Palestinian Activist Rasmea Odeh Appears in US Court Before Deportation

Palestinian activist Rasmea Odeh has made her final appearance in a U.S. court before her deportation, which she accepted in a plea agreement at the end of March following her three-year battle with the United States over alleged “immigration fraud.”

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Hundreds of 69-year-old Odeh's supporters packed the court, where Detroit federal Judge Gershwin Drain, despite praising her years of service to Palestinian women in the Chicago area, announced that the activist’s citizenship had been revoked.

She is due to be to deported, possibly to Jordan, for failing to declare on her U.S. immigration and citizenship applications her conviction by an Israeli military court in 1969.

Last week, Chicago’s International Union of Operating Engineers hall was also packed with her supporters, many from activist organizations such as Code Pink, Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine and Black Lives Matter, in an event held as a last farewell for Odeh.

In Chicago, where she lived for more than 23 years, Odeh worked as the associate director of the Arab American Action Network.

“For 20 years, she lived here peacefully, honorably and gave more than many U.S. citizens,” said defense attorney Michael Deutsch, who has stated he has been inspired by Odeh’s “militancy”, and who also criticized prosecutors for filing charges.

The Palestinian leader was first found guilty in November 2014. While she was initially sentenced to 18 months in prison, revocation of her U.S. citizenship and deportation, a U.S. appeals court threw out that verdict in February 2015. The court ruled that the trial made the error of not allowing Odeh to call an expert witness to testify about the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from the torture and rape she suffered while detained by Israeli authorities.

The lifelong activist’s defense attorneys argued that PTSD affected her mental state when she filled out her citizenship application back in 2004. A new trial, in turn, was granted to include expert testimony on her PTSD.

During her trial, however, the U.S. government filed new charges based on her involvement with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — which Washington labels a “terrorist organization.”

At 19 years old, Odeh was arrested by Israeli authorities in 1969 in Jerusalem for her connections to two bombings in which two people were killed.

While in an Israeli prison, she says she was beaten with wooden sticks, metal bars, hands and fists as well as kicked by booted feet. She was also denied sanitary supplies while menstruating, prevented from using a washroom, denied regular sleep and left naked most of the time, often in front of male guards. One guard punched her repeatedly on her ears, which resulted in her hearing being impaired for two years.

Odeh says she was finally forced to sign a confession when guards brought in her father and ordered him to have sex with her. But according to an affidavit from clinical psychologist Mary Fabri, which detailed her PTSD, even after Odeh signed the confession, the torture did not stop.

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She spent a decade in imprisonment till she was released in 1980 during a prisoner exchange with the PFLP.

“I am going to have to leave the life I have built for more than a decade at some point in the next few months. I am going to have to leave Chicago and all the beautiful people who have welcomed me so warmly to this country and this city. But I will still be organizing wherever I end up,” Odeh said in April at the Jewish Voice for Peace national conference.

“And I’ll be watching developments in the U.S. very closely, because besides Palestine, this is the main front of the battle for the liberation of my homeland. And liberation we will win.”