The Girl with a Bomb in Her Basket: Age, Race, and Jewish Terror on Trial in British Mandate Palestine

Abstract: This article explores how age became racialized in the context of British Mandate Palestine (1917–48). Specifically, it charts European Zionist discourses about how Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews aged in different ways. These discourses, which I call “age talk,” played an important role in the court case of Rachel Habshush Ohevet-Ami. In June 1939, Ohevet-Ami, a young Jewish woman of Yemeni and Moroccan descent, disguised herself as an “Arab” and attempted to execute an attack targeting Palestinians in Jerusalem. In her ensuing trial, two questions would decide Ohevet-Ami’s fate: How old was she? And who had the power to decide? As this article searches for an answer, it addresses questions along the way that lie at the heart of the history of British Mandate Palestine about what it meant to be an Arab or a Jew, an “oriental” or a “European,” a terrorist or a freedom fighter, and a child or an adult.