‘Alex used to say that fighting is for animals.’ : Mideast ‘Cousins’ Urge Talk, Not Hate

Zev Putterman was telling a story designed to touch some raw nerves.

Speaking at the monthly meeting of the Orange County Cousins Club, a group of about 30 Jews and Palestinians concerned with the Arab-Israeli conflict, Putterman said he was overjoyed when the military commander of the Palestine Liberation Organization was gunned down. The commander was hated by the Israelis as much as he was loved by Palestinians, and most experts credit the Israelis with assassinating him.

Putterman’s vengeful admission upset many Palestinians at the meeting, and the scene could easily have degenerated into an angry debate. But before that could happen, a woman who might by any standard have earned the right to hate, made a plea for peace.

“I don’t think anyone should be killed,” said Ellen Odeh Nassab. “Killing is never going to accomplish very much.”

Nassab is the sister of Alex Odeh, the Arab-American activist who was killed three years ago today by a bomb in his Santa Ana office. The FBI suspects members of the Jewish Defense League of planting it.

She and other members of the Odeh family are perhaps the most driven members of this disparate group of Palestinian-Americans and American-born Jews who meet every month at UC Irvine to discuss the latest news from the Middle East.

The group also sponsors lectures by academic and political figures who live in the heart of the conflict. By talking to one another instead of fighting, club members hope that they can take a small step toward peace in a region that has scarcely known it for the past 50 years.

“People sometimes wonder why I talk to Jews, when the man who killed my brother was definitely a Zionist Jew,” Nassab said, looking Putterman straight in the eye.

“Alex used to say that fighting is for animals and talking is for humans. So maybe I am carrying on his memory.”

The name Cousins Club comes from the belief of both Muslims and Jews that they are the descendants of the sons of Abraham and thus, in a biblical sense, cousins. Though many of the Palestinians in the group are Christians, they say the name still holds meaning because it implies that Jews and Arabs are related and must learn to live together.

The local group was formed last February when Orange County members of the original Cousins Club in Los Angeles got tired of commuting. Since then, it has established its own tone and agenda. Unlike the Los Angeles group, the Orange County chapter requires all new members to sign a petition calling on the U.S. government to do three things:

- Recognize the right of Palestinians to a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza Strip “with peace and security for both states.”

- Recognize the PLO as the Palestinians’ official representative.

- Support and take part in a U.N.-sponsored Middle East peace conference that would include the PLO, Israel, the Soviet Union and the Arab countries involved in the conflict.

The requirement has kept the club’s meetings free from the wrenching ideological arguments that have become the hallmark of the club in Los Angeles. But it has also kept some Palestinians and Jews from joining.

Nabil Dajani, a Palestinian who relished the knock-down, drag-out fights of the Los Angeles club when he was a member, fears that this has kept the Orange County club’s membership too narrow. He has found that he puts off people on both sides of the issue when he presents them with the list of principles.

One time, Dajani said, he asked a Jew and a Palestinian to join the club. The Jew refused to sign the group’s petition because it mentioned the PLO and endorsed the Soviet Union’s participation in an international Middle East peace conference. The Palestinian refused to sign because the petition recognized Israel.

But regardless of the group’s size or its impact on a conflict that began before most club members were even born, it is clear that many in the group feel it is worth joining just for the chance to talk to the other side.

“I feel like I’ve met some new friends in this group,” said Ruth Shapin, a Jewish attorney, who said she did not know any Palestinians before she joined the Cousins Club. The club includes two accountants, two college professors, an aerospace engineer, a nurse, a restaurant manager and the director of a local political theater group.

“We’ve got a group of fairly ordinary people,” said Ken Wexler, a linguistics professor at UC Irvine. “They’ve got lives of all kinds.”

What is extraordinary, however, is that they have broken ranks with members of the Arab and Jewish communities by joining the group. And some members, pointing to the fate of Alex Odeh, say they fear they may yet pay a price for having done so.

Roni, a Jewish woman from Orange who asked that her last name not be used, is one example. She said the people she most fears are the members of the Jewish Defense League, the right-wing extremist group suspected by the FBI of carrying out a string of bombings, including the Odeh slaying, in 1985.

Last March, Nassab and others said, JDL members showed up at a Los Angeles rally the club helped sponsor and copied down club members’ license plates.

“I don’t think I’d feel the same way if I was living in another area,” Roni said, explaining why she did not wish to give her last name. “I’m proud of what I do. But I guess I feel that right now there are limits to how vulnerable I want to be.”

Like other Palestinians, Nassab measures her life by the wars that have disrupted it.

She was only 10 years old when the first Arab-Israeli war erupted in 1948, resulting in the partition of Palestine. Her family’s native village became part of what is now called the West Bank and fell under the jurisdiction of neighboring Jordan.

In 1959, she came to the United States to study nursing. Before long, she married John Nassab, a Palestinian who had fled his native Haifa in 1948.

When the 1967 Arab-Israeli war ended, Israel had won control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and she and other Palestinians caught outside those areas during the fighting found they could not return.

Odeh was finishing college at Cairo University in Egypt when the 1967 Six-Day War broke out. Since he could not go back home when the war was over, Odeh moved to Amman, Jordan.

But life for a Palestinian refugee, even one of the middle class, was not easy there, Nassab said. She decided it would be better for him to join her in the United States, where she thought he could live a freer life.

Brought Brother Over

Nassab brought her younger brother to Orange County in 1972. By 1978, he had earned a master’s degree in political science from Cal State Fullerton and joined a number of Arab-American organizations. In 1983, he became the West Coast director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the job he held until his death in 1985.

By then, Odeh had become a prominent political figure in the Arab community. His quiet manner and insistence that an end to the Middle East conflict could only be achieved through peaceful means had won him many Jewish admirers as well.

“I brought him here mainly because there is liberty and freedom for all,” she said. “I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I should have left him in Amman, where there isn’t so much liberty and he wouldn’t be so free to speak his mind.”

In the three years since Odeh was killed, no one has been arrested for the crime. At least one of the FBI’s chief suspects in the killing, Robert Manning, now lives freely in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where another of Nassab’s brothers still lives.

Last July, federal officials indicted Manning, for another apparently nonpolitical bombing. His wife, Rochelle Ida Manning, was arrested a few weeks earlier in connection with the bombing, which killed a Manhattan Beach secretary named Patricia Wilkerson. The actions have put the Odeh slaying back in the news and allowed Nassab to nurture a fragile hope that someday her brother’s killers might be caught.

“I’d like it to be settled somehow,” she said. “I don’t wish death on anyone. But I feel there has got to be some sort of trial and confirmation.”