My paper explores the sway that discourses and performances of masculinity hold in the virtual disappearance of so-called honor (al-?ar?) crimes in the Palestinian refugee camps of Tyre (South Lebanon) where I lived and conducted fieldwork for two years. While there is a large consensus in the refugee community to reprove such forms of violence as inhuman and antiquated, my male interlocutors in the camp would often make a point of conceding to me that the public abuse or deviance of female relatives still carries an affective dynamics that can obliterate abstract moral judgments. In the paper, I will provide a thick description of two cases that developed when I was living in the camp, and analyze the networks of actors (especially male) and the range of rhetorical registers they mobilized to definitively avert the potential for violence. I will draw in particular on in-depth interviews with two fathers who, by their own accounts and as a matter of semi-public knowledge, had recently found themselves in the position and with the impulse to put to death a purportedly deviant daughter. My argument is that in both cases the eventual renunciation of violence hinged not on the threat of the law nor on the negation of ideals of masculinity, but rather on a compassionate acknowledgement of these ideals and, at once, an ethical call to rise above one’s anger and vulnerability to kal?m al-n?s so as to turn a potentially unmanning position into an occasion for a sublime display of self-government.