On October 11, 1985, during Back to the Future’s 15th week in theaters, while audiences reveled in Marty and Doc Brown’s escape from Libyan terrorists seeking weapons of mass destruction, a markedly different terrorist attack occurred in Santa Ana, California, killing 41 year-old Palestinian-born Alex Odeh, the regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). Though Americans were often told about the threat of terrorism (often stereotyped as Arab extremists in TV and movies), Alex Odeh’s case and its resemblance to other recent attacks on ADC offices went cold. Another 41 years later, filmmaker Jason Osder and academic William Lafi Youmans seek to solve the case in their part-archival, part-investigative, too-much-True-Crime documentary, Who Killed Alex Odeh?
Right off the bat, Who Killed Alex Odeh? has a major problem emblematic in both its title and structure. As the documentary eventually reveals, there isn’t much actual question as to who was behind Alex Odeh’s assassination. Even at the time of the initial investigation, it was widely suspected that the Jewish Defense League (JDL) was behind the attack, a far-right, U.S.-based militant organization, founded in 1965 and eventually designated as a terrorist group by the FBI in 2001. (Though the organization in name alleged to be a representative of Jewish communities, it should be made clear that the JDL was a political Zionist project and will be described through that framework.)
The FBI identified three suspects in 1985, and they become the focus of the documentary’s investigation: Robert Manning, Keith Fuchs (aka Israel or “Izzy” Fuchs), and Andy Green (aka Baruch Ben Yosef). There are some developments from the last two decades, including Fuchs’ and Green’s residence and political activities in Israel. The documentary unfolds as though it is actively a part of the investigation into these suspects, but what it really is presenting is a retelling of Israeli journalist David Sheen’s reporting, mostly by Sheen himself. For what it’s worth, Who Killed Alex Odeh? has been in the works for at least 12 years, after the filmmakers received a Sundance Institute Documentary grant for the project. But the focus on Sheen and large amounts of time spent on him recounting his findings obfuscate the film’s relationship to his investigation, and the editing choices make it unclear as to whether or not the production is actually following Sheen’s research as it takes place; all of his interviews discuss his reporting in the past tense and are framed as though he is just another source for the documentary, but certain sequences and B-roll footage suggests that Sheen and the documentary are working as one. Osder and Youmans insist on structuring the film like a paint-by-numbers true-crime-of-the-week, selling to the viewer that indeed the question “Who killed Alex Odeh?” is a suspenseful mystery it will set out to solve in 83 minutes. The anticlimactic reveals are a useless distraction from genuinely valuable threads within the film that are frustratingly obscured at every turn.
The film’s strongest ideas occur when it embraces an analytical role, tracing the line between the emergence of the JDL — and the U.S.’s refusal to hold the organization accountable — to the genocide in Palestine and aggressive, violent political framework that defines Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu’s rule. JDL founder Meir Kahane started the Kach Party in Israel in the early 1970s, and in 1984 Kahane would be elected to the legislation on a platform explicitly and callously advocating for the expulsion of Palestinians and Arabs. While the documentary pursues answers to Odeh’s murder, it jumps back and forth to the emergence of Kahanism, which, while nominally supported at the time, bore protegees such as Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir. The thesis buried somewhere in Who Killed Alex Odeh? is that far-right extremism takes decades of quiet, calculated growth before assuming power, and such growth requires the ongoing complicity of global powers like the United States to permit and encourage every little rightward tilt of the needle. This isn’t to suggest that the violent occupation of Palestine didn’t begin until the mid-’80s, but to demonstrate how the assassination of Alex Odeh was a critical moment for the U.S. to fail to intervene. That throughline is present in the documentary, and it is baffling that the film either refuses to commit to it or doesn’t think highly enough of its audience to accept anything other than another iteration of Making a Murderer.
The film’s other strength is also, ultimately, its worst failure. Alex Odeh dedicated his career to challenging the prevailing stereotypes about Arabs and Palestinians as violent, religious extremists and terrorists. Who Killed Alex Odeh? continues this legacy, questioning assumptions of who is a terrorist without overcorrecting into stereotypes and generalizations of a different sort. But along the way — and despite its best intentions — Alex Odeh exists within the documentary as an idea more than a person. The film invokes his name and the desire for his justice without putting much time into exploring who he was and how his work fits into relevant history pre-dating his death. By putting so much emphasis on True Crime trademarks — in score, editing, and a couple of attempted “gotcha!” moments — the focus is scattered everywhere but on what justice functionally means to his legacy. The film wants the viewer to believe that its and/or Sheen’s investigation have brought closure to Odeh’s case, but there is hardly even a sense of renewed clarity.
DIRECTORS: Jason Osder & William Lafi Youmans; DISTRIBUTOR: Watermelon Pictures; IN THEATERS: October 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 24 min.
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