Defying a Clan Code of Silence on Unspeakable Crimes

From The New York Times:

So-called honor killings among Muslims are a phenomenon across the Middle East, including in Israel, where Arabs, most of them Muslim, make up almost 20 percent of the population. The Israeli police and courts have caught and convicted some of the killers; unlike the laws in some Arab societies, Israel’s do not make allowances for such acts.

Yet among the Abu Ghanem clan here in Ramla — where family honor can be tainted by a woman’s desire to go study at a university or her use of a telephone — the bloodletting has carried on. Some women’s advocates have accused the police of a dismissive attitude toward Arabs, while a Jewish district police official speaks of the “ambivalence” of Israel’s Arab citizens, who do not always want to cooperate with investigations “for nationalist or local reasons.” So far, the Abu Ghanem cases have ended without convictions, the police say, mainly because relatives maintained a conspiracy of silence and washed all the evidence away.

Then in January, after the last killing, of Hamda Abu Ghanem, 18, female relatives decided to speak up. Twenty of them.