Many thanks to Eugene for giving me an opportunity to blog about my new book, The Trials of Rasmea Odeh. It is the story of a Palestinian woman who faced two wrenching trials in her lifetime, over forty years apart. The first trial was for the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket in 1969, which took the lives of two Hebrew University students. She was convicted in that case, partly on the basis of a coerced confession, and sentenced to life in prison. Odeh was released after ten years in a prisoner exchange with the PFLP. She immigrated to the United States in 1996 and became a naturalized citizen in 2005, both times falsely denying that she had ever been convicted of a crime or imprisoned (as well as other false denials on the visa and citizenship applications).
Rasmea Odeh was born in 1947 in the village of Lifta, on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Her family was evacuated to Ramallah in early 1948, shortly before the fighting began between the nascent state of Israel and Arab and Palestinian forces. As refugees, the Odeh family lived for a time in a tent, eventually becoming prosperous enough to buy a house in nearby al-Birah.
Odeh grew up in the West Bank, which was then under Jordanian rule. According to a 1980 interview she gave to a Lebanese journalist, she began attending Communist Party meetings, which were illegal under Jordanian law, as a young teenager.
