COLUMN ONE : Paying a High Price for Honor : An Arab tribal custom obliges a man to kill a female relative if he thinks she has sullied the family name. Palestinian women hope that in the new Mideast, tolerance of such murders will end.

Police or shepherds or hikers find them: the bloodstained bodies of women, murdered and dumped outside West Bank villages and towns. A woman discovered recently by a bulldozer driver near the village of Beit Jala had been bound hand and foot and decapitated. Sometimes, they have been strangled, shot or burned alive. More often, the victim has been stabbed or hacked to death.

The murderer, if apprehended, nearly always turns out to be a close male relative--father, brother, cousin, uncle. The men of one village, Beit Duqou, favor throwing women off their mosque’s minaret.

The practice is called honor killing, and it is so deeply rooted in the ancient Arab tribal structure that many barely consider it a crime. No accurate record is kept of how many women die this way each year in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but sociologists believe the count may be around two dozen.

According to tradition, a man is obliged to take the life of a close female blood relative if she does something that is believed to sully the honor of the family. The most common transgression is for an unmarried woman to have sex.

Now a small group of Palestinian women--political activists and feminists--is hoping that the establishment of a Palestinian government, and the expected end of Israel’s 27-year military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, will give the women a chance to change their society’s attitude toward honor killing.

Palestinian women stood side by side with the young men who confronted Israeli soldiers in the occupied territories during the Palestinian intifada, or uprising against Israeli military rule, these advocates argue. Now is the time for them to call in their political chits with Yasser Arafat’s fledgling Palestinian Authority.

“During the intifada, women were in the streets,” said Maha Abdo, a social worker at the West Bank Women’s Center for Legal Aid and Counseling. “They . . . took on the national liberation struggle and stepped away from the social struggle. Now women believe it is time to address the issue of the empowerment of women.”

There is perhaps no more sensitive issue they could tackle, Abdo and other women acknowledge.

Palestinians say that sometimes women or teen-age girls disappear and the only explanation offered by the immediate family is that they have “gone to Jordan.”

“For years, we didn’t want our dirty laundry washed in public,” Abdo said. “These issues weren’t discussed. But it is out now because of the growing awareness of Palestinian women. We know that we need to talk about it. All women’s organizations are beginning to organize. We’re a little late, but not too late.”

Activists such as Abdo have grown up hearing the stories of women who have “gone wrong” and paid for their supposed moral transgressions with their lives. Even among well-educated, wealthy families, a woman is expected to be a virgin when she marries. (Men are exempt from such strictures.)

Many of society’s pillars, its legal community and religious leaders, view the practice of honor killing as a powerful deterrent, a way of ensuring social order.

“Murder is a bad and horrible thing,” said Azmi Tanjeer, a Nablus lawyer who was a district court judge in the West Bank for 15 years under Israeli rule. “I am, of course, opposed to murder. But also, in my opinion, what is more important is moral stability in a society. Religion, culture, tradition calls for this (honor killing). Maybe if one woman is killed because of honor, it might stop other women from taking this step.”

If a man is convicted of carrying out an honor killing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and in surrounding Arab countries, he usually can count on serving a few years in prison and receiving the sympathy of his family and neighbors for having been “forced” to take the life of his relative. Under the Jordanian law that applies in the West Bank, an honor killing is considered murder with “special circumstances,” which means the penalty is lighter than for any other kind of murder.

In the West Bank, Jordanian criminal law has applied during the Israeli occupation. Egyptian law has applied in Gaza. The Israeli authorities never tried to alter the laws’ lenient approach to honor killing.

“Everyone will tell you that they are against this idea of honor killing,” said Islah Abdul Jawad, a sociologist at Bir Zeit, a West Bank university. “But the fact is that the practice is tolerated.”

The Rev. David Johnson, director of the privately funded Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, was directly involved in one case.

In May, 1993, a Palestinian woman came to his hospital seeking medical treatment, Johnson said. The woman, whose name he refused to divulge, told the staff she had been severely beaten by male relatives after they learned that she had been raped by her brother-in-law and was pregnant.

After treating the woman, Augusta Victoria kept her for several days while its social worker tried to find a safe place for her in Israel. There are no shelters for Palestinian women in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and only one shelter in Israel run by Arab women.

Ultimately, Johnson authorized the woman’s release into the custody of her father after asking him to sign a statement saying he was responsible for her well-being.

Within 24 hours, Johnson said, the woman’s corpse was returned to the hospital. Sources at the hospital said that an autopsy revealed she had been beaten to death and then dragged behind a truck or tractor.

“How do I feel about it? It is a tragedy,” Johnson said. “But sometimes the culture wins.”

Not every woman who is accused of violating a family’s honor is slain. Some wealthy families will send a pregnant, unmarried daughter out of the country for an abortion. Others simply insist that the man who got her pregnant marry her, said Abdul Jawad.

But women’s advocates say that all too often once a woman has been accused of violating her family’s honor, she is under a virtual death sentence. And no woman can consider herself safe simply by getting married.

Tradition requires a woman’s family to continue to take responsibility for her behavior as long as she lives. Whatever her age or marital status, her conduct is vital to the interests of the family. One misstep can plunge the extended family into disrepute and ruin the chances that her female relatives will make good marriages.

One Palestinian women’s organization in Israel, Al Fanar (The Lighthouse), started helping women flee the country through a secret network of safehouses in 1991 after a Palestinian woman in a northern Israeli village was burned alive by her father and brother for having sex before marriage.

But Al Fanar activists say that sometimes women they shelter are so frightened of the prospect of living in a foreign land that they return to their families and accept their punishment.

Women’s advocates say they know that their fight against honor killing will be a long and difficult one, even though the Palestinian Authority says it will guarantee women’s rights once Israel hands over the administration of daily affairs in the West Bank.

Intisar Wazir, the only woman in Arafat’s Cabinet, insisted in an interview at her Gaza office that the Palestinian Authority will change the laws and society’s approach to honor killing.

“The sulta (Palestinian Authority) condemns killings for reasons of honor,” said Wazir, who is the social affairs minister. “The view of the sulta is that murder is murder. Anyone who commits such a murder will be treated as a murderer.”

Even though only a tiny percentage of Palestinian women fall victim to honor killings, the atmosphere of fear that the crime creates for all women is damaging, their advocates insist, and it must be battled in the courts and in educational programs.

“We have prepared ourselves,” said Abdul Jawad, the sociologist. “We have reviewed legislation in Jordan, Egypt and Israel. We know that the criminal law, as it exists now in the West Bank, discriminates against women.

“We want the Palestinian Authority to show a political, cultural and social will (to say): ‘We don’t want this; this crime will not be minimized.’ ”

One Palestinian official recently risked his life to protect a woman accused of violating her family’s honor, but his actions were not welcomed by some feminists.

Saeb Erekat, minister of municipal affairs in the Palestinian Authority, is both the senior civilian official in Palestinian-controlled Jericho, a tiny West Bank oasis, and a prominent member of a prestigious Muslim family.

For one month last summer, Erekat sheltered a Christian woman in his home because her family wanted to kill her for fleeing the cousin she had been forced to marry and trying to run away with the Muslim with whom she had fallen in love.

Vivian Dellou fled the West Bank town of Ramallah and managed to reach Jericho, where she begged Erekat to protect her. He agreed and faced down a crowd of her angry, armed relatives who came to his door demanding that Dellou be handed over.

It was an almost unheard-of act of courage, particularly because Erekat risked a confrontation between the majority Muslim community and the minority Christian community.

But Erekat said he felt that he simply had no choice.

“I saw the fear in her face,” he said. “I told them that they would have to kill me to take her.”

Erekat protected Dellou while Palestinian officials negotiated with her family. The case was considered so explosive that Arafat himself at one point tried to persuade Erekat to surrender Dellou to her family.

But Erekat demanded that the family guarantee her safety and allow her to divorce her cousin before he would hand her over. The family accepted his terms, and Dellou returned to Ramallah.

Erekat said he has visited her since, at her family’s home, and finds her in good spirits. Friends say, however, that she lives under virtual house arrest, forbidden to go out without a chaperon.

“So they saved her life,” said Jamila abu Dihhu, director of the Bisan Research Center in Ramallah. “But . . . we ended up with a woman who is a prisoner in her own house.”

By negotiating with the family, Abu Dihhu said, the Palestinian Authority supported traditional tribal law, which calls for mediation of disputes by the heads of families and respected members of the community. It left the fate of a woman to be decided by her male relatives.

Abu Dihhu sees honor killing as just the most extreme form of control exercised over Palestinian women by male relatives.

“The minute you get your (first) period, you’re (practically) locked into your parents’ home,” she said. “From the age of 10, girls are told not to ride bicycles because it might rob you of your virginity. They are warned not to play active sports.”

An ardent feminist, Abu Dihhu expressed skepticism about the ability of women’s groups to change society’s views toward honor killing, or the Palestinian Authority’s willingness to treat such killings as murder. The Palestinian Authority, Abu Dihhu scoffed, “hasn’t been different from other Arab governments on all aspects of political life, so why should they be different on women’s issues? They will not stick their necks out for women. For them, it’s a minor problem.”

Tanjeer, the lawyer, agreed that the Palestinian Authority is unlikely to touch so explosive an issue as honor killing as it establishes its authority throughout the West Bank. “Society would rise up against the authority if it tried to change this law,” he said.

Tanjeer said he judged about 100 cases of honor killing in the district courts of Ramallah and Hebron during his career. Normally, he sentenced convicted offenders to between six months and two years in prison, following Jordanian law.

Now, in his private practice, Tanjeer sometimes defends men accused of honor killing. Most recently, he persuaded a judge to sentence Abdallah Abed Latif Awis to two years in prison after Awis hacked his daughter, 25-year-old Shirah Awis, to death for allegedly engaging in prostitution.

Awis, a Jordanian citizen, crossed into Israel on July 26, stopped to buy an ax in Jericho, then traveled to his ancestral village near Nablus. There, according to Israeli police spokesman Eric Bar Chen, Awis lured his daughter, the mother of four children, out of her home and into an abandoned warehouse. He killed her with the ax, then turned himself in.

He told his interrogators that he had learned in Jordan that his daughter had engaged in prostitution during a stay there. Honor required him to kill her, he said.

“I explained that he took this act because he was a man with high standing in his community,” Tanjeer said, “who simply couldn’t live with what his daughter had done.”

Jerusalem bureau researcher Summer Assad contributed to this report.