuals from seeking revenge for the killing of a loved one is beyond the political realm of the Fatah and Hamas leader, and that is the danger confronting their efforts to produce a national unity government.
The Makkah agreement was seen as the only way to avert a Palestinian civil war, because of what was feared to be an unbridgeable chasm between Fatah and Hamas. Having heaved a sigh of relief over the Makkah agreement, the world now sees that the cycle of vendetta killings casting a dark cloud over hopes that the Palestinians have found a common platform to fight their cause.
Until the Makkah agreement was worked out, it was the political responsibility of the leaders of Fatah and Hamas to bury their differences. Now it is the individual responsibility of every Palestinians to understand and accept that family vendettas could prove to be deadly for their cause and struggle for liberation from foreign occupation.