Who Killed Alex Odeh? Documentary Exposes Anti-Palestinian Bias and Violence

The historical past of Israel-Palestine is incessantly diminished to a query of permissiveness. It’s not solely a narrative of land grabs, colonialism, genocide and spiritual extremism, however one of many very politics of storytelling. Media narratives exist (or do not exist, because the case could also be) in direct correlation with implicit bias. For many years, Palestinians each inside the occupied territories and within the diaspora have discovered a maddening consistency by which their tales are skeptically questioned, if not outright dismissed, whereas their Jewish and Israeli counterparts’ tales are acquired with considerably much less pushback.

As implied by its title, Who Killed Alex Odeh? is, a minimum of partially, a homicide thriller, an investigation right into a four-decade-old chilly case of the homicide of Odeh, an Arab-American peace activist whose workplace was bombed in 1985. However, administrators Jason Osder and William Lafi Youmans neatly and inventively use the style trappings of a true-crime documentary to counsel one thing way more sinister than a single politically motivated assassination. It’s an earth-shattering documentary which ingeniously makes the connection between reportage and subsequent state violence.

There are culpable actors right here, however the true reply to the movie’s title query is {that a} long-standing systemic bias in opposition to Palestinian narratives — within the information, in native, state and nationwide authorities, in movie and tv — has contributed to an ecosystem whereby murders of Palestinians are missed at finest, inspired at worst.

Who Killed Alex Odeh? Masterfully Constructs an Examination of Anti-Palestinian Violence

On the time of his homicide, Odeh was employed because the West Coast Regional Director for the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). He was beloved each inside his neighborhood and with out, because of a profession of working intently with each Arabs and Jews to foster peace each in Los Angeles County and overseas. The evening he was killed, he was scheduled to talk at a Jewish neighborhood middle.

4 bombs have been detonated in his workplace by suspected Jewish extremists from the terrorist Jewish Protection League (JDL), a far-right Zionist outfit which was borne out of a want to “rework the picture of the passive Jew” by proud fascist Meir Kahane, who, amongst different motives, wished to ascertain Israel as a theocracy. It was assumed on the time that Odeh, regardless of his acknowledged pacifism, was focused after he was interviewed the evening earlier than on Eyewitness Information in a extremely edited section during which he appeared to be excusing the homicide of Jewish civilians aboard the Italian vessel Achille Lauro. In actuality, Odeh denounced the Palestinian terrorist assault, solely going as far as to say he understood why determined acts have been being taken by individuals whose rights had been taken away.

On the time, the ADC was working fairly onerous to counteract in style stereotypes of Arabs as ruthless terrorists and sadistic oil tycoons. However the assault on the Achille Lauro fanned the flames of Islamophobia within the Nineteen Eighties (it actually did not assist {that a} poorly-made TV film was produced on the assault shortly thereafter). However whereas Arabs have been painted as unfeeling terrorists, it was Kahane and the JDL who have been coaching militants to hold out political bombings and advocating for the eradication of any Arab presence inside Israel.

For the unitiated, Kahanist thought and terrorism are daunting topics, however Osder & Youmans do a rare job reducing all the way down to the fundamental details in harrowing element. If watching younger militant Jews march and shout “dying to Arabs,” or “a ’22 for each Jew” (in reference to a gun) would not ship sufficient of a chill down your backbone, then the audio of considered one of Odeh’s suspected killers arguing that “God made the Arabs poorly” in an open name for genocide most likely will.

In appreciatively tender methods, Osder & Youmans constantly convey this gnarly historical past of far-right Israeli extremism again to the very actual and protracted ache of Odeh’s widow, Norma, and his daughter, Helena, who’ve been working tirelessly to get solutions from the FBI. Prior to now two plus years, as Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues (and because the battle will get diminished to Instagram Reels), we’re in steady hazard of being inoculated to the rising variety of harmless deaths. However these are human beings, and Osder & Youmans by no means allow us to overlook that.

Most damning of the institutional breakdown of the investigation is the reveal of simply how simply solvable the case is, as evidenced by the dogged dedication of Israeli journalist David Sheen, who has spent over a decade investigating the Israeli far-right. Who Killed Alex Odeh? is sneakily way more advanced than the query of 1 harmless man’s dying, however a query of the way it occurred so simply and the way its fixing has been kicked to the curb with callousness. As Odeh’s surviving household is aware of greater than most, the one manner ahead for this and any battle is a repudiation of violence in all of its types, and an equal therapy of injustice in every single place.

Who Killed Alex Odeh? screened on the 2026 Sundance Movie Competition.