The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

CHILDING AND THE VIOLENCE OF THE LAW

The colonial instruments of the British Mandate government created new boundaries to childhood in ways that disrupted prior legal and social categories. In this way, the construction of "child" as a legal category was part of the violence of colonial law. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian pioneered the important concept of "unchilding" to describe the way that colonial violence works to evict Palestinian children from the category of childhood. I want to reframe the idea of unchilding in Mandate Palestine to argue that the very construction of new legal categories of childhood and adolescence was part of the way that colonial criminal law worked to erase and remake previous societal structures.¹⁶ The assigning of child status—and not merely its denial—was part of the colonizing logic of the Mandate state.

At the establishment of the British civilian government in Palestine in 1922, colonial officials undertook an extensive revision of the existing Ottoman criminal code. That enterprise included a wholesale reorganization of the process for dealing with juvenile delinquents. The new juvenile delinquency system was articulated in the 1922 Young Offenders Ordinance, closely modeled off British juvenile justice legislation of the preceding decade. The 1922 Ordinance significantly changed the legal definition of childhood as existed in the Ottoman penal code. Under the new system, the age of criminal liability was lowered from fourteen to nine. In reducing the age of criminal liability, the ordinance not only expanded the scope and meaning of criminality, but it also changed the meaning of institutions like reformatory school. In the late Ottoman period, reformatory institutions primarily housed poor and orphaned children, with those criminally convicted making up a small percentage of inhabitants.¹⁷ Under the 1911 Ottoman penal code, children thirteen and under who were brought before the court could be sent to reformatory schools for rehabilitation, but their actions would not be considered crimes. By altering the chronological parameters of criminality, the British colonial government also created a new category of childhood: the young offender. Neither fully child nor fully adult, the young [End Page 88] offender could occupy both or either space. The liminality of this position left the young offender's subjecthood open to claims by various actors.

Throughout the years of the Mandate government, the juvenile delinquency system expanded dramatically, coming to include multiple reformatory institutions, a juvenile court, and a probation service. Over that period, thousands of young people passed through the system.¹⁸ Their ages ranged from seven and eight—below the Mandate's age of criminal responsibility—to seventeen and eighteen. Most fell between twelve and fifteen. The majority were arrested on charges of theft or fighting, but some stood accused of much more serious and violent crimes. In the earlier years, corporal punishment was the most common sentence; later, probation replaced sentences of lashes in some contexts. The files analyzed in this study present a necessarily skewed picture of juvenile offenders' experiences. Petitions and prisoner reports were only made for the young people who were incarcerated, either in reformatory schools or in adult prisons. Incarceration often meant more serious charges and older offenders, although not uniformly so. While the stories of the young people who were arrested, charged, convicted, and whipped or bound over or fined mostly survive in the archive in the aggregate or in the most minimal forms, the same contestation over the meanings of childhood likely structured their experiences as well.

The colonial juvenile delinquency system worked to define the boundaries of childhood through both rhetorical and institutional instruments. In doing so, the criminal law rendered child-subjecthood precarious and able to be easily revoked. As numerous examples of parental petitions and court appeals make clear, the mechanisms that claimed authority to bestow childhood could and were used to dismantle it as well.

The international standards that today structure conversations about children's rights and juvenile justice were in the process of construction in the interwar period; thus, the British colonial regime in Palestine simultaneously participated in the creation and violation of such standards in their treatment of juvenile delinquency. Hallmarks of these new standards, which stemmed from contemporary ideas about child development, adolescence, and the nature of criminal behavior in the fields of sociology and psychology, included graduated punishments according to age, the use of separate courts for children and adolescents, and the goal of rehabilitation, embedded in institutions such as reformatory schools and probation services. All of these were parts of the juvenile delinquency system in Mandate Palestine as it was built over the 1920s and 1930s: the probation service was established in 1928, followed by the juvenile court in 1937.¹⁹ [End Page 89]

These institutions of juvenile justice carved out childhood as a distinct and special category of political subjecthood; however, they could also serve to deny the protections of childhood to the young defendants who came before the courts. For example, Ahmad al-Zir'ini's case file reveals a confrontation between two medico-legal instruments meant to establish the boundaries of childhood in a concrete way. On the one hand, we have his birth certificate, a legal document that should have established beyond doubt his chronological age and thus his particular position and treatment within the criminal justice system. However, at least according to the claims of his father, his birth certificate was first ignored and then later used to reduce his prison term, but not seen as strong enough evidence to fully reopen the question of whether or not he should be imprisoned at all. On the other hand, we have the assessment of the prison medical officer, who recorded Ahmad's "approximate age" as seventeen and concluded that continued imprisonment would not adversely impact his health. The birth certificate and the medical examination were competing medical and legal authorities that could be used to grant or deny Ahmad the legal protections associated with childhood.

In a similar case, with far higher stakes, the claims of the birth certificate and the medical examination were reversed. When Muhammad Suleiman Ahman al-'Abid was convicted of murder, he was sentenced to serve a term of imprisonment in the Central Prison in Jerusalem as the court found him to be under the age of eighteen and thus not eligible for capital punishment.²⁰ In this case, the son of the victim sent al-'Abid's birth certificate to the court, contesting the claim that al-'Abid was a minor. At the same time, the prison medical examiner concluded that al-'Abid was, indeed, seventeen. In this instance, as in al-Zir'ini's case, the expert instruments of the juvenile justice system—vital records and forensic medicine—conflicted with each other. The juvenile justice system, as it developed worldwide in the mid-twentieth century, depended on scientific and academic expertise to define childhood, and yet childhood continued to be a contestable category and the same instruments that could bestow childhood on one subject could revoke it for another.

WHO CAN MAKE CHILDHOOD? PARENTS CLAIM THEIR CHILDREN

The precarious nature of child-subjecthood left Palestinian children and families vulnerable to the violence of the colonial state, but it also created an arena of contestation in which families could make their own claims to defining the parameters of childhood. The central question was: who has the authority to make childhood? While the legal system asserted the power to proclaim the [End Page 90] boundaries of childhood, parents and other family members spoke back to that system. At times, parents used the system's own instruments to challenge its conclusions; other times, they critiqued the very logic of juvenile delinquency laws and often made their own claims to what childhood meant.

Several parental petitions pushed back against the institutions that structured Palestine's juvenile delinquency system. Once the juvenile court was created in 1937, advocates were prohibited from appearing in court for fear of "creating too adversarial an atmosphere."²¹ Parents protested this decision in their appeals to the high commissioner. One father, Deeb al-Eweiwy, claimed that this prohibition prevented his son from being able to contest the lack of evidence in his case. His thirteen-year-old son was charged with receiving stolen carpets and sentenced to serve a year in the boys' reformatory school. In the petition, al-Eweiwy proclaimed his son's innocence, stating that no stolen goods had been found on his person and that he was only arrested because he was grazing sheep near the place where the carpets were stolen. Furthermore, the petition said, witnesses testified against another boy and charges were proved against him. Al-Eweiwy argued that his son's minority prevented him from defending himself, as he was allowed no advocate to present evidence attesting to his innocence.²²

In another case, a father directly criticized the ordinance that prohibited advocates from the courtroom. Abdul Mun'em Thalji claimed that the police had beaten his son to elicit a false confession on a charge of damaging a neighbor's fig trees. Thalji had employed a lawyer to defend his son, but because the lawyer was barred from the courtroom, he was not able to contest the confession.²³ Both al-Eweiwy and Thalji couched their petitions in the language of mercy, highlighting the emotional pain of their children's absence and the unnaturalness of mothers being separated from their children. However, embedded in these pleas for mercy were indictments of the juvenile delinquency system and, importantly, the fathers' own ideas about how childhood should be defined and treated in the criminal courts.

Other parents invoked the ideas of child development that purportedly structured the juvenile delinquency system to make claims to their children. In 1940, 'Abd al-Karim Fayyad 'abd al-Khader was convicted of murder by the criminal court in Nablus and initially sentenced to serve a sentence in the government reformatory school. A later X-ray examination determined his age to be precisely seventeen years and three months and so, on the recommendation of the police inspector, he was transferred to the adult prison.²⁴ 'Abd al-Khader's file contains several petitions from family members, including one from his brother, who repeatedly emphasized 'Abd al-Khader's young age as [End Page 91] a mitigating factor in his offense. His mother also wrote to the high commissioner. Hamdeh Deeb Qa'adan wrote of her son's adolescent lack of foresight, arguing that he was not alone in committing wrongs "in his infancy" and that continued internment would be physically and psychologically damaging to him.²⁵ In making these arguments, she was—wittingly or not—appealing to the contemporary scientific theories that undergirded the juvenile justice system in the first place. In her son's case, the technology that determined his fate was an X-ray examination. Of course, the idea that such an instrument could precisely determine a distinction of mere months seems ludicrous. But it was this very unreliability of such scientific instruments that opened the way for people like Qa'adan to advocate for their children.

In the case of 'Ali 'Atallah 'Ali, who was convicted of murdering his uncle at age seventeen, his father and other family members repeatedly pushed the government to follow their own guidelines in recommending clemency. 'Ali was convicted in 1941 and sentenced to prison. Between 1941 and 1944, numerous reports from the prison determined that while 'Ali's conduct in prison was good and he was not likely to reoffend, clemency was not recommended because a formal peace had not been reached between his family and the family of the victim. Reports by the director of education, the chief probation officer and the inspector-general of prisons all stated that peace between the families was a precondition for recommending 'Ali's release. This standard was common among juvenile delinquency cases for violent crimes in Palestine. The colonial government was reluctant to release young offenders if there was a threat of retaliation within towns and villages, whether that threat was real or imagined. Thus, the young person's own rehabilitation was tied into a sense of collective rehabilitation of local social relations.

The preoccupation with community relations reflected two features of colonial governance. First, the government was highly concerned with public security, especially in the wake of the anti-colonial revolt of 1936–1939. Several reports on juvenile offenders made mention of partisan affiliations or political motivations for violence.²⁶ Thus, young people accused of crimes were thought of not only as disruptions to local communities or problems in the moral development of society, but also as potential threats to the colonial order. Second, the government's focus on reconciliation as a part of juvenile rehabilitation betrayed the ways that the colonial legal regime defined and mediated childhood through ethnic, racial, and religious categorization. Compensation to victims' families [diyat] and community reconciliation already had long and complex histories in Islamic legal structures and in the Ottoman penal code, and these have been interpreted in various ways by scholars. In Ottoman legal history, [End Page 92] community reconciliation is often viewed as part of the layered and pluralistic structure of Ottoman law that granted autonomy and incorporated modes of local justice practices. In a manner not dissimilar to how the British colonial government would discuss reconciliation during the Mandate period, early twentieth-century Ottoman officials assumed rural and Bedouin communities demanded different justice standards due to their supposed civilizational inferiority.²⁷ In the case of Mandate Palestine, Alex Winder has argued that local communities' use of reconciliation could alternatively be interpreted as forms of "indigenous justice" that functioned in opposition to the British colonial legal order.²⁸ In the case of these juvenile delinquency cases, however, it was the colonial regime imposing the use of "customary justice" as part of meeting the requirements of the state law. And just as the Ottoman officials thought that customary laws were more appropriate for the "uncivilized" Bedouin, the architects of Mandate Palestine's legal reforms argued that Arabs, as an ethnic group, necessitated particular legal structures. Norman Bentwich, first attorney general of Mandate Palestine and author of its criminal code, wrote in 1938 of homicide laws in Palestine: "A country in which the majority of people are less civilized and passions are easily roused, needs a law to be tempered to their weaknesses. The ruthless severity of the English law of homicide is altogether alien to Arab morality."²⁹

By integrating formal reconciliation into the procedures of the juvenile justice system, the colonial government worked to encode such practices into law. The report [mazbata] in which the victim's family formally renounced their rights to retaliation ended with the statement that the family submitted the declaration to the general secretary in accordance with governmental regulations. Enfolding this structure of reconciliation into the proceedings was as much a colonial innovation as it was a means of acquiescing to local custom. Moreover, because reconciliation was not a consistent requirement of pardons but one that was applied sporadically and at the discretion of colonial authorities, it functioned to reify racial and ethnic distinctions.

THE LAYERED IDENTITIES OF CHILDHOOD: ETHNIC AND CONFESSIONAL BOUNDARIES

The colonial categorization of childhood by race and ethnicity did not cleanly align with the overarching governmental impetus to organize the population along confessional lines. In the case of a young Jewish defendant, the issue of family reconciliation and continued community enmity also played a decisive role in the outcome of the petitions for release. Joseph Ben Yafet Shett was serving a sentence in the Jerusalem Central Prison on a conviction of manslaughter [End Page 93] by the Criminal Court of Assize of Tel Aviv. The trial judge's sentence and subsequent prison reports on Ben Yafet Shett positioned the crime as the result of pre-existing fasad between Ben Yafet Shett's family and that of the victim. Fasad, which means "corruption" but can refer to disturbances of public peace and community relations, was often assumed by colonial officials to be a driving force of violent interpersonal crime in Palestine and the primary obstacle to social rehabilitation. As in 'Ali's case, the lack of formal reconciliation between the perpetrator's and victim's families was the reason cited to deny petitions for Ben Yafet Shett's release.³⁰

The references to fasad in Ben Yafet Shett's case and the government's insistence that his family pay indemnity to the victim's family and conclude a formal ceremony of reconciliation underscore the complexities of colonial racial hierarchies in the juvenile delinquency system. All of the parties involved in this case were identified in the government files as Yemeni Jews and thus were subsumed under an Orientalist framework that applied particular logics and behaviors to Arab and Eastern defendants. In this case, the victim's brother himself appealed to this racialized understanding of community relations and rehabilitation in his petition, asking the government to deny Ben Yafet Shett's release. Claiming that the memory of his brother's murder was still fresh in the family's mind, Yeshayahu Yisrael wrote,

The people of the Orient have a hot temper and in seeying [sic] their greatest enemy walking free and enjoying life may God forbide [sic]—any feeling of revenge may enter their hearts and may bring to a new misfortune.³¹

The implicit threat in Yisrael's petition—that Ben Yafet Shett's release could spark an ongoing cycle of familial blood feuds—confirmed the colonial legal structure's understandings of how Arab Palestinian society operated and how children and families should be treated under the criminal law. Although much of colonial governance in Mandate Palestine was organized along confessional lines, especially in the later years of the Mandate, in these incidents, we can see the emphasis on racial or ethnic distinctions rather than religious ones. While Arab Jewish young persons were included within the Orientalist frameworks of fasad and tribal reconciliation, the files of Ashkenazi Jewish young offenders (those of European Jewish descent) do not mention considerations of indemnity, community feuds, or formal familial reconciliations.

The inclusion of Ben Yafet Shett's case within this Orientalist narrative about juvenile delinquency conflicted with the Zionist political leadership's approach to juvenile rehabilitation, which advocated for separate treatment for Arab and Jewish young offenders. In 1933, the Palestine Zionist Executive protested the [End Page 94] integration of Jewish and non-Jewish Arab boys in reformatory institutions and petitioned the government to establish a separate Jewish-only reformatory school. In 1939, the Vaad Leumi [General Council of Jews in Palestine] founded Kfar Avoda, a farm school for "delinquent, backward, or neglected children."³² Unlike the reformatory schools that housed the entirety non-Jewish Arab young offender population, Kfar Avoda was not under the direct control of the Government of Palestine but was subcontracted by the court system and run directly by the Vaad Leumi. Most of the Jewish young offenders interned in reformatory institutions who appear in government files in the 1940s were sent to Kfar Avoda. The integration of Jewish and non-Jewish Arab children in disciplinary institutions was, at times, a source of complaint in Jewish parents' petitions. This was the case for Yissachar Levy, who was interned at the boys' reformatory school in Jerusalem on a charge of housebreaking. His father petitioned the government for his son's release, citing his son's complaints of "being the only Jew among Arabs who let loose their bad temper on him."³³

Racialized and Orientalist assumptions about young offenders' characters and the communities from which they came structured the government's approach to their rehabilitation and their families' approaches to advocating for their releases. Yet even when families adopted and worked within the government's racialized frameworks, they did not always succeed in securing their children's freedom. In 'Ali Atallah 'Ali's case, even after a formal reconciliation did take place, the government failed to grant clemency, prompting a series of petitions from 'Ali's father. Between 1944 and 1947, 'Atallah 'Ali made at least five direct appeals to the high commissioner on behalf of his child. The petitions continually cited and included the document of reconciliation as evidence that the government's own conditions for release had been met. In his first appeal, in May of 1944, the father stated that he was asking for the government's pity on his son only now because peace had been made with the victim's family.³⁴ By 1947, pleas for mercy turned to frustrations as he lamented that meeting the government's prerequisites had not resulted in 'Ali's release, writing, "in spite of this tribal reconciliation, my son is still in prison."³⁵

The structural inequalities between the Jewish and non-Jewish Palestinian Arab populations that characterized the colonial state also shaped the ways parents engaged with the system. In a few instances, Jewish parents employed outside experts to challenge the government on its own terms—a tactic seemingly not used by or less available to non-Jewish Arab parents. While Thalji's father criticized the government for barring lawyers from defending his son, Ben Yafet Shett was represented at his trial by Dr. Philip Joseph, at that time a partner in a leading Tel Aviv law firm (and brother of future Israeli minister of justice [End Page 95] Bernard Dov Joseph). During the trial, Dr. Joseph raised several arguments, challenging the government's admission of evidence. In his lengthy judgment, denying the defense's arguments, the trial judge nonetheless remarked, "the accused may regard himself as very fortunate that an advocate of Dr. Joseph's ability and experience should have consented to conduct this case on behalf of the defense."³⁶

Other Jewish parents enlisted medical doctors to help appeal their children's imprisonment and offer justifications for their behaviors. David Rashti's father, Ya'acov, wrote in his petition that his son experienced health problems while interned in Kfar Avoda and upon examination by a doctor was found to have a thyroid condition, which the reformatory institution was not equipped to treat.³⁷ Included with the father's letter was a note from a doctor attesting to David's condition and his need to remain in Tel Aviv for treatment.³⁸ In recommending David for release, the director of social welfare invoked his medical condition as an explanation of his previous delinquent behavior, writing that the treatment David received "undoubtedly" improved his behavior as well as his physical health.³⁹

Claims of ill health and poor treatment were not exclusive to Jewish parents, but the ability to marshal expert testimony on behalf of such claims seemed more common in the files of Jewish young offenders. An attorney writing on behalf of Abdul Hay Abdul Jalil al-Zamir, for example, did use his client's chronic gastritis to appeal to the high commissioner's sense of mercy but did not cite testimony from outside medical professionals.⁴⁰ The prisoner reports on al-Zamir noted that he was under prison medical observation for stomach problems and anemia, but concluded that continued imprisonment under these conditions did "not endanger his life" and discouraged his release based on the "considerable family fassad."⁴¹ It is impossible to determine from these episodes that the use of external professional experts in support of their children was a tactic only used by Jewish parents—certainly Palestinian Arab parents also employed attorneys when they could. Nor can the limited surviving source material comprehensively account for all of the ways that parents engaged with the government institutions on behalf of their incarcerated children. Given the well-established overarching discrepancies in political, social, and economic institutional power between the Jewish and non-Jewish Palestine Arab populations, however, it is reasonable to surmise that Jewish parents might have had different access to resources to advocate for their children.⁴² Although children served as political capital for all constituencies, Jewish parents potentially had the support of Zionist quasi-governmental institutions with more robust political power under the structure of the Mandate government. When Joseph Ben [End Page 96] Yafet Shett was finally granted release, for example, it was because of negotiations concluded between the director of social welfare and the Jewish Masters', Officers', and Seamens' Union, which had agreed to take him aboard a ship.⁴³

These parents—Eweiwy, 'Ali, Thalji, Qad'an, Zir'ini, Shett, and Rashti—alternately employed and critiqued the government's own instruments to advocate for their children. In doing so, they embraced the parameters and, at times, the logics, of the juvenile delinquency system, but also claimed their own authority within it. The technologies and legal structures that strove to objectively draw the boundaries of childhood and the treatment of juvenile delinquents within the system were fungible and fallible, and parents of young offenders used those openings to make claims over their children.

WHAT MAKES A CHILD? WHAT MAKES A PARENT?

Parents not only contested the unmaking of their children's childhoods, but they also proposed alternate understandings of childhood. They emphasized emotional bonds between parent and child as well as their children's roles, economically and socially, within the family. While the legal system treated childhood as a developmental category and children as individual entities that could be separated from their parents, the parents discussed childhood as a relational category, in which the child's subjecthood was embedded within familial and community networks. Al-Zir'ini, for example, wrote of his son as the foundation of the family, both emotionally and materially. Calling him "the center of my hopes," al-Zir'ini argued that Ahmad was needed at home since he was the economic support for a large family.⁴⁴ Fathers often highlighted the financial role that their sons played in the family as a reason that the government should return them home. Those claims worked in tandem with other critiques of the juvenile delinquency system, creating complex and layered depictions of childhood. In addition to demonstrating that his family met the conditions of reconciliation that prefigured his son's release, 'Atallah 'Ali consistently emphasized his old age and his family's economic needs in his appeals to the government. Citing his own disabilities (visual impairment) and his large family of six persons, 'Ali argued that his son provided necessary labor for the maintenance of the household.⁴⁵ In later petitions, 'Ali argued that he incurred additional debt in executing the formal reconciliation process and thus needed his son released from prison to help pay for the very procedure that the government required of them.⁴⁶

These petitions positioned the meaning of (male) youth in relation to familial obligations and economic need. Toma Khoury, in pleading for his son's release from the boys' reformatory school in Bethlehem, referenced both his [End Page 97] large family and his poverty amid the high cost of living in Palestine under the Mandate system.⁴⁷ Abdul Ra'uf Akhsham's father similarly appealed for his early release from the boys' reformatory school with the argument that his son was his sole help in supporting a large family. Like 'Atallah 'Ali and several other parents, Akhsham portrayed himself as elderly and suffering from blindness.⁴⁸ The petitions' constructions of fatherhood were as important as their constructions of childhood—appeals depicted fathers as physically weak and in need of their sons' aid. Khoury wrote that he had "become an old man," while 'Ali's stated age fluctuated between sixty and seventy-five over the course of a series of letters.⁴⁹ Positioning themselves as frail and in need of assistance cut against notions that these men were threats to the political order and instead invited the government's pity and mercy.

However, even as parental appeals portrayed parents as weak and their sons as their potential rescuers and protectors, they also made claims to authority and ownership over their children. The nature of the claims they made over their sons were often highly gendered, with fathers claiming responsibility and authority for their children and mothers invoking parental love and emotional needs. Many petitions concluded with fathers' claims to paternal authority over their children, assuring the government that they would oversee their children's behavior and moral conduct. Abdul Mun'em Thalji simultaneously invoked his economic need for his son to tend his land and animals as well as his son's youth and innocence. Thalji claimed responsibility in supervising his son and guaranteeing his good behavior if released.⁵⁰ Talab Muhammad Abu-Haltam similarly offered to supervise his thirteen-year-old son's conduct and development if released from the boys' reformatory school at Acre, citing his son's prior good behavior and scholastic success.⁵¹

Sometimes other relatives assumed the role of the father figure, claiming responsibility over the juvenile offender's moral and social conduct. Abd al-Karim Fayyad 'abd al-Khader's older brother took on the paternal role in his case, since their father was deceased. In his multiple appeals to the high commissioner, 'Abd al-Khader's brother, Abdullah, positioned himself as the head of the family and cited his material circumstances and history of government employment as evidence of his ability to supervise his brother.⁵² In contrast to the many familial petitions that highlighted poverty as a reason that a juvenile offender was needed at home, 'abd al-Khader emphasized his family's financial security as a reason that the government should see him as a worthy overseer of his brother's social and moral rehabilitation. Childhood and fatherhood had layered—even contradictory—meanings in these appeals. The regularity with which fathers claimed that they were old, weak, [End Page 98] and impoverished without their sons' help suggests that the government was sympathetic to the idea of youth as providers and stability for their families. 'Abd al-Khader's claims to financial security may have worked against his brother in this respect, as one of the reasons given by the district commissioner of Nablus in arguing against clemency was that 'Abd al-Khader was from an influential family and "his dependents are in no state of penury."⁵³ Yet, the depiction of childhood and youth as the strength and livelihood of the family contrasted with its depiction as innocence in need of paternal guidance and support. As the appeals demonstrate, however, those contradictory meanings could work together, creating a multifaceted understanding of childhood and a young person's position in the family, community, and society. While criminal law and the attendant institutions of the juvenile delinquency system strove to establish objective definitions of childhood, parents of young offenders complicated those definitions with their own arguments about what youth could and should mean.

Whereas fathers invoked their parental authority in these petitions through claims to supervise and guide their children, mothers were depicted (by themselves or their spouses) as bound to their children by love and emotional necessity. Maternal authority was the authority of affective attachment. After objecting to the paucity of evidence and lack of an advocate in his son's case, for example, Deeb al-Eweiwy concluded his appeal to the high commissioner by highlighting his wife's emotional pain at being separated from her child.⁵⁴ Ben Yafet Shett's mother concluded her petition to the high commissioner by saying, "I appeal to Your Excellency as a mother in distress."⁵⁵

Two mothers, on opposing sides of the same dispute, invoked their parental authority over and maternal attachment to their sons, both of whom were accused of murder. Jamil 'Omar Abdallah al-'Omar was accused of participating in the murder of Fayyad al-'Abid 'Abd al-Khader in 1940 and then absconding from police pursuit. 'Abd al-Khader's son, 'Abd al-Karim, was later imprisoned for the murder of a member of the al-'Omar family in retaliation for his father's death. Both mothers wrote to the high commissioner, pleading mercy for their sons. Jamil's mother, Fatima, asked for amnesty for her son, who, she said, was urgently needed to support their family and, equally, to be a comfort to her in her old age.⁵⁶ As shown previously, 'Abd al-Khader's mother, Hamdah Qa'adan, appealed to the government's own assumptions about child development in highlighting her son's youth and inability to understand consequences. Qa'adan also claimed parental authority in knowing her son's needs, writing that she considered the seven years he spent imprisoned an "adequate deterrent" for her son, whose health was impacted by his incarceration.⁵⁷ Here [End Page 99] Qa'adan positioned herself as an equal expert on her son's moral development and rehabilitation as the officials of the juvenile delinquency system.

These petitions show that parents at once submitted to the power of the state over their children and continued to claim their authority as mothers and fathers. While the government spoke of childhood as simultaneously innocence and danger, the parents' petitions made claims for different meanings of childhood—as sources of vitality, comfort, family labor, and the maintenance of social cohesion. Although parental petitions rarely succeeded in changing the outcomes for their children, they were attempts to reclaim authority over their individual children and over the boundaries and meanings of childhood more broadly.

CONCLUSION

As children became symbols of modern progress throughout the world in the twentieth century, the institutions and structures designed to ensure their welfare became sites of intense intervention for the developmentalist colonial state. The colonial criminal justice system in Palestine mediated the meanings of childhood for thousands of young Palestinians in the mid-twentieth century. Its legal structures moved them between childhood, the liminal space of the "young offender," and adulthood. Its institutions exposed them to the violence of the state and the disruption of the family. In assuming the power to assign and define childhood, the juvenile delinquency regime also assumed the power to deny young people its attendant protections. At the same time, however, the nature of the criminal justice system invited multidirectional claims on childhood. As parents and other family members became incorporated and invested in the system, they brought to it their own arguments, not only for who got to be counted as a child but also for what childhood could mean and the place it occupied, emotionally, socially, and politically.

Recovering the stories of these young people and their families from the archives allows us a view into a lesser-seen aspect of life under a colonial regime. It also reveals the fragmented nature of governance under a twentieth-century colonial system and the ways in which parents became participants in defining what that governance meant. This is not a simple story of heroic resistance. Few parents—if any—were successful in rescuing their children from incarceration and when clemency was granted, it was often because of the internal logic of the government rather than the parents' arguments. Yet their petitions show the ways that childhood was deployed as political capital not only by the colonial state, but also in response to it. In acting as parents making claims on their children, ordinary Palestinians were also political actors confronting, challenging, [End Page 100] and reshaping the governing logics of the developmentalist colonial state. Centering the narratives of children also leads us to reconsider Palestine as a site of colonial development, one in which the lines between the child as a legal category and a child as a personal relation, between the state and the family, were being continually redrawn.