1. Justice Alan Rose to High Commissioner, following Criminal Appeal, 119/1944, Israel State Archive (hereafter ISA).

2. Bernard Cohn, “Law and the Colonial State in India,” in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, ed. Bernard Cohn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 131–52; Marc Galanter, Law and Society in Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jaap De-Moor, ed. European Expansion and Law, (Oxford/New York: Berg, 1992); Moore, Sally F., “Treating Law as Knowledge: Telling Colonial Officers What to Say to Africans about Running ‘Their Own’ Native Courts,” Law and Society Review 26 (1992): 11–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sebba, Leslie, “The Creation and Evolution of Criminal Law in Colonial and Post-Colonial Societies,” Crime, History and Societies 3 (1999): 71–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Bhabha, Homi, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (1984): 125–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jana Tschurenev, “Between Non-Interference in Matters of Religion and Civilizing Mission: the Prohibition of Suttee in 1829,” in Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India, ed. Harald Fischer–Tine and Michael Mann (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 68–94.

4. Dagmar Engels, “Wives, Widows and Workers: Women and the Law in Colonial India,” in European Expansion and Law, ed. Mommsen and De-Moor (Oxford/New York: Berg, 1992), 159–78; Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Oakland: University of California Press, 1998); Pedersen, Susan, “National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politics of Colonial Policy-Making,” Journal of Modern History 63 (1991): 647–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Assaf Likhovski, “Servants, Brides and Workers: Arab and Jewish Girls and British Legislators in Mandatory Palestine [Hebrew],” in One Law for Man and Woman, ed. Eyal Katvan, Margaret Shilo and Ruth Halperin-Kaddari (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2010), 375–404.

5. Partha Chaterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

6. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss these controversies in greater detail; a succinct presentation of the differences between the subaltern school and the recent trend pursuing a more nuanced understanding of power relations is provided by Lauren Benton, who reviews the controversy in the 1980s between the Marxist social historian Edward Palmer Thompson and one of the founders of Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha, and develops it further. Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2–30; and Martin Wiener, An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

7. De, Rohit, “The Two Husbands of Vera Tiscenko: Apostasy, Conversion, and Divorce in Late Colonial India,” Law and History Review 28 (2010): 1011–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richard Roberts, Litigants and Households: African Disputes and Colonial Courts in the French Soudan, 1895–1912 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2005); and Sharafi, Mitra, “The Marital Patchwork of Colonial South Asia: Forum Shopping from Britain to Baroda,” Law and History Review 28 (2010): 979–1009CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Kolsky, , “Introduction. Forum: Maneuvering the Personal Law System in Colonial India,” Law and History Review 28 (2010): 973–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Engel S. Merry, Colonizing Hawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

9. Hagan, John, “Extra-legal Attributes and Criminal Sentencing: An Assessment of a Sociological Viewpoint,” Law & Society Review 8 (1973): 357–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alfred Blumstein, Jacqueline Cohen, Susan E. Martin, and Michael H. Tonry, eds. Research in Sentencing: The Search for Reform, (Washington DC: National Academy Press, 1983); Chiricos, Theodore G. and Crawford, Charles, “Race and Imprisonment: A Contextual Assessment of the Evidence,” Ethnicity, Race, and Crime: Perspectives Across Time and Place 13 (1995): 281–309Google Scholar; and Zatz, Marjorie S., “The Convergence of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class on Court Decision Making: Looking Toward the 21st Century,” Criminal Justice 3 (2000): 503–52Google Scholar.

10. Gary LaFree, Rape and Criminal Justice: The Social Construction of Sexual Assault (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1989); and Ulmer, Jeffery T. and Johnson, Brian, “Sentencing in Context: A Multilevel Analysis,” Criminology 42 (2004): 137–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. Regarding the term “clitoridectomy,” in academic literature pertaining both to the colonial past and to the present, different terms are used to convey the intervention in women's genitals. Erika Sussman uses the term “female circumcision,” and also presents the criticism raised against that term. Susan Pedersen and Claire Robertson use the term “clitoridectomy,” while noting the ritual significance of this act as part of age group initiation. Authors dealing with current debates and legislation use either the term “female genital mutilation” or “female genital cutting” (to avoid the strongly judgmental term “mutilation”). Finally Wairimu N. Njambi, herself from Kenya, uses the ritual term referring to women's age group initiation, in the local language: Irua ria Atumia..See Sussman, Erika, “Contending with Culture: An Analysis of the Female Genital Mutilation Act of 1996,” Cornell International Law Journal 31 (1998): 193–250Google Scholar; Pedersen, “National Bodies”; Robertson, Claire, “Grassroots in Kenya: Women, Genital Mutilation and Collective Action, 1920–1990,” Sings 21 (1996), 615–42Google Scholar; Njambi, Wairimu N., “Irua Ria Atumia and Anti-Colonial Struggles among the Gikuyu in Kenya: A Counter Narrative on ‘Female Genital Mutilation’,” Critical Sociology 33 (2007): 689–708CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Pinar Ilkkaracan, Women and Sexuality in Muslim Societies (Istanbul: Women for Women's Human Rights\KIHP, 2000); Lynn Welchman and Sara Hossain, eds., ‘Honour’ Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence Against Women, (London and New York: Zed Books, 2005); and Standish, Katerina, “Understanding Cultural Violence and Gender: Honour Killings; Dowry Murder; the Zina Ordinance; and Blood Feuds,” Journal of Gender Studies 23 (2014): 111–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Welchman and Hossain, “‘Honour’: Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence Against Women,” Introduction, 4.

14. Baker, Khawla A., “Marital Problems Among Arab Families: Between Cultural and Family Therapy Interventions,” Arab Studies Quarterly 25 (2003): 53–70Google Scholar; Clinton Bailey, Bedouin Law from Sinai and the Negev: Justice Without Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 81–83; and Judith Tucker, Women, Family and Gender in Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

15. Purna Sen, “Crimes of Honour, Value and Meaning,” in ‘Honour’ Crimes, 42–63.

16. Shalhoub–Kevorkian, Nadera, “Reexamining Femicide: Breaking the Silence and Crossing ‘Scientific Borders’,” Signs 28 (2003): 581–608CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. For a discussion of the importance of considering FHK to be a category in itself, see Chesler, Phyllis, “Are Honour Killings Simply Domestic Violence?” Middle East Quarterly 16 (2009): 61–69Google Scholar.

18. Lughod, Janet Abu, “Seduction of the ‘Honor Crimes,’” Differences 22 (2011): 17–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ceren Belge, “Whose Law? Clans, Honor Killings and State—Minority Relations in Turkey and Israel” (PhD diss., University of Washington Seattle, 2008); and Noga Efrati, Women in Iraq: Past Meets Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 20–40.

19. In her article “Seduction,” Abu Lughod locates her criticism in the context of the growing animosity toward Muslim immigrants in the West. She expands on the political significance of the static culture-related portrayal of “honor killing,” liable to reinforce negative stereotypes of Muslim immigrants to Western countries, and to condemn Islamic culture as a monolithic entity. She claims that honor should be understood not as a sensational, extraordinary (and possibly exotic) performance, but as an important element internalized as a part of the way of life and identity of both men and women, young and old.

20. Norman Bentwich, England in Palestine (London: Kegan Paul, 1932), 284.

21. Loomba, Ania, “Dead Women Tell No Tales: Issues of Female Subjectivity, Subaltern Agency and Tradition in Colonial and Post-Colonial Writing on Widow Immolation in India,” History Workshop 36 (1993): 209–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Yang, Anand A., “Whose Sati? Widow Burning in Early 19th Century India,” Journal of Women's History 1(2) (1989): 8–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mani, Contentious Traditions; Dirks, Nicholas B., “The Policing of Tradition: Colonialism and Anthropology in Southern India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 39 (1997): 182–212Google Scholar; Midgley, Clare, “Female Emancipation in an Imperial Frame: English Women and the Campaign Against Sati (Widow Burning) in India, 1813–1830,” Women's History Review 9 (2000): 95–121CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Major, Andrea, “A Question of Rites? Perspectives on the Colonial Encounter with Sati,” History Compass 4/5 (2006): 782CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. Matiel Mughannam, The Arab Woman and the Palestinian Problem (London: Joseph, 1937); Ellen Fleischman, The Nation and its “New” Women: The Palestinian Women's Movement, 1920–1948 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2003); Charlotte Weber, “Making Common Cause? Western and Middle Eastern Feminists in the International Women's Movement, 1911–1948” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2003).

24. Sussman, “Contending with Culture,” 229–30, 238–39; Pedersen, “National Bodies.”

25. Yang, “Whose Sati?”; Sussman, “Contending with Culture,” 229–35.

26. Sussman, “Contending with Culture,” 229–30.

27. Ibid., 234; Pedersen, “National Bodies,” 660–66.

28. Efrati, Women in Iraq, 20–40.

29. Ibid., 23–24.

30. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti, “Can the Subaltern Speak: Speculations on Widow Sacrifice,” Wedge 7/8 (1985): 120–30Google Scholar; Yang, “Whose Sati,” 17–27; Loomba, “Dead Women Tell No Tales”; Ashish Nandy, “Sati, A Nineteenth Century Tale of Women, Violence and Protest,” in Exiled at Home: At the Edge of Psychology, Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi, Oxford University Press), 1–31.

31. Anghie, Antony, “Colonialism and the Birth of International Institutions, Sovereignty, Economy and the Mandate System of the League of Nations,” NYU Journal of International Law and Politics 24 (2001–2002): 523–28Google Scholar.

32. The special character of the British Mandate in Palestine and its impact on the later conflict between Jews and Palestinians, and between Israel and Arab states, led to a vast body of work. We will refer only to a very small number of such studies from a variety of scholars, British, Palestinian, Israeli, and others; Albert Hyamson, Palestine Under the Mandate 1920–1948 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976); Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000); Henry Cattan, The Palestine Question (London: Saqi, 2000); Zeina Ghandhour, Discourse on Domination: Imperialism, Property and Insurgency (London: Routeledge, 2009); Ann M. Lesch, Origins and Development of the Arab–Israeli Conflict (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006); and Stein Kenneth, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).

33. Mustafa Kabha, The Palestinian People: Seeking Sovereignty and State (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2013), 9–23.

34. The position of Mukhtar, the state appointed head of a village or of an urban district, was first established by the Ottomans and further reinforced by the British Mandate administration. Ghandour, Discourse on Domination, 96–120.

35. Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: 1936–1939 Rebellion in the Palestinian Past (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1995).

36. Ibid., 40.

37. Salim Tamari, Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture (Oakland: University of California Press, 2008); Doumani, Beshara, “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History,” Journal of Palestine Studies 21 (1992): 5–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bernstein, Deborah and Hasisi, Badi, “Buy and Promote the National Cause: Consumption, Class Formation and Nationalism in Mandate Palestinian Society,” Nations and Nationalism 14 (2008): 127–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. Weber, Making Common Cause, 88–121.

39. Manar Hasan and Ami Ayalon, “Arabs and Jews, Leisure and Gender, in Haifa's Public Spaces,” in Haifa before and after 1948, ed. Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat Weiss (Dordrecht: Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation Republic of Letters, 2012), 81–96.

40. Bentwich, England in Palestine, 284.

41. Colonial Office, 1929–1933, 733/172, ISA.

42. Article 188, in The Imperial Ottoman Penal Code, trans. John Bucknill and Haig Utidjian (London: Oxford University Press, 1913).

43. Between the years 1939–1943, the High Commissioner sent the full minutes of court cases of murder to the Colonial Office in London. Thirty-five such court cases are available in TNA, of which five deal with murder of women on the grounds of family honor. Regrettably, we have no way of knowing if these are all the cases, or who initiated the sending of the minutes. This was not done before 1939 or after 1943. The high commissioner reported his decision to either endorse the capital punishment approved by the Supreme Court of Appeal, or to commute the sentence to long-term imprisonment.

44. Regrettably, among the cases that appeared before the SC, not all are available in the ISA or in the archive of the ISC.

45. All but four cases took place in rural Palestine, north and central. We have not yet come across any case from southern Palestine, despite the Bedouin concentration in that part, with their strict codes of honor and control of female sexuality. The Bedouin tribal court was not granted the right of adjudicating crimes of homicide, but such cases may well have remained unreported. Three cases took place in Jaffa. but at least one of them involved people from a village in southern Syria. One more case took place in Gaza.

46. In one of the two cases, the brother's claim to have suspected his sister's immorality seemed too far-fetched, whereas in the other. the accused killed two women, his former wife and mother-in-law, and neither the Court of Criminal Assize nor the SC recommended clemency.

47. The composition of the Court of Criminal Assize was decided, ad hoc, for each case. The chief judge was always appointed from the ranks of the justices of the SC.

48. According to the King's Order in Council 1922, the high commissioner was the representative of the king, and appeals regarding judicial verdicts were to be directed to him, and to be decided in consultation with the Advisory Council (at times referred to as Executive Council).

49. Our observations are similar to those made by Natalie Zemon-Davis in her Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in 16^th Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). She demonstrated that petitions for pardon in sixteenth century France were structured along lines following accepted discursive norms.

50. Attorney General (AG) v. Kamel Ahmed Hussein el-Majdoub, (1944), ISA.

51. AG v. Atiyeh Faraj, 42/47 (1947), ISAGoogle Scholar.

52. AG v. Mahmoud Hassan Abdul Mun'em el-Soury, 39/47 (1947), ISAGoogle Scholar.

53. AG v. Imkheibir Kataf, 8/46 (1946) ISAGoogle Scholar.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid.

56. Assaf Likhovski, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

57. AG v. Muhammad Salem Ishreim, 98/42 (1942), ISAGoogle Scholar.

58. AG v. el-Soury, 1947.

59. AG v. Ali Ibn Salameh Jadii, 57/40 (1940)Google Scholar, TNA. Court of Criminal Assize, judgement, 2

60. Ibid.

61. AG v. Muhammad Hassan Said Shihadeh, District Court, 43/45 (1945) ISAGoogle Scholar.

62. Judith E. Tucker, The House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Oakland: University of California Press, 1998).

63. Bailey, Bedouin law from Sinai and the Negev, 107–113.

64. AG v. Shihadeh, 1945, Conviction by District Court, 9 (Emphasis added).

65. AG v. Khader and Hamad Ibn Musa Tamam, 6/33 (1933). ISAGoogle Scholar.

66. The other brother was released, as two out of four judges accepted his claim not to have been involved in the killing.

67. AG v. Khader and Hamad Ibn Musa Tamam, 1933. The majority judgment was signed by Francis H. Baker (British), A. Guy Sherwell (British), and Shafiq Dajani (Arab).

68. Minority opinion of Judge A. Daoudi, AG v. Khader and Hamad Ibn Musa Tamam, 1933.

69. Ibid.

70. AG v. Kataf, 1946.

71. Ibid., Supreme Court of Appeal, Judgement, 2 (emphasis added).

72. AG v. el-Majdoub, 1944.

73. Ibid., Judgement of Supreme Court, 2 (emphasis added).

74. Nathan Brun, Judges and Lawyers in Eretz Israel (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2008), 289–92 (Hebrew).

75. Chief Justice Trusted to High Commissioner, AG v. Ali Ibn Salameh Jadii, 1940 (emphasis added).

76. AG v. Faraj, 1947.

77. Ibid., Letter of President of Court of Criminal Assize Justice Currie to High Commissioner, 2.

78. Justice Currie to High Commissioner Cunningham, Alan, in AG v. Mahmoud Abdel Hadi el-Kassas 67/47 (1947) ISAGoogle Scholar.

79. Justice Copland to High Commissioner MacMichael, AG v. Ishreim, 1942.

80. Justice Trusted to High Commissioner MacMichael, AG v. Jadii, 1940.

81. Justice Copland to High Commissioner MacMichael, AG v. Ishreim, 1942.

82. Peters claims that the British colonial government strongly opposed the role allotted to the victim and the victim's family in the judicial procedure. This was one of the grounds for British opposition to Islamic law, both in northern India and in Nigeria, both studied by Peters. Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

83. Omri Paz, “Crimes, Criminals and the Ottoman State, Anatolia between the Late 1930s and the Late 1960s” (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, 2010).

84. Petitions to the High Commissioner A. Cunningham, AG v. el-Majdoub, 1944.

85. AG v. Kataf, 1946.

86. In the case of Saleh el-Zawawi, the minutes of the trial are missing, and all we have are the petitions sent to the High Commissioner, John Chancellor. Mukhtars of Jerusalem, July 22, 1932. ISA M-268/23 (emphasis added). This does not necessarily mean that the writers were portraying the precise Shari'a position on murder aimed at redressing “family honor.” It does mean that in this case and in most other letters, the writers used religion as one of their major points of reference and as a powerful argument that the high commissioner could not easily reject.

87. Dignitaries of Hebron Distrtict to High Commissioner Cunningham, AG v. el-Majdoub, 1944.

88. Dignitaries of Hebron District to High Commissioner Cunningham, AG v. el-Kassas, 1947.

89. Petition of organizations in Jaffa to Cunningham, AG v. Kataf, 1946. The petition included two versions of the word “honor,” both related to women's sexuality: sharaf and ard. Both these terms are highly emotive terms dealing specifically with honor related to sexuality.