Julia Shatz’s article “The Makings and Meanings of Childhood: Parents and the Juvenile Justice System in Interwar Palestine” appears in the Winter 2024 issue of The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. Digital Childhoods editor Hannah Stamler spoke with Dr. Shatz about the challenges of researching in colonial archives, the history of juvenile delinquency, and how her research on interwar Palestine can speak to contemporary Middle East politics.
Your article studies the social and legal category of juvenile delinquency in the twilight years of British Mandate Palestine. To set the scene, could you give us a broad overview of the juvenile delinquency system in Mandate Palestine and what changes the British made to Ottoman law and practice?
By the end of the Mandate Period, if you were a young person between nine and eighteen and were arrested, you could expect to be tried in the juvenile court, nominally without representation, although that standard was not always uniformly applied. If convicted, the judge could issue a fine, release you to your parents on guarantee, put you on probation, or pronounce a sentence of corporal punishment or incarceration, either in a reformatory school or, if you were sixteen or older, in an adult prison. Over the course of the Mandate period, most arrests were for theft or fighting and most juvenile offenders received sentences of corporal punishment (up to twelve lashes), although probation began to overtake corporal punishment in the mid-1930s.
The criminal justice system in Mandate Palestine reflected contemporary international standards for the treatment of juvenile delinquency that were in development in the mid-twentieth century. Those emerging standards included things like graduated punishments based on age, a separate juvenile court, the goal of rehabilitation over punishment, and reforms (like the prohibition of advocates) that aimed to reduce the adversarial nature of criminal proceedings.
When the British assumed control of the new Mandate for Palestine in 1922, the new governmental structure changed both the law-on-the-books and the law-in-practice, to use the terminology of legal scholars. The biggest change to the “law-on-the-books” was that the 1922 Young Offenders Ordinance lowered the age of criminal liability from fourteen, under the Ottoman Penal Code, to nine years old. This fairly dramatic change aroused protest and condemnation from Palestinian lawyers and legal scholars in the 1920s. In the twenty years that followed that ordinance, there were several other reforms to the system, including the establishment of the probation service, the creation of a juvenile court, and the expansion of reformatory institutions. All of those changes were debated, contested, and disagreed upon.
To capture the experiences of Palestinian “youth offenders,” you analyzed appeals made to the Mandate authorities on their behalf. I’d love to know more about this source base: How did you find it? What types of documents are included? Which children are represented?
Like most archival discoveries, I stumbled across the appeals accidentally. In graduate school, I became interested in the reformatory schools set up to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents because they seemed like such a peculiar mixture of English-style boarding schools and carceral institutions. On a research trip to the Israel State Archive, which houses the largest repository of Mandate-era Government of Palestine documents, I requested every file I could find related to the juvenile delinquency system and came upon a couple dozen files of individual juvenile offenders. I’m not sure that I can assign any logic or pattern to whose files ended up surviving: Some were quite lengthy—up to eighty pages—and others were only a couple pages.
Since the files were from the Department of Police and Prisons, the information pertained to young offenders who were sentenced to some form of incarceration, either in a reformatory school or an adult prison. This meant it was a limited sample, as most juvenile offenders weren’t imprisoned. It also meant that the ages and crimes of the offenders skewed somewhat older and more serious, though this was not true of every file: The offenders’ ages ranged from thirteen to eighteen, and crimes included everything from sexual assault and murder to receiving stolen property and damaging trees. Finally, because the system’s institutions were structured by gender, all of the relevant files were about boys and young men.
The files themselves mostly contained intradepartmental communications, such as annual prison reports and discussions of possibilities for release. In the midst of some of those governmental conversations, however, were petitions from family members—mostly parents—asking the High Commissioner of Palestine to grant clemency to their children. In some cases, there was a single petition or even just a summary of a petition. In others, it was evident that the parent petitioned the government on an annual basis.
After reading several of these appeals, it became clear that there was something of a formula that parents followed. They appealed to the High Commissioner’s sense of mercy, often emphasized their own weakness, age, or infirmity, and made promises for their children’s future good conduct. But in between what were likely well-rehearsed appeals were discussions of their children’s particular cases and critiques of the theory and practice of the juvenile delinquency system.
I imagine it was not always easy to excavate the voices of Palestinians in files put together by British administrators. Could you give us an example of how you read your sources ‘against the grain’?
Any of us who engage in the work of reading against the grain of a colonial archive should be humble about how much we can actually capture the voices of historically marginalized people. With these sources, there were several layers between me and the unfiltered perspectives of the petitioners. As you say, these files were compiled by British colonial administrators, and then later, by archivists. Some of the files only had summaries of the original appeals; others only had versions translated by colonial officials into English. It is also likely that some appeals in their original form and language were written by third parties, since many parents were illiterate.
I used a couple of approaches to reading these fascinating, if problematic, sources. One was to understand these appeals as their own genre, in the tradition of scholars like Natalie Zemon Davis who used court and legal records to excavate social history: What formulas did people seem to use again and again? For example, one pattern I detected was the way that fathers positioned themselves as elderly and meek. In one case, the father of a prisoner petitioned the government several times for his son’s release by emphasizing that he was old and unable to provide for his family in his son’s absence. Over the course of these appeals, the father’s age fluctuated from seventy-five to seventy to “nearly sixty.” Clearly, the factual truth mattered much less than the narrative that he was constructing—a narrative that appealed to the government’s mercy by positioning himself and his family as non-threatening and framing his son’s release as a way to ensure the kind of social stability that the government was always so concerned with.
Another way of reading these appeals was to look through the narrative framework for things that did not fit a beseeching tone. One father stated that his son was only convicted because he was too young to defend himself and had no advocate to represent him (an effect of the 1937 ordinance that created the Juvenile Court). Although couched in the language of pity and mercy, this appeal leveled searing critiques of the juvenile justice system’s operation. That particular petition was signed with a thumbprint, indicating, perhaps, that the father was not literate and not himself the writer of the appeal. We cannot know with certainty whose voices we are actually hearing. We can, however, see how members of the community responded to and engaged with the colonial legal system by making parental claims to incarcerated children.
Throughout the piece, you emphasize how both British administrators and Palestinian subjects leveraged the murkiness of childhood to their advantage. How did the liminality of childhood as a category serve to uphold and undermine the Mandate government?
The tension that I highlight in the article is that a juvenile justice system rests both on certainty about a person’s status as a child and on the fundamental liminality of the category of “young offender,” which, by definition, exists somewhere in between the total innocence of childhood and the total responsibility of adulthood. Both the need to know age with certainty (something that was not guaranteed during the Mandate years) and the murkiness, as you say, of the boundaries of childhood, allowed different constituencies to make claims on the juvenile delinquency system.
As a legal status created by the colonial administration, the category of young offender rendered young people subjects of the state and allowed the colonial state to insert itself into the family by arresting, punishing, and incarcerating children. In short, by being categorized within the framework of the colonial criminal law, a young person was subject to the violence of the state. At the same time, however, the process of determining whether a person was a child or a young offender and deciding what, if any, mitigation youth should have on a person’s case allowed parents, families and community members to speak back—not only to the question of the actual age of the defendant but also to what childhood or youth should mean. The juvenile delinquency system did not merely assess whether someone counted as a child; it had to continually define and redefine the boundaries of childhood, and in doing that, non-state actors were able to bring their own ideas about childhood into the conversation.
As you highlight, childhood was not the only category at play in Mandate Palestine: What differences did you observe in how Arab Muslim, Arab Jewish, and European Jewish children and families were treated?
First, I want to add to those categories Arab Christian children, as well as the non-Arab and non-European children for whom I do not have many individual files, but who certainly appeared in the juvenile justice system during its existence.
Given the limited number of files I have, it is difficult to make sweeping statements about differences in treatment based on ethnic or religious identity. That said, I was struck by the ways that discussions about Mizrahi Jewish young offenders seemed to complicate the categories that the Mandate administration itself used to classify the population of Palestine. Early on in the Mandate period, the government was invested in understanding and administering its population through the confessional categories of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish. Yet, in records of Yemeni Jewish young offenders, officials discussed offenders’ “Eastern” nature in Orientalist language similar to that used to describe Muslim and Christian Palestinian Arab youth. This echoes a lot of scholarship on the racial hierarchies that existed within the Jewish population of Mandate Palestine and the ways that non-European Jewish children were treated by European Jewish leadership.
Because the Jewish population was given more political autonomy under the Mandate system to develop their own agencies and organizations, it’s also safe to say that Jewish communities had more structural support advocating for the treatment of Jewish young offenders. I saw glimpses of that in some individual cases, when Jewish organizations became involved in negotiating young offenders’ releases. But it’s really hard to know whether or how those larger structural advantages impacted any particular young offender in my story.
In my broader research on the juvenile delinquency system in Mandate Palestine, I have seen some differences in treatment between the Palestinian Arab and Jewish populations, again, mostly resulting from the institutional and political inequalities that defined the Mandate’s governing structures. For example, because the Mandate government granted semi-independence to Jewish political and social organizations, Jewish young offenders were generally supported by a more autonomous system of advocacy. By the mid-1940s, the Government of Palestine reached an agreement with the Jewish National Council and established a reformatory institution for Jewish young offenders that was almost entirely autonomous from direct governmental oversight.
I was captivated by your observation that “the assigning of child status—and not merely its denial—was part of the colonizing logic of the Mandate state.” Could you say more about what you mean? How should we conceptualize the overlaps between the history of childhood and the history of colonialism?
As historians of childhood, we know that the category of childhood—and the idea that children occupy a particular status that entitles them to special protections—is a historical phenomenon. It is in the years after the First World War that standards about the treatment of children and ideas about children’s rights began to coalesce in national, colonial, and international regimes of law and welfare. In my research, I was interested in how the construction of the categories of child, adolescent, or young offender in this period could also be part of expressing and extending the power of the colonial state.
In thinking through this, I drew from colonial legal studies, especially Samera Esmeir’s book Juridical Humanity, which argues that British colonial law in Egypt attempted to humanize Egyptians by making them subjects of the law in ways that also made them subject to the violence of the colonial state. In a similar vein, my work thinks about how rendering legal categories like “child” and “young offender,” which were meant to be compassionate, liberatory, and temper state violence, also created subjecthoods that existed within a framework of state power.
I think that the history of colonialism and history of childhood have a lot to say to each other, not only by showing us how different types of children were treated differently or how narratives of child saving were used to justify colonial rule, but also by exploring how the creation of “child” as a discrete category of political and social subjecthood became a medium through which colonial power relationships expressed themselves. In the article, I cite the work of Palestinian legal scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian who pioneered the concept of “unchilding” to talk about how denying child status and its attendant legal and international protections to Palestinian children is part of the violence of the Israeli regime of occupation.
Do you have plans to continue expanding the research in your article? If not, are you working on another research project you’d like to tell us about?
Yes, this research is part of a larger book project that looks at different arenas of child welfare intervention in Mandate Palestine to examine how those projects enabled multiple actors to make social and political claims on the colonial state and on the place of children in Palestine’s future. That project focuses on three general areas of welfare work: infant and child health, orphans and destitute children, and juvenile delinquents and wayward girls. These areas aligned with the priorities of twentieth-century international child-saving movements, but were also rooted in the specificities of Palestine’s place in the Ottoman Empire, its material experiences in the First World War, and the particularities of the Mandate System.
Somewhat related to this project, I am also in the beginning stages of research on the role of nutrition science in relief works for Palestinian refugees during and after the 1948 war. This project actually connects to my work on juvenile delinquency because I’ve found fascinating accounts of the very specific caloric and nutrient schedules that dictated meals in the government reformatory schools. This project stems from initial research that I did several years ago, although obviously that work is taking on new resonances in our current political moment.
With that it mind, I would be remiss if I did not ask how your research has affected your thinking on what we are witnessing right now in Gaza. Do you have any reflections you’d like to share?
The past and the present bear on each other in so many ways. The questions that I explore in this research—of how Palestinian childhood was defined, who counted as a child, and what forms of childhood garnered sympathy and compassion—are clearly resonant today in light of the catastrophic violence that Israel is inflicting on Gaza and, as we know, on thousands of Palestinian children. These are not newly resonant questions, but ones that have recurred for years and decades. I was doing some of this initial research in Jerusalem in 2014, when there was another war on Gaza, and the same questions and same discussions were being had at that time as well. It is the job of the historian to be able to place the present in a more expansive context and genealogy. And it’s our obligation as historians to illuminate that context and that genealogy for our students, our communities, the public at large. So, of course, I cannot help but see Gaza (and Palestine more broadly) today in view of my research and the longer history of Palestinian childhood that I study.
At the same time, I am not encountering what we are witnessing in Gaza solely as a historian. I should say that I am answering these questions just days after we’ve witnessed the bombing of civilians and the slaughter of children in Rafah, so I am also encountering those events as an individual person, as an American citizen, and as the parent of very young children. All of those shape my thinking as well. As historians, I think we are obligated to approach both present political events and our own research in our full humanity and to hold together in one hand both the deep understanding of context and deep human empathy and compassion. The tension for me, and I’m sure for many other scholars of Israel and Palestine right now, is that when the present is so overwhelming and so full of unbearable grief, the past feels simultaneously very important and very, very small.
And to end on a personal note, we’d like to ask you about a few of your favorite things…
1) Favorite way of managing notes and/or citations?
I’m terribly noncommittal when it comes to organization programs and software. I’m currently exploring DevonThink, on the advice of some of my wonderful colleagues, but I usually retreat to my comfort zone of pages and pages of Excel spreadsheets.
2) Best book in the history of childhood and youth you’ve read in the past year (does not have to be something that was also published in the last year)?
Emily Baughan’s Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire is a wonderful book that has been hugely helpful in my own work. And, this is not a history book, but Rania Sweis’ Paradoxes of Care: Children and Medical Humanitarianism in Egypt has also made a big impact on me.
3) Favorite childhood book?
This might be the hardest question of them all! I was a voracious reader as a child and now my own childhood reading memories are overlaid with what I’m reading to my children. My ultimate comfort books as a child were probably the Anne of Green Gables books. All I wanted as a young girl was to have red or auburn hair and be described as “headstrong,” since that seemed to be the defining common thread between most of my favorite protagonists.
Now that I get to see books through the eyes of my kids, I’m rediscovering the beauty and joy of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen and Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad series, both of which my children love dearly.
4) Best piece of advice you remember receiving as a child?
Probably that it’s okay to quit. Or maybe I should say to let go. I was a fairly serious (if not terribly talented) gymnast for most of my early childhood. Even when it was time to move on, I had a lot of angst and anxiety about who I would be without gymnastics. I remember my parents very clearly giving me permission to set down that burden. I’m sure I didn’t understand it at the time, but it was early exposure to the lesson that you can be many things in your life and who you have been does not need to dictate who you will become.
And in keeping in theme of my article, my mother is a criminal defense attorney, so I was also given a lot of good and specific advice about how to avoid ending up in the positions of my research subjects.
Julia Shatz is an Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Fresno. Her research focuses on child welfare, humanitarianism, and colonial governance in twentieth-century Palestine.
