Open and Closed: Alex Odeh’s Murder Four Decades On

October 11, 1985 was set to be an ordinary Friday for Alex Odeh. But when he opened the door to his office that morning, he triggered a bomb that detonated into a fireball of shrapnel.

by William Lafi Youmans

We are all here remaining on the land, and we are all returning to it despite the closed doors and high walls around it.

– Alex Odeh, Whispers in Exile (1983)

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October 11, 1985 was set to be an ordinary Friday for Alex Odeh, if not for his appearance on two television reports the day before. After seeing the broadcasts, Alex’s wife Norma warned that “they” were going to kill him. But Alex had been receiving death threats for years, and he believed his wife’s fears were unfounded; that sort of thing wouldn’t happen in America. Alex assured Norma she had nothing to worry about. He sat down for breakfast with his three young daughters that Friday, as he did every other morning. Norma made him his favorite, eggs and ham. Alex ate, kissed his family goodbye, and headed to work at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s (ADC) west coast office, where he worked as a coordinator for the national civil rights organization. His office was in Santa Ana, one of the many sprawling suburbs in Orange County just south of Los Angeles.

It was his last breakfast. Shortly after 9:00 AM, Alex arrived at his office on the second floor of a nondescript office complex on East 17th St. He opened the door, triggering a bomb that detonated into a fireball of shrapnel. The blast severed his leg and burnt much of his body. Two hours later, Alex died at a nearby hospital. Since he was a prominent organizer with the ADC, Alex’s assassination had political overtones. The bombing reverberated throughout the national Arab-American community, all the way to his village of birth, Jifna, in the West Bank.

The symbolism of Alex dying after opening a door is almost too obvious to note. His activism was all about gaining wider access for Arab Americans to the halls of power, from government to media. Yet, as the epigraph of this essay shows, Alex aspired to return to his native Palestine despite the closed doors of Zionism, which ideologically prohibits the return of Palestinians to their homelands while its adherents seek to silence those who even speak of their exclusions. These doors—the door to Palestine and the door to civic influence—have long been related for Palestinian-American activists. The more one honestly named and sought to force open the door to Palestine, the more obstructed one’s access became to U.S. media and political life. A Palestinian-American who wanted to “make it” in media or politics often felt the need to be strategic, that is careful, in their criticism of Israel. Alex was somewhat moderate politically, a believer in inter-faith dialogue who called for a Palestinian state on the occupied territories.

I have thought often about these symbolic paradoxes around doors as I work with my colleague Jason Osder on a documentary about the unsolved murder of Alex Odeh. Having to put his life, murder, and the subsequent investigation into film form forced me to think about the fraught relationship between openness and closure when it comes to public visibility for Palestinians in the United States. For a tireless advocate like Alex, closure and openness are not opposites; every closed door either has the potential to be opened or at least forces them to find new possibilities. In both his life and untimely death, Alex embodied the range of openings, opportunities, closings, and limitations that publicly-engaged Palestinians in the United States navigate.

The Openings and Closings of Migration

Alex often pondered the contradictions of being Palestinian in the United States through his various writings—his poetry, notes, and articles. It all starts with migration. In his 1983 book Whispers in Exile, Alex ruminates on the simultaneous opening and closing one experiences when moving between countries—the genesis of Palestinian-Americans as a community. For a determined person with hope, exclusion does not always mean disempowerment. The primary closure of Alex’s life was his exile from Palestine during the 1967 war, when he was finishing his studies at Cairo University. Reflecting on the Israeli occupation banning his return to Jifna, he states:

I was immersed in the bitterness that I felt in June of 1967, which was burdened with frantic worries. It was the day I lost all contact with my family after the occupation of what remained of Palestine. That day, I felt that my humanity was revolving in a strange orbit without my will.¹

This dispossession, however, led to the opening of a life in the United States, where his sister Ellen had immigrated to work as a nurse in 1965.² She settled to start a family, and encouraged Alex to follow her in the tradition of chain migration.

However, through the dark clouds with the smell of murder and displacement, I was overlooking a small window through which I could see the face of my older sister in the far away country – America – circulating within its frame of a dancing longing.³

Exile gave Alex what he described as a “window” showing him a new future—a closure with an opening. The allure of America as his future was also rooted in connecting with his past, as personified by Ellen, who had raised Alex after their mother died. Closed off from the possibility of life in Palestine, America opened its doors. While Alex reflected on his own experience as a Palestinian-in-exile, he tried to generalize it to what migration means for any migrant, and how the hardships it beckons by definition must be met by work towards new prospects:

Migration has a meaning of pain in the human soul [because it] accompanies leaving family, loved ones, and the land behind us. Then migration must also have a meaning of hope before us in that country or that new land…And with hope, there must be serious work and building a future equivalent to that.⁴

Emigration, even by force, is never the end of one’s ties to a homeland. For migration to take on new meaning, away from the loss it signifies for the displaced, the migrant must embrace change without losing themselves, Alex cautioned. The migrant must learn to adopt, if not understand, “the thought, mind, and heart of this country.” This is done through being immersed in “the people of his new country.”⁵ The way immigrants contribute back to their new society is not through servitude but through edification. This contribution is made possible by the migrant preserving their “historical heritage and emotional ties to the motherland”—that is, without closing oneself off from their past.⁶ This is far from a frictionless proposition. As much as he valued qualities about his country of adoption, Alex acknowledged the U.S. government’s “many sins against the Arab peoples in general and against the Palestinian people in particular.”⁷ His vision of a contribution, then, was to right the ship—to inform the public. He subscribed to the idealistic notion that if Americans understood the Palestinian story, they would see the errant ways of an American foreign policy that favored Israel at the expense of positive relations with the Arab people. This faith in the public’s basic reasonableness animated his activism, but the politics of the American system were so skewed that the opening he envisioned as a new migrant would never quite materialize. In his murder, especially as an unsolved one the U.S. government failed to prioritize, we see the ultimate closure.

The Hazards of Visibility or the Enclosure of Being Public as a Palestinian

I heard a man without a tongue, so I knew he was a foreigner.

– Alex Odeh, Whispers in Exile

As the western regional director of the ADC, Alex operated behind-the-scenes to recruit members, set up meetings, plan events, and engage with media to improve the representation of Arabs. Alex focused much of his media advocacy on print, writing letters to the editor, and connecting reporters with sources. He appeared on alternative radio programs, mainly Middle East in Focus, which aired on the Los Angeles Pacifica outlet, KPFK. It was only in the days before he was murdered that Alex started to appear on television, the primary medium for public visibility in political life. The day before his murder, Alex was interviewed in news packages with the five year old Cable News Network, or CNN, as well as the evening news of KABC, the local ABC news affiliate, which hundreds of thousands of people in the greater Los Angeles area tuned into each evening.

The news event he was asked to speak about was the seajacking of a Mediterranean cruise ship, the Achille Lauro. A group of Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) militants took over the ship in the hope of exchanging hostages for the freedom of Palestinian prisoners. During the takeover, one of the militants killed an elderly American Jewish man, Leon Klinghoffer, who was in a wheelchair. That he was Jewish was presumed to be the motive for the murder, but there were many Jews on the ship and he was the only person harmed. This murder shocked the American public. The Reagan administration condemned it, and then ordered the U.S. Air Force to bring down an Egyptian plane carrying the seajackers after Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman, Yasser Arafat, brokered a deal to end the standoff. This was a controversial decision that alienated key U.S. allies such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and led to the collapse of the Italian government. The Reagan administration, desperate for a victory in his declared “war on terrorism” after the humiliation in Lebanon in 1983, hailed the plane’s downing as a resounding defeat for terrorism. As preposterous a claim as it was, it nonetheless riled up public jingoism against Palestinians and Arabs writ large, including Arab Americans.

For a media activist to be interviewed for a television report would feel like something of an opening. Media activists who work on Palestine tended not to see people with voices like theirs appearing in mainstream media. Alex believed owners of “newspapers, television stations, and radio stations” were generally likely to be pro-Israel, but that did not stop him from trying to claim a place in the mediasphere. He insisted activists must work to prevent the American public from being “easy prey for propaganda devices” and felt that talking about the Palestinian desire for freedom would resonate with the American public.⁸ The right words could let them capitalize on this opening.

In the media landscape, openings are often deceptive, as they entail multiple conditions that de-limit what can be said, that is, not edited out. Opportunities for media access and exposure are accompanied by constraints on the range of acceptable discourse as well as the beckoning of obligatory incantations, such as the condemnation of violence, that a Palestinian is expected to perform in order to be sanctified as a media guest. The other limitation is that Palestinians are expected to speak as representatives of all Palestinians. During his television interviews, Alex was called upon, as a Palestinian-American, to speak on behalf of the community and answer for the actions of the PLF—an offshoot of an offshoot of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. This positioning of Alex reduced him to the status of a de facto spokesman for the PLF in the eyes of an uninformed audience, something he was certainly not.

A hidden “closure” in media appearances often occurs in the form of editing, when news producers remove or re-order footage, including an interviewee’s comments. In what has become a well-worn imperative in television interviews, the reporters beckoned Alex to condemn the murder of Klinghoffer, and he did so without reservation. Yet his words of condemnation never aired on KABC; they were edited out. A local businessman and friend of Alex’s, Richard Saad, said about his KABC interview:

Alex made extensive statements in that interview before he died, condemning the hijacking of the Achille Lauro. Out of the 40 minute interview, they edited it down to something like 35 or 40 seconds. That made it appear as though that by listening to the statement made on television, it would appear as though he was commending Yasser Arafat and he was this, quote, pro PLO guy you know, they presented something that was really out of context with the man and what he stood for.⁹

Condemnation of Palestinian violence was, and often still is, a condition news media placed on activists in exchange for giving them a voice. This is an unfair compulsion because it only runs one way. Supporters of Israel are never made to condemn Israeli atrocities as a precondition to speak. Still, this sort of closure is complicated. That the Arab-American community was enraged that KABC omitted Alex’s condemnation shows it also was a form of protection in a time of intensified popular distrust and animosity. This only highlights the courage of activists who were brave enough to speak out in honest but unsafe ways. Still, Alex would not have hesitated to call Klinghoffer’s killing unjust. He was a peace activist, after all. As careful as he was, he could not avoid the inherent controversy of being publicly Palestinian.

After Alex was killed, media reports referred to the scandalous media appearances where Alex dared to commend Arafat for playing a positive role in mediating the end of the seajacking:

I think the media mistakenly linked this incident with the PLO. As far as I know Arafat did an excellent job. We commend Arafat for his positive role in solving this issue. The media ought to give the PLO and Arafat recognition, inform the public about the PLO as a political organization and Arafat in particular as the chairman of the PLO who is a man of peace.¹⁰

To praise Arafat in the U.S. media took a great deal of bravery, but this was a fairly common view among Palestine solidarity activists and Arab-Americans at the time. However, the above quote ignited media scripts about Arab-Americans possessing suspicious, vaguely anti-American politics. Arafat was politically untouchable in U.S. politics; he was a villain due to the overtly pro-Israel bias in American politics and media. Alex was tarred as an Arafat fan in the most sensationalized reporting about the bombing. Yet, eight years after Alex was killed, when the peace process commenced, the Clinton administration rehabilitated Arafat’s image in America as a “man of peace,” to borrow Alex’s phrase.

Lost in the media frenzy over the Achille Lauro was Odeh’s gruesome murder, an actual act of terrorism on American soil. Media researchers at the time found that leading newspapers reported on Klinghoffer’s murder hundreds of times more than they did Alex’s, highlighting a significant disparity in coverage. In the three days after Alex’s murder, the New York Times, for example, devoted 1043 “column inches” to Klinghoffer and only 14.5 to Alex. The Washington Post and even Alex’s hometown paper the Los Angeles Times were also vastly disparate in their coverage, though not as disproportionately as the New York newspaper of record.¹¹ Tragically, Alex’s desire to get U.S. media to value Arab lives failed. The proof was in the relative lack of media coverage of his own murder.

The Opened-Closed Murder Case

Nearly 40 years after the bombing, the FBI has failed to catch Alex’s killers. Norma Odeh is uncertain about the status of the investigation: “I wonder now if the case is still open or is it a cold case now? I don’t know.”¹² In the parlance of murder investigations, open and closed are not truly dichotomous. For one thing, a murder case is only closed when it is solved because there is no statute of limitations. Every unsolved case is by definition open. This would seem to be a perfect dichotomy, but as we have seen with migration and the hazards of being a public Palestinian, the difference is not so clear cut. Some investigations are active, meaning law enforcement are working to solve the case at the present moment. But other investigations are dormant, inactive, though technically open: cold cases. The FBI assured Norma and the ADC that they were actively pursuing information about his murder. Due to the lack of progress over so many years, the case certainly appears cold. This is odd because soon after the bombing, the FBI admitted there were established suspects, members of the militant Jewish Defense League, which was founded in the late 1960s by Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York. The suspects are American-born extremists who moved to Israeli settlements in the West Bank, namely Kiryat Arba outside of Hebron, though none of them live there today.

Hugh Mooney, a former Santa Ana police officer who tracked the investigation, believed that U.S.-Israeli relations gave the case a political dimension. The investigation, by his account, was quashed by the federal government and Israel itself. He predicted “it’s going to be an open case forever.”¹³ For an investigation to be open in perpetuity is effectively to be closed but unsolved. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”¹⁴

Remembering Alex in the Midst of Genocide

Being a new documentary filmmaker committed to a visual, non-fiction narrative telling of Alex’s story and the open-closed-cold investigation, I grappled with a challenge: How does one impose story structure on real-life events and people whose lives defy such structure? To express this difficulty in one specific way: How does one close a story that has no ending?

This problem is even more pronounced when making a ninety-minute film about a Palestinian, an inevitably tragic figure. Aristotle thought a lot about plots. In his Poetics, written around 350 B.C.E, he observed that tragedies have beginnings, middles, and ends. Most Palestinian tragedies start with the Nakba, even if the first moment of the story does not seem related. The catastrophe of Palestinian dispossession that Israel’s establishment in 1948 entailed is omnipresent in Palestinian existence, always in the background. Typing this now, I realize for the first time that I, a half-Palestinian, half-American, would not exist if it were not for the Nakba. My mother would have stayed in Palestine rather than seek life in the United States as escape from a homeland that fell under foreign rule and colonization. She chose self-imposed exile over being ruled by the forces that usurped her nation. The Nakba in a sense lives on in me, then, just as Alex was a being in exile, embodying the Naksa.

In October 2023, the images of Palestinians fleeing northern Gaza for the supposedly, only temporarily, safer south evoked images of 1948: lines of families carting elders and children, carrying as many possessions as they could, moving slowly by foot, all to avoid destruction. A new slogan emerged, “the Nakba never ended.” The only Palestinian in the U.S. Congress, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, circulated on social media a graphic with this phrase declared in all-caps. No mere slogan, it is a reminder that the Nakba was a tragedy without an end, a story without closure.

Another way of putting it, as many have, is that the Nakba is not an event, but an on-going set of procedures that structure in one way or the other the lives of all Palestinians. An event has a clear ending, but a historic process rarely stops neatly and conclusively, especially when it is the engine of oppression imbued by power. The Nakba, as the central defining logic of Israel and its allies’ rule over Palestinians, connects the past with the present and propels their aims for a future free of Palestinians. Conceptually we can think of the Nakba as a schema for the organization-and-disorganization of Palestinian life, defining their possibilities and transforming them into impossibilities. For Palestinians, the Nakba is an open process of perpetual, unfolding closures that was imagined as having no end even before Gaza. But now we can see where the Nakba goes—towards a Palestine completely devoid of Palestinians.

The operating logic of the Nakba demarcated Alex as what Agamben called a homo sacer, a Roman legal concept for someone who could be killed without being sacrificed (a death given no meaning). As a result, Alex’s killers would not be treated as murderers. The death of someone who cannot be sacrificed is a closure with no opening in the sense that it entails no new interpretive potential. As such, Alex’s murder was given little attention in the U.S. media and by government officials despite being an act of terrorism in the United States. It was a random act, nothing more, and certainly not an indictment of the Zionist propulsion towards violence. The killers are free thanks to the federal government’s lack of urgency in solving the case as well as the Israeli government’s “non-cooperation,” to put it lightly. The Reagan administration ordered the Air Force to act against Klinghoffer’s killers, but feigned helplessness when the Israeli government did not respond to FBI requests for assistance in Alex’s case.

Although the muted government and media responses suggest we are to take no lessons from Alex Odeh’s murder, the inevitable message is that Palestinian lives are simply not valued equally by those with power. I could just as well be describing the dynamic of Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza, and the callous disregard the Biden administration shows towards the Palestinian civilians bearing its bloody brunt. Their lost lives are individually unmentionable, as Palestinians are in effect rendered into unpeople. However, we must tell their stories; we must force the public to hear their names. Their memories, like Alex’s, cannot be foreclosed by bombs.

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Notes

1. Alex Odeh, Whispers in Exile, trans. Hala Numan (Glendale, CA: The News Circle Publishing Company, 1983), 12.

2. Pat McDonnell Twair, “The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (1982-1989),” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 8, no. 6 (Oct 31, 1989): 25.

3. Odeh, Whispers in Exile, 12.

4. Ibid., 81.

5. Ibid., 82.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 187.

8. Ibid., 92.

9. Diane James and Michael Bogopolsky, producers, “Political Terrorism in the United States: The Assassination of Alex Odeh,” broadcast, KPFK, February 13, 1986, https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/kz1415?nns=Odeh.

10. Jay Mathews, “Alex Odeh: Arab-American Victim of Hate.” Washington Post, October 12, 1985. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1985/10/13/alex-odeh-arab-american-victim-of-hate/f159c30d-1e6d-4f9b-85cf-184ec7a0805e/

11. “Two Victims of Terrorism: One Mattered, the Other Didn’t,” Michigan Voice 9, no. 9 (December 1985): 21-22.

12. Interview with Norma Odeh, conducted by William Lafi Youmans, October 24, 2021.

13. Interview with Hugh Mooney, conducted by William Lafi Youmans, October 14, 2019.

14. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963, in Why We Can’t Wait, ed. Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 77-100.