Will Obama Launch Drone Attack Against Israeli Settlement?

The ingredients are all there.  An American citizen is killed in a terrorist act.  The likely perps flee to a foreign country.  That foreign country “obstructs” the investigation and will not extradite the suspects. The country shielding the alleged terrorists had itself wantonly killed two U.S. citizens over the last decade.  The suspects can’t be arrested. What is Obama to do?  Will he make another one of those “painful” decisions to shoot a Hellfire missile onto a faraway foreign town?

Don’t bet on it.  The likely perps are in Israel.

The American citizen who was murdered was a Palestinian-American named Alex Odeh.  He was the regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), in southern California.  He opened his office door on Oct. 11, 1985 and was killed by what the FBI said was a very sophisticated pipe bomb.  A month after the attack the New York Times reported that a group called the “Jewish Defense League” had planted a number of bombs in ADC offices including the one that killed Odeh.  According to Wikipedia three suspects to the killing were thought by the FBI to have fled to Israel to live in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba.

Here’s a piece written about the case in 1990 by independent investigative reporter Robert Friedman (not to be confused with New York Times imperial 1% spokesperson Thomas Friedman) about Israeli obstruction in the case.

Though the three most named suspects are still alive none have been questioned about the Odeh killing.   This year the ADC has teamed with the NAACP and Jewish Voice for Peace,  to launch a petition asking the Justice Department to bring Odeh’s killers to justice.

Here’s Democracy Now’s Oct 11 show about the effort to seek justice in the Odeh killing.

Here’s is a petition you can sign that will go to Eric Holder calling for accountability in the Odeh murder.

If you’re wondering about the identity of the two Americans killed by Israel look up the 2010 killing of Furkan Dogan, by Israeli commandos and the 2003 murder by bulldozer of Rachel Corrie.  EI recently published a piece about the killing of Dogan and U.S. government concerns…to link the victims to terrorism.

A few days ago Homeland Security arrested a Palestinian-American woman, Rasmea Odeh, and charged her with falsely filling out her citizenship application 20 years ago (see The Struggle archive on Palestine/Israel).  I have no idea if she was related to Alex Odeh, but the thought crossed my mind that this might be a cruel answer to the ADC-NAACP-JVP petition.

Final note, if you want to quibble Kiryat Arbat is not in pre-’67 Israel, but in the West Bank.  However, if you look at Israeli maps there’s no West Bank, just areas with bible names.  At any rate Kiryat Arbat is a colony living firmly under the law of Israeli apartheid.