The Murders and Lies of Rasmea Odeh

Is this title an example of anti Palestinian Racism?

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We are visiting with our son and his bride in Atlanta. They live in the primarily Jewish neighbourhood of Toco Hills. There are four synagogues within walking distance of their home, part of an Atlanta Jewish community of 160,000. Family and friends that I’ve met here are uneasy. Some are angry and want to see a more aggressive stand taken by Israel against our enemies. Others are wondering if they have a future here, and whether to pick up stakes and move to Israel.

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Anti Palestinian Racism

Our thoughts are still on the vote taken on June 18 by the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) to create a taskforce to study the problem of anti Palestinian racism (APR) in Toronto schools. As we wrote in a previous article, the Toronto board has seen a spike in incidents of antisemitism, which has been driven by anger and resentment about the war in Gaza. Jewish parents demonstrated outside the meeting location due to the refusal of the board to allow them to speak on the matter, and due to a perceived failure by the board to address antisemitism against their children.

Since last week we have been reading the report “Anti-Palestinian Racism: Naming, Framing and Manifestations” by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) on the problem of APR. Reading it has given us some insight into the world view of those who are raising concerns about APR, and the report is likely what the TDSB staff, and perhaps the trustees would have read, before deciding to include APR in the board’s anti discrimination policy, at the meeting last Tuesday.

The language used in the report to describe anti Palestinian racism is quite similar to that used in the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition has been denounced by some on the left for attempting to silence the voices of Palestinians. A similar concern about APR being used to silence Zionists was raised in our earlier article. There is a certain irony here, in that the adoption of the IHRA definition has clearly not silenced critics of Israel or advocates for Palestinians. Indeed, since the outbreak of the war in Gaza, we have heard criticism of Israel, and advocacy for Palestinians, almost everywhere we look in the news and on line.

Here is the way anti-Palestinian Racism is described at the beginning of the ACLA report:

WHAT IS ANTI-PALESTINIAN RACISM? Anti-Palestinian racism is a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives. Anti-Palestinian racism takes various forms including: denying the Nakba and justifying violence against Palestinians; failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people with a collective identity, belonging and rights in relation to occupied and historic Palestine; erasing the human rights and equal dignity and worth of Palestinians; excluding or pressuring others to exclude Palestinian perspectives, Palestinians and their allies; defaming Palestinians and their allies with slander such as being inherently antisemitic, a terrorist threat/sympathizer or opposed to democratic values.

In the ACLA report on APR, the definition itself contains clauses that seem very problematic. For example, we know that Palestinians committed acts of terrorism on October 7. One reading of the definition suggests that saying that would be an example of racism. One would expect that saying something that is true would not fall under the definition, but that exception is certainly not made explicit.

How else do we know that the concern that advocates for Israel will be silenced by the adoption of APR, is more realistic? Some of the critics of the IHRA definition say that the problem with the definition is with the examples. They don’t like it that Israel is mentioned in several of them. But it is precisely the demonization of Israel that is driving a lot of the antisemitism that we are seeing in Canada at the moment. It’s impossible to talk about antisemitism without looking at the way UN officials, many NGOs, some politicians and much of the media are talking about Israel in the context of the current war.

Looking at the examples in the ACLA report tells us a lot about what kind of speech and action is apt to be considered racist. Those examples show that Jews and advocates for Israel have good reason to worry that the promotion of APR is on a collision course with the right to speak out against the demonization of Israel and the promotion of hatred towards the majority of the Jewish community which supports Israel.

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Rasmea Odeh

In the report, one of the examples cited of anti Palestinian racism is the treatment of Rasmea Odeh. Let’s look at who she was, what she did, and what happened to her.

Rasmea Odeh was born in 1947 or 1948, and was a citizen of the Kingdom of Jordan. In 1969, she was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). On February 21, 1969, a bomb planted in a crowded Supersol food market in Jerusalem killed two men and wounded 9 other people. Four days later a bomb at the British consulate wrecked a room but caused no injuries. In both locations a second bomb was defused before it could go off.

Israeli authorities found the materials used to make the bombs at Odeh’s residence. She was arrested and confessed while in Israeli custody to involvement in the bombings. She was convicted by an Israeli court and sentenced to two terms of life in prison. She served ten years in Israeli prison. In 1979, she was one of seventy-eight prisoners released in exchange for an Israeli soldier captured by the PFLP in Lebanon

Image: Palestinian Terrorist Rasmea Odeh — Source: The Daily Beast

In this 2022 article by Steven Lubet in The Daily Beast: Meet the Palestinian Terrorist Who Lied Her Way Into America, Odeh appeared in Geneva soon after her release to testify in front of a UN committee which was investigating human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories. The article reports:

Within the first minutes of her testimony, Odeh began lying about her participation in the PFLP’s guerrilla operations. She told the committee that she had never had explosives in her home, that she knew nothing about Palestinian commandos or resistance, and that she had no involvement in the Jerusalem bombings or other “military operations.” As we will see, all of these assertions were untrue and have been flatly contradicted by Odeh’s own words in later interviews as well as by other participants in the bombing.

Odeh’s account of torture by the Israelis, included a claim that she was stripped naked and that her father was brought in and ordered to rape her. According to her Wikipedia article, this account was never corroborated by her father, who mentioned only that conditions in the prison were crowded.

The article in the Daily Beast goes on to say:

Shortly after appearing in Geneva, when she was living in Beirut, Odeh was interviewed by the Lebanese journalist Soraya Antonius, to whom she described her involvement with the PFLP and her commitment to “military action,” thus contradicting her own sworn testimony. Odeh also admitted her part in the British consulate operation:

We had placed a bomb there to protest Britain’s decision to furnish arms to Israel. Actually we placed two bombs, the first was found before it went off so we placed another.

Lubet’s article goes on to itemize a great deal of additional evidence that Rasmea Odeh was guilty of the crimes for which she was convicted.

According to Wikipedia, after 25 years living in Amman, Rasmea Odeh came to the United States to look after her father who was a US citizen. Nine years later in 2004, she applied for American Citizenship. On her application she attested to false information, denying her past as a PFLP terrorist, her 11 years as a convicted bomber in Israeli prisons, and other information required for completion of the citizenship forms. On her application for US citizenship she used an alias, Rasmea Joseph Steve.

In that same year, she appeared in a film about female terrorists called “Women in Struggle”. In that film, one of her accomplices describes the bombing “exactly as she told the Israelis in her original confession.” Odeh did not contradict anything that was said about her actions in the film, which put these activities in a positive light.

In 2014, Rasmea Odeh was charged in the US with immigration fraud. At her trial, she repeated her earlier claims that the confession in Israel was obtained under torture, but this was ruled irrelevant by the judge. She was convicted and in a plea bargain agreed to be deported from the United States in 2015.

The ACLA report has the following to say about Odeh:

It is undisputed that when the target of APR is Palestinian the harms to them are far greater and longer-lasting – and in many cases life altering. For example, Professor Steven Salaita was de-hired and his academic career ended due to the pressures of the pro-Israel lobby; and Palestinian feminist organizer Rasmea Odeh was deported by the United States. Palestinians cannot escape APR even if they conceal their identity. The APR Palestinians experience is life-long and it impacts their dignity and self-worth. Palestinians live with an ever-present fear or readiness for backlash as the Palestinian in the room. APR not only impacts the individual but also their community who see one of their own being targeted.

If a report written in the name of a group of Canadian lawyers describes Rasmea Odeh’s conviction for a fraud of which she was clearly guilty, as anti Palestinian racism, can we expect that equity officers or teachers at the TDSB will be more careful about the facts?

One of the examples of APR in the definition is “Nakba Denial”. What does this mean? Nobody is denying that Palestinians lost their homes in the territory that became Israel in 1948. But some critics claim that Israel had a plan (Plan Dalet) which they claim proves the intention of the founders of Israel to expel them all along. In contradiction of this claim, Benny Morris says that the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes occurred ad hoc, during the war, and was done out of military necessity. Would that statement be considered Nakba denial? Would people accuse Morris of anti Palestinian racism on that basis?

If APR means that you can’t say that Israel’s war of independence was a just war, then it is clear that embracing a campaign against APR in Toronto schools will necessarily require that people who support Israel stop saying things about history that they believe to be true. If that’s the case, the struggle over the freedom of Jews and others who support Israel to make a case in defense of Israel at the schools of the TDSB, is just beginning.

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