Sarah Gualtieri speaks with William Lafi Youmans and Jason Osder about their award-winning documentary film, Who Killed Alex Odeh? Released by Watermelon Pictures in 2026, the film reexamines the case surrounding the assassination of beloved Palestinian American teacher and community leader, Alex Odeh. In 1985, while opening his office in Santa Ana, California, Alex was killed when a tripwire bomb exploded, causing catastrophic damage. The suspects were quickly identified as members of the Jewish Defense League, but they evaded arrest and, to this day, no one has been held accountable for Alex’s murder. The film weaves together never-before-seen archival footage and interviews with the Odeh family, criminal investigators, and one of the suspects to reveal the workings of the US–Israeli alliance and how it protects some lives and renders others vulnerable to premature death.

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Sarah Gualtieri (SG): I’d like to start with the title, Who Killed Alex Odeh? The film is a forensic reconstruction of the assassination of Alex Odeh in 1985 and it does a very good job of building a case against members of the Jewish Defense League as the responsible parties for the assassination.

On the one hand, much of this will come as a surprise to viewers. Viewers won’t be familiar with the case. Jason, you, yourself, have shared elsewhere that you didn’t know about the case, and Will, on the other hand, of course, you did, growing up in a community in which the murder of Alex was almost a cautionary tale about the possible repercussions of being involved in Arab American community organizing. So, it’s a tale that’s once known, but also not known.

For many of us, and I put myself in this camp, we know about the murder of Alex Odeh for a number of reasons. For starters, the evidence against the JDL members is pretty widely available, but it’s a familiar story for other reasons. It’s a familiar story because it’s a story of impunity, it’s a story of how Palestinians, Palestinian Americans, Arabs here in the United States, and Arabs in the occupied Palestinian territories are subject to a form of racism that makes them vulnerable to premature death. And those who are responsible for their death are not held accountable.

As I watched this film, I was thinking a lot about Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian journalist with US citizenship who was shot and killed by the IDF in Jenin while she was covering a raid in May of 2022. And the resonances for me were just very obvious. Shireen was a well-known, outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights. She was killed very obviously by an IDF soldier and there were witnesses to her murder, and yet their testimony didn’t seem to be considered worthy of anything by the American officials and by the FBI who are ostensibly going to follow this case.

And so, in the end, we have another case—two cases side by side, more than 35 years apart, and no one has been held accountable. It’s a story of impunity, it’s a story of no one being held accountable.

So, I wondered if you could just reflect on that for me. Was that one of the goals in producing and directing the film—you wanted viewers to make these connections and to understand this long history, both past and now present, of anti-Palestinian racism?

William Lafi Youmans (WLY): We try to give hints and nudges along the way, but you don’t want to come off as pedantic in a film. It’s not enjoyable viewing. So, we just try to provide as much of the story and grounding and as much evidence as we could collect to help audiences feel for the Odeh family, feel part of the story, and to start to think about the larger issues, and to ask: What’s the takeaway?

For me, there were two takeaways, two driving theoretical interests. The first is to just think about citizenship and the question of whether we can say there’s equal protection for all citizens within a framework of US foreign policy over this conflict. And so, how does the US–Israeli relationship produce almost different classes of citizenship? And that the way that the criminal justice system and the US fails to offer the sorts of protection to Palestinian American citizens that they might provide to Jewish American citizens is something that calls into question equal protection of citizenship, but where I’m a little bit stuck is that there’s Shireen but you can also think about non-Arab victims. Rachel Corrie, the solidarity activist—an Israeli soldier ran her over with a bulldozer in Gaza more than 20 years ago. The government made some noise about the exculpatory Israeli self-investigation, but took zero action. And there’s been murders of US citizens who were, for example, in the Mavi Marmara, the flotilla, who were trying to break the siege of Gaza. One of the World Central Kitchen aid workers killed by Israel in 2024 was also a US citizen. And there’s the same impunity. So, it’s not just about a particular racism. It’s also about punishing those or not protecting those who are inconvenient to US foreign policy.

The main point of the film is how that US–Israeli relationship compromises one of the key institutions that a state is supposed to provide which is protection, which is the idea of justice: if you, as a citizen, are killed, that your murder will be pursued vigorously in order to prevent that. That’s just part of the basic social contract of why we have a state. Why do we pay taxes, why does the state exist if not to protect its citizens? That’s a first principle that’s baked into the basic essence of what a democratic government and country are supposed to be about and it’s been abandoned because of the corrupt politics of the special relationship.

Jason Osder (JO): So, the basic question: Do we want audiences to consider the bigger systemic issues through this story? Absolutely, yes. Clearly, yes. And we had a lot of debates over the title. The reason we landed on it was to attract interest and to subvert the true crime genre. We’ve always known there is an audience who knows this story and is hungry for the film; the audience that’s going to comment on our social media posts and are basically just so glad that the story is being told in a public way. And we support that audience and they support us and they supported the making of the film.

But then, there’s an audience that is more represented by me than by Will. Someone who may be learning about this for the first time and potentially thinking about Palestine in a different way. Perhaps a certain part of that audience probably is resistant to a political polemic but might be taken in by a true crime approach. So, if you start by engaging the brain of someone the way you engage in a murder mystery—where they know that they’re meant to participate and think about, Who do I believe? And who is a suspect? Like a Law & Order episode, a murder whodunit—then, once they’ve engaged in that way, start to turn the political screws to make that larger systemic case, you may engage someone on the political issues who may not be open to a more overtly political film. So, that’s part of the idea behind the title.

WY: At one screening, a colleague made a very interesting argument: If you just focus on the word “who” to the average person, it’s who literally planted the bomb. But when you start to think about it structurally and think about the governments that are involved and how high does this thing go in terms of the officials and the political class, and the fact that the media didn’t cover this as much and has never really covered the murder of Palestinian Americans proportionately to other communities when they’re targeted … then it’s not just who planted the bomb. Now it’s who are the people in the mechanisms of power that ultimately allow this crime to go unpunished?

The systemic inequality is so severe and so longstanding, it’s not limited to acts of violence and murder. Alex couldn’t return to his home in the West Bank after 1967, but his murderers are able to go there and become settlers. To him, it’s a vital place, his homeland, where he no longer resides because of his ethnicity. To the suspects, it’s a place that they were not born, they were born in America, and yet they can go to enjoy impunity for crimes committed in the US.

So, if the film gets audiences thinking along those lines, then we’ve done our job.

SG: To what places do we go when we watch this film that take us just away from the specificities of the murder of Alex? For example, my mind went to Abu Ghraib. Let me explain. There’s a moment in the film where you incorporate the investigative journalism of David Sheen. He maintains that the Kahanist movement was, up until the late 1980s, 1990s, the word that he may have used was “taboo.” Like, it was just too much, too extreme, too racist, too vile to be widely accepted as part of Israeli political culture. Of course, that’s not the case today. The extremist rhetoric, the policies of settler violence are very much mainstream in Israeli society and in the settler-colonial project as it’s unfolding every single day in the occupied Palestinian territories. I wondered about this idea of the Kahanist movement—which fuels the actions of the JDL—as being somehow an aberration, a taboo.

This idea of something being too extreme or an aberration reminded me of Abu Ghraib and the torture photos that came out of Abu Ghraib in 2004 and how there was a lot of talk of “oh, this is just the actions of a few bad apples,” and “this is not really who America is.” Bush said that at some point, that “this is not America.” Now, there’s a critique of this idea of the aberration because that really is America—like, there’s such a longstanding history of American racialized violence that unfolds both domestically but also abroad. The racialized violence that is captured in these photos out of Abu Ghraib is really a core aspect of American political culture.

So, is the Kahanist movement really an aberration on a fringe? Or is it actually more in the center of Israeli and American political culture?

JO: Regarding David Sheen’s quote, I wouldn’t characterize Kahanism as an aberration. I agree with your analysis. What he says is that prior to Kahane, it was taboo to discuss it publicly and it would have been behind closed doors. In my understanding, that’s pretty accurate. That kind of extremism wasn’t acceptable political speech during that time in America or Israel. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t being spoken of in private or that that type of violence wasn’t in people’s minds or hearts. Kahane said it out loud and he made it demagoguery, not for the first time, but in a modern context.

The bad apples question is a good one and it was something we talked about a lot. We wanted to avoid that characterization. However, there were also valid concerns about how to characterize this movement. This is the opposite of the bad apples characterization that we also sought to avoid. Then and now, many Jews and many Israelis reject expressions of extremism. We saw it as absolutely walking a tightrope between broad brushing a whole group of people and falling into the bad apples trap where you say, “Oh, this was just this fringe or an oddity.” In truth, Kahanism was an extremist movement that was small at its inception, but has gained a tremendous amount of power in the time since the murder. This is systemic and speaks to what happens when extremism and violence is allowed to fester, which we tried to show in the film.

WY: When we were meeting, when we were talking to some people about the film early on, we got one reaction that was “oh, Kahane’s an outlier, he’s extreme, he was not really respected in the Jewish community institutions.” And that was all true. But then, with the election of Kahanists into the Israeli parliament and then Itamar Ben-Gvir eventually into the cabinet, suddenly you don’t hear that anymore. The historical marginalization of the Kahanist political movement was something no one brought up anymore because it reemerged with power in the present. That’s something that the film gets into.

But, to me, really, what the bad apple question is about is can we say that Kahane and Kahanism is representative of Zionism? And this is why this becomes a very difficult issue because for liberal Zionists, they want their cake and they want to eat it, too, and they want to be able to say that Kahane, like Netanyahu, is the bad apple because the state of Israel is basically defensible. But that always struck me as strange because when Kahane was calling for transfer of the Palestinians it was not an anomaly. Israel was built on transfer and it did transfer again in 1967. Kahane really laid bare the fundamental logic of dispossession at the basis of Israel. And that made politicians very uncomfortable and made supporters of Israel have some cognitive dissonance because they built up these ideological illusions about the purity of the state’s foundation and everything. So, on the one hand, the bad apple discourse around Kahane does that work, but there was a strong desire by the state to amplify that message. Israel banned Kahane and his Kach party from reelection because of the growing power of his movement and Israel was under a lot of political pressure, even from the US, to exclude Kahane. Now Jewish institutions had the same equivalent dynamic on in the US side, so they vilified Kahane and saw him as a threat. He gave it right back to them, calling them names and confronting them.

But the other interesting thing about Kahane and Zionism was that he had this saying along the lines of: “We can’t be Zionist and democratic. We can’t be committed to having a Jewish state and also be a democracy.” And that was very uncomfortable for the Israeli establishment and for supporters of Israel and the United States to hear. That’s why the bad apples rationale was appealing for mainstream Israel supporters, but Kahane is clearly just as much part of the Zionist lineage. He is in the ideological genealogy stemming from the Jabotinsky right wing, though a religious strain. And the Likud is one branch as well. Kahane is within that tradition. So, he’s not someone outside of Zionist history ideologically by any stretch and now his ideas have grown into a potent discourse in Israel where ethnic cleansing Palestinians is discussed commonly as a solution.

JO: To pick up on the other part of your question, the Abu Ghraib photos and the American influence: I was able to infiltrate parts of the settler community and there’s a type of settler that absolutely is there because they want to put a boot on someone’s neck. They have moved somewhere where they can do racialized violence with impunity and many of those people are American born.

Nothing is an absolute in this conversation, but the way that Kahane and this murder represents the sense in which that very specific type of racialized violence, an American type of racialized violence, was imported and grafted in to Israeli society largely through the mechanism of the settlements was something I was just struck by. And I’ve observed this firsthand and I’ve read literature that discusses this.

I’m interested in an American viewer that dismisses Israel–Palestine by saying, “That’s not about us. That’s so far away. I don’t need to think about this. It’s all the way across the world.” No, it’s not far away—it comes from Brooklyn.

The best answer we have received from the US government is that they need more evidence. But they didn’t need more evidence when they arrested and detained the LA 8, right?

SG: One thing I liked about the film, too, was that it profiled the ADC, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee which is a longstanding Arab American civil rights organization. Alex was the West Coast Regional Director of the ADC when he was assassinated. He was not just a civil rights advocate, he was a professor, he was a poet. Just two years before his death, the News Circle Publishing House, which was based in Glendale, California, and run by Joseph Haiek, had published a collection of Alex’s poetry and essays which in Arabic was Hamasat fil Ghurba or in English Whispers in Exile. One of the essays was actually about the murder of Ghassan Kanafani by the Mossad in Beirut, a piece that features the silencing of another Palestinian creative. And so, Alex is so complex on many levels because of these different facets of his identity and his wider engagement in the world.

But the ADC has continued to function as a very active civil rights organization. Just yesterday, that would be August 31, I read about the ADC’s legal department representing a master’s student at UCLA who is suing the university for the withholding of his degree, ostensibly as a punitive measure because of his involvement in the encampments during the genocide on Palestine.

Was this also something you were thinking about as directors, that the film tells the story about social movement organizing in which an Arab American organization is at the center?

WY: Alex was truly an organizer. He was someone that did the very unsexy, non-glamorous work without much credit or much fanfare: He stayed after work to do the mailings, folding thousands of letters and licking the envelopes, and then, getting the volunteers organized to help him do that. So, we have a lot of footage of events where Alex is just standing in the back, and he’s just making sure that everything’s organized and working. He was very much the person who connected people behind the scenes, who brought people together to get things done. He was organizing a lot of meetings, doing a lot of phone calls, checking with people. This is the grunt work of activism and organizing that makes organizations truly possible.

And one reason why I thought that was important to document in the film is because for a time before what we saw with the Gaza ceasefire protest encampments, I felt like there was an overreliance on social media and mass communication. Everyone was into clicktivism and it was becoming too pervasive. And so, I was hoping that this film could be a reminder that actual, tedious work is necessary to movements. And then suddenly, movement activism became better than I ever imagined in terms of the response to the genocide in Gaza, in seeing what students were able to do. One reason why our film was getting into film festivals and having a new potential to reach audiences was because of the work of student activists to change the zeitgeist.

So, if anything, it’s almost the opposite effect of why we make films. We think films can change minds, but what was happening in society with minds changing has been able to elevate our film in many ways.

SG: Could you just talk to us about challenges in making the film that might be oblique to us as viewers, whether they’re related to accessing archival material, or other things?

JO: There’s two things to bring up and the first would be the archival research, which I’ll let Will take in detail. And then the second one was that we didn’t meet David Sheen until several years into the process. There was a long period where we were making the film and we knew we wanted to be investigative, but we didn’t personally want to be the on-camera investigators. Then, sort of, through happenstance, we got in touch with David Sheen and I think we just realized right away we had a character to follow. He is incredibly dogged. That kind of investigation takes a certain type of insanity that’s different than the type of insanity that Will and I have.

WY: Yes, I would say with the Odeh family, it took many years of working before we could get very usable footage. And, one thing that was consistently impressed upon Jason and I was just how courageous Norma and Helena are. But, at the same time, coming from a tradition of ethical care as a researcher and taking into consideration the kind of harm that can come from working with people who are clearly traumatized, we tried, for the most part, to meet with them on anniversaries; namely the murder of Alex, so around October 11 and his April birthday each year. I would say more than 90 percent of our visits were timed to coincide with when they were all already going to feel especially heightened sadness, therefore, we wouldn’t be making them revisit painful memories outside of a time when they would normally be doing that anyway, although as Helena said many times, she thinks about her father every single day. So, that meant that for us, it took years of going back, because the windows of appropriate time to be talking about it with them were narrow.

And then, just the crazy labor of archival research. I have so much more respect for archival filmmakers, from pleading with all different kinds of people you have to meet to get access and the patience and insistence that you have to have just to get old videos, to managing the boxes and boxes of old artifacts and dealing with dust in the boxes that you breathe in as you ingest them. I went through ADC’s files and there were over six hundred boxes crowded in an office.

I was very lucky to come upon Arab American Television, which was a program based in LA that Alex was actually part of. He wasn’t just involved with ADC, he was involved with a lot of different organizations, helping form them and serving on boards, including, I think, the Arab American Press Guild in LA. Arab American Television had been in storage for decades, the whole collection, and Wahid Boctor, the founder of it, eventually was willing to send them to me. And so, I got four huge storage containers of tapes—about 4,000 tapes. And I had to go through and digitize them to find minutes of Alex. So, it took a very long time.

SG: In an interview, Will said how the murder of Alex was a cautionary tale for Arab Americans. People were scared, obviously. You had the brazen assassination of a Palestinian activist. The bomb itself was so catastrophic—the damage it caused, it was just so extremely violent. So, Arab Americans, Palestinians and those allied with them, could have just shut down. They could have said, “The stakes are too high, we’re going to be quiet for a while.” But, of course, they weren’t quiet, they didn’t stop organizing

And the case that immediately came to mind was the case of the LA 8 in Los Angeles two years after Alex’s assassination . Young Arab Americans are working to mobilize—they’re passing out leaflets, they’re going to demonstrations, they are not being quiet. The LA 8 case involved seven Palestinian immigrants and one Kenyan woman who were arrested for distributing pro-Palestinian pamphlets and faced deportation proceedings for 20 years. And this case came to be known as the LA 8 case. Historian Esmet Elhalaby has written a really important article called “Los Angeles Intifada,” in which he shares a photograph of the scene outside the federal building when the LA 8 deportation cases were being heard. And Irv Rubin, West Coast coordinator of the JDL, and one of the suspects in the murder of Alex Odeh, is there with a disgusting sign full of derogatory words against Arabs and threats against Arab American life. So, Rubin is there and he represents this more extremist arm of domestic terrorism in the United States and yet, right there in the federal building, you have the state operating to contain, control, and, in this case, excise Arabs from the American polity through these deportation proceedings.

So, for me, this was an image where the two things came together. You have state repression against Arab Americans and you have violent domestic terrorism. They are standing side by side. So, to recap, Arab Americans don’t shut up after Alex’s assassination. They keep organizing. And then, what are they facing? They’re facing domestic terrorism against them, and they’re facing state repression.

So, this is not just a film, as we said in the beginning, that is about an act of domestic terrorism against an Arab American individual. It allows viewers to go wider, to make connections. But are they making the connections to state repression here in the United States?

JO: The LA 8 is a powerful counterexample. Regarding the Odeh case, the best answer we have received from the US government is that they need more evidence. But they didn’t need more evidence when they arrested and detained the LA 8, right? The other counterexample we bring up in the film is Achille Lauro. And in that case, international law was thrown out the window, there were no concerns whatsoever. It’s easy to conclude that the US response to terrorism is not based on justice or guilt, but it’s based on political efficacy.

WY: The story of LA 8 begins a few years before the raid around the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. It began with the FBI bulk interviewing active members of the Arab immigrant community. Alex, of course, being with ADC, became an advocate and actually was under suspicion himself around the Olympics, even though he was involved in a committee to welcome Arab athletes to the city. It was very much a point of pride in the community that the Olympics were even happening in LA, but there was some notion that Palestinian terrorists would strike because of the 1972 Munich games. Some of the fear was also based on a Hollywood movie called Black Sunday, where Palestinian terrorists attack the Super Bowl. And so, it was in the context of the Olympics that the LA8 were on the surveillance radar. Alex was advocating actually for them individually and trying to get the FBI to lay off and stop what the community felt was an intimidation tactic.

And then, the night that the LA 8 were swooped up they had helicopters and armed agents busting into doors and arresting these peaceful activists. They’re not militants by any stretch. But that night, there was an emergency meeting for the community in a center there and one of the activist lawyers named Brian Hudson contrasted the feds actions saying, in effect: “This is the same FBI that hasn’t made a single arrest in the murder of Alex Odeh in more than two years. And here they are coming in with their guns drawn persecuting the peace activists in the community.”

That was such a powerful observation the very night that it happened. It zoomed in on a key double standard around the system of impunity that we talked about, that pro-Israel militancy benefited from. The other side of the coin is that the state represses Palestinian activism.