As Isaia Urbani explains well in his recent article, there is no single people behind the name Gaza, but a mosaic of clans, extended families and tribal confederations. Those who have lived in the region for a long time know that the Strip is an archipelago of local powers, of hamula competing with each other for survival, territory, smuggling and honour.

Yet, in the Western imagination – and even more so in universities and processions – Gaza is represented as a unanimous body, a clear symbol of collective suffering and resistance against Israel.

A poetic and consoling representation, but one that ends up betraying reality. Hamas, in fact, has not only measured itself against Israel: it has had to fight a multiplicity of internal enemies. Clans like the Doghmush, the Hilles, the Abu Shabab or the Samhadana have clashed several times with Islamist militias in real urban battles.

Some – like the Abu Shabab clan, of Tarabin Bed ouin origin – have even formed ‘Popular Forces‘, anti-Hamas armed groups that, according to local sources, have received limited Israeli support.
Others, such as the Khalas in the north or the Mujaida in Khan Yunis, have been severely repressed. The international press has reported on executions, vendettas and feuds that resemble, rather than a political front, a network of struggling micro-sovereignties.

Hamas has tried to co-opt them, but has never really unified them. The reality is that no one will be able to ‘disarm Gaza’ unless this deep structure is first understood: not a party, but a constellation of clans where each affiliation coincides with survival.

The many Gaza

Dozens of influential clans operate in the Strip, veritable parallel powers with historical, economic and military roots. Among the largest and best known are: al-Masri (around 20,000 members), Kafarna, Hilles, Doghmush, Abu Samhadana, Khalas, Shawwa, Abu Middain, Abd al-Shafi, Mughani. To these are added dozens of other smaller families, linked to specific territories. A quarter of the population has Bedouin origins and belongs to six saff (tribal confederations), each of which in turn is made up of a dozen asha’ira (tribes), totalling at least seventy-two lineages.

The modern Hamas no longer coincide with the Bedouin tribes, but retain their logic: absolute internal solidarity and distrust of any central power. In such a context, even a possible disarmament of Hamas would not guarantee peace: it would dissolve a single authority, leaving dozens of competing armed powers to emerge.

Western removal

On 7 October 2023, Hamas and other terrorist groups carried out a sudden attack, penetrating Israel, killing around 1,200 people, including over 800 civilians, and taking 250 people hostage, including 30 children, whose sad story we know.

We must remember this not to belittle the subsequent massacres carried out by the Israeli government, but to recognise a mental trait typical of our time: the tendency to deny the certain, in the name of the ‘true‘.

Hamas itself filmed and disseminated its violence as an instrument of terror; yet, two years later, there are those who go so far as to claim that those images are propaganda fictions. It is the sign of an ideological need rather than a critical doubt: believing only what confirms one’s thesis, denying reality itself.

In the squares and campuses of Europe, unfortunately, part of the intellectual world continues to read the Palestinian question as a struggle between Good and Evil, reducing Gaza to an icon of revolutionary purity.

One forgets that the West itself bears on its conscience centuries of anti-Judaism (first pagan and then Christian) and secular anti-Semitism, right and left.
The creation of the State of Israel was also an act of collective atonement: the decision of a devastated Europe to unload the burden of its guilt on another region, entrusting a strip of Middle Eastern land with the impossible coexistence between different victims of History.

Forgetting it today, resetting memory and selectively saving it, means projecting our contradictions outside and taking refuge in an illusory purity.
It is a form of self-absolution disguised as solidarity.

Not an invitation to pessimism, but a challenge to conscience

My analysis – and the mapping that accompanies it – is not meant to spur pessimism, but caution. The Israeli-Palestinian issue is among the most difficult of our time and would require a Western intellectual unity that we do not have today: the ability to discuss without slogans, to know before judging, to recognise that our oldest fractures are mirrored in the Middle East tragedy.

True disarmament, perhaps, begins here: the disarmament of rhetoric and selective memory. Only then will we be able to return to thinking of peace not as an ideological abstraction, but as a shared task between civilisations bordering the same sea. That Mediterranean that was the cradle of Athens, Jerusalem, Rome and Cordoba – where the three faiths were able for a moment to speak the same language of knowledge. That Mediterranean which today, more than ever, awaits a common language of truth and justice.