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Edna Erez and Anat Berko
usually just admit that he did it, and would do it in a defiant manner, to get more
points in regards to the manhood aspect.
Another legal agent characterized women’s involvement in terrorism as follows:
In most cases, there is a difficult personal situation that has made them to do what
they have done…A woman would usually argue that she acted out of distress,
because of an unwanted or bad marriage, because things have been hard for her, or
due to family (or life) pressures. Women often express their despair by going to stab
a soldier or sometimes even by only displaying a knife, without even attempting to
stab…
The interviewees who process security violations in military courts mentioned a
few cases in which desperate women have just thrown knives at soldiers so that
they will be taken out of their families, even temporarily, thereby avoiding an
unwanted (forced) marriage or difficult familial circumstances (Price and Vinitzky,
2008).
Women’s defense strategies also rest on the assumption that females are lacking in
intelligence, and defense counsels may sometimes allude to women’s inability to
comprehend what they were doing, or appreciate that they were in fact involved in
terrorism. Legal agents described cases in which parents or other family members
provided testimony that their loved one was deceived or manipulated into
participation, or that she did not comprehend the meaning of her actions; one
mother stated on the witness stand that her daughter got involved “because of her
stupidity.” In one military court case of a joint husband-wife operation designed to
transport suicide bombers into Israel, the accused husband, trying to defend his codefendant
wife, claimed that she did not know the purpose of the travel. He
spontaneously turned to the judge and with male fraternity remarked, “His honor,
you know what a woman is, a woman is half a brain.”
Women often offer justifications for lenient sentences or argue at the penalty stage
for mitigating circumstances that would result in shorter prison time. As will be
discussed next, imprisonment – the standard penalty imposed on security offenders
– is particularly hard on women and their families, as well as for Palestinian
society in general. 33 Reasons for mitigation of sentence as reflected in Israeli
criminal law include traditional defenses such as minority status, coercion or
duress, self defense, diminished responsibility, or marginal involvement in the
terrorist act. Medical factors, such as being pregnant or having suffered serious
injury as a result of the terrorist operation, may also be taken into consideration at
sentencing. While demonstrated affiliation with terrorist organizations can lead to
an escalation of penalty, this is not the case if the defendants’ membership was
limited to an organization on a university campus, while being a student.
Women involved in terrorism are often eligible for many of these defenses and
mitigating factors, resulting in lower penalties than their male counterparts. Their
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