The Ottoman entry into World War I devastated the economies of coastal Syria and Mount Lebanon, tipping the region into a famine that would last from 1915 to 1918. Discontent with the Ottoman wartime administration increased as the situation worsened. Ill-conceived Ottoman policies and the state’s association with alleged profiteers eroded the state’s moral authority to enforce laws that were increasingly viewed as malicious by sufferers and outside observers alike. In the absence of normal economic opportunities, both desperation and opportunity contributed to the rise of adaptive coping strategies, including actions that skirted or blatantly violated the law. However, despite the moral and legal implications of such criminal behavior, contemporary observations and retrospective narratives about the period indicate that not all of this crime was seen as equal. Indeed, the exigency of the famine not only diminished the incentive to conform to legal and social norms, it eventually produced a wartime culture that saw the violation of purportedly unjust legal and physical boundaries like the “blockade of the mountain” as laudable, even heroic. The role of justice in this development was key, since certain crimes like smuggling were granted reprieve, whereas other economic adaptations like graft and profiteering were regarded as more reprehensible by their commission during the crisis because they were seen as inflaming the already terrible inequity of suffering in the crisis. The social endorsement of such behaviors suggest the existence of an “immoral economy” that developed as a subtle form of resistance to state and market authority. Unlike Hobsbawm’s notion of social banditry, such transgressors were not necessarily criminals by profession, merely by circumstance, and unlike the active collectivity of E.P. Thompson’s “moral economy,” violations remained subtle amid the repression of the war. However, the elevation of such behaviors within narratives critical of Ottoman policy implies a similar sense of critical solidarity inspired by the injustice of the famine and the apparent indifference of the authorities to address it. The prevalence of such subtle contestations of authority and the social acceptance of a specific set of crimes-against-injustice demonstrates that the authority of social and legal boundaries is not solely bound to their utility in times of crisis, but also to how they are socially perceived by the actors they purport to limit.