Dr. Moheb Zidan

Moheb Zidan is Associate Professor of Economics at Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2019, following degrees in economics from the University of Haifa. His research sits at the intersection of development, crime, and gender-based violence, with a particular interest in what quantitative methods can recover from colonial legal archives. He has conducted extensive archival research at the National Archives at Kew, the Israel State Archives, the National Library of Israel, and digitised repositories including FADA at Birzeit University, and has worked on the documentation of femicide in Palestine, including the public documentation project Bikafee. He is a fellow at the Max Weber Kolleg from September to November 2026.

The Politics of Capital Punishment in Mandatory Palestine (1920–1948)

This project examines how the British administration used the death penalty in Mandatory Palestine, drawing on a newly constructed dataset of more than 900 capital cases tried in the civil courts, alongside over 800 cases tried before military courts, assembled from archival records in the United Kingdom and Israel/Palestine. It offers the first systematic analysis of both political and non-political executions under British rule, combining quantitative analysis of sentencing and clemency with close reading of trial records, petitions, and the confidential correspondence of colonial officials. It argues that capital punishment functioned not only as criminal justice but as an instrument of political control, and traces how legal categories such as motive, provocation and discretion were applied — particularly in cases of “honor” killing and femicide, where colonial readings of custom shaped who was executed and who was spared. The project contributes to debates on colonial governance, legal pluralism, and the transformation of law under empire, and will result in a book manuscript.

• Zidan, M. 2026. “The Political Calculus of Capital Punishment in Mandatory Palestine.” The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice. https://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.70037
• Zidan, M. 2026. “Archival Data and Economic Pedagogy: Building Skills and Engagement in Undergraduate Classrooms.” Journal of Economic Teaching. DOI: 10.58311/jeconteach/8509f51e04c22af3cc2c3b5ce0fbe1a433aac4e9
• Zidan, Moheb 2022. “Developing Strategies and Methods for Documenting Femicides in Palestine”, in Mustafa (Ed.). Violence and Crime Among Palestinians in Israel (pp. 34-61). Haifa: Mada al-Carmel, Arab Center for Applied Social Research.
• “When Honor Disappears: Institutions, Identity, and Femicide in Israel,” (working paper)