JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1995, Pages 35, 88

In Memoriam

Samir Odeh, 1951-1994

By Mary Abowd

And they searched his chest

But they could find only his heart

And they searched his heart

But they could find only his people

—Mahmoud Darwish, Earth Poem

In the early hours of Oct. 11, 1994, Samir Ibrahim Ahmed Odeh, beloved leader in the Palestinian national movement, died suddenly in Jerusalem, just hours after returning to his homeland from a 24-year exile in the United States. The doctors searched his chest. They found that at the age of 43, Samir had died of a massive heart attack.

Those who knew Samir, and who gathered in Chicago 40 days after his death to remember him, also knew his heart. That is where he held his people—his family, his many friends, his country, his struggle. That is where he yearned for the liberation he worked tirelessly his entire life to achieve.

Samir was born on March 4, 1951, in the Old City of Jerusalem, the sixth of seven children. He had four brothers: Daoud, Yacoub, Mohammed and Zacharia, and two sisters: Sarah and Miassar. Not long after his birth, his family moved from their home in the Old City to Ard Al-Samar, a Jerusalem neighborhood where Samir grew up and where his family still lives.

When Samir was two years old, his father, Ahmed Odeh, died at the age of 35. It was then up to his mother, Um Daoud, to raise her children alone. A firm believer in education, she secured a scholarship for Samir to attend the Quaker Friends School in Ramallah in 1967, when he was 16. Um Daoud hoped that attending a prestigious school would help Samir to avoid being imprisoned like his older brothers for activism against the occupation. With the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, however, Samir followed the lead of his older brothers Yacoub and Mohammed and became a distinguished student leader. Two years later, the Israeli secret police arrested several Palestinian resistance activists, including Samir's brother Yacoub and his cousin Rasmiya. Both were severely tortured. Rasmiya spent 10 years in prison before she was exiled in 1979 to Lebanon. Yacoub was held for more than three months before his family was permitted to visit him. Later that year, he was sentenced to life in prison, where he remained for 17 years until his release in the famous Israeli-Palestinian prisoner exchange of 1985.

Shortly after Yacoub's sentence was handed down in 1969, Israeli troops forced the family from their home—which was shelter for 12 people—and demolished the building. It was the third home demolished in Jerusalem by military order after the beginning of the Israeli occupation.

After the dust had settled, Samir's mother returned to the rubble that had been her home, knelt down, and began to stack the stones, one on top of the other. With the help of her children and the community, the home was rebuilt—an act of resistance that made a powerful impression on Samir and affected him for the rest of his life.

After he had lived for a year in the rebuilt home, Samir's brother Mohammed arranged to transfer Samir's Friends School scholarship for study abroad. In 1970, Samir left Jerusalem for California.

In the early 1970s, Samir moved to Chicago and began working at two jobs to help support his family in Jerusalem. He also attended classes at Chicago's YMCA Community College. As a student leader, Samir was active in the Organization of Arab Students and later in the General Union of Palestinian Students.

Samir is best known in Chicago as one of the founders of the Arab Community Center, fondly known as "the Markaz." In 1972, the Markaz opened its doors in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood on the city's Southwest Side, offering Arabic language classes, theater and dance for children, educational meetings and haflahs (parties) to raise money for the Palestinian national movement. To this day, the Markaz is a meeting place for Arabs of every nationality, a center for political activism and education.

In 1979, Samir helped create the National Network for Palestinian Community Empowerment, which trained Arab organizers to establish local community centers. He spent much of his own time traveling across the country, helping Arab- American communities organize.

A Community Activist

In recent years, Samir served as the director of the Arab Community Center, and established the Youth Delinquency Program, the first program in the city created to serve Arab-American youth. The Arab Community Center was the first Southwest Side venue for a town meeting by the late Mayor Harold Washington after his election in the mid-1980s.

In the mid-1970s, Samir met his future wife, Camelia, through the Organization of Arab Students. They kept in touch during Camelia's six-year stay in Beirut, where she worked with Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila and Bourj Al-Bourajneh camps.

In 1981, Camelia returned to the U.S. briefly to visit her family. Later that year, the two announced their engagement and planned for Samir to join Camelia in Beirut in 1982. But because the U.S. government had refused Samir legal immigrant status, he was similarly denied travel documents. During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, Camelia was in Beirut and Samir was forced to stay behind in Chicago, where, in September 1982, the U.S. government issued Samir a deportation decree. The following December, the couple were married. Their daughter Leena was born in 1986 and their son Ferris-Leith was born two years later.

In the 1980s, Samir's work concentrated on solidarity with Palestinians living under occupation and on local Chicago politics. He was instrumental in creating the Palestine Solidarity Committee, an organization that provided North Americans a way to connect with and support the struggle of Palestinians. He also worked to create the Illinois Medical Committee, an alliance of Jewish, Arab and North American health care workers that brought wounded Palestinians to U.S.-based hospitals and raised thousands of dollars to support health care facilities in the occupied territories.

Samir's role in city politics was shaped by the local progressive movement. From 1985 to 1990, he served as outreach chair for Illinois Voters for Middle East Peace, aimed at increasing voter registration and a more active role for Arab Americans in local government. This led to the creation of the Advisory Commission on Arab-American Affairs, which established a voice at the mayor's office for Chicago's Arab community. On a national scale, Samir and the Arab Community Center joined Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition in 1988, a move that strengthened the community's ties to African-American leaders nationwide.

In 1988, solidarity from Illinois' Black leaders played a crucial role in convincing the Illinois Democratic party to adopt a plank in its platform calling for Palestinian statehood. During the Democratic National Convention that same year in Georgia, the issue of statehood as a policy plank on the national level narrowly missed being called for a vote.

In 1990, Samir spearheaded efforts to oppose the Gulf war. With others he helped found the Emergency Coalition for Peace and Justice in the Middle East. This local coalition grew to include more than 100 organizations and hundreds of activists from the labor, church, women's and student movements.

In the aftermath of the Gulf war, with its disastrous effects on Palestinians worldwide, Samir was instrumental in keeping hope alive. In 1991, he was a key organizer of the benefit concert, "Healing the Wounds of War and Occupation," featuring Kris Kristofferson and his band, which raised $50,000 for desperately needed emergency relief for Palestine. He was also part of a successful campaign in 1993-94 — the Committee to Stop the Executions in Kuwait—which sent a delegation to Kuwait to pressure the Kuwaiti government not to execute 16 Iraqi and Palestinian residents of Kuwait who were unjustly accused of collaborating with the Iraqi occupation during the Gulf war. Their sentences were changed to life imprisonment.

As a resident of Chicago's West Lawn neighborhood, Samir served as a bridge between the Arabs and other communities who share the neighborhood—African Americans, Latinos and whites. In 1993, he was elected vice chair of the Southwest Community Congress, the largest community organization on Chicago's Southwest Side. That same year he helped establish the Arab-American Chamber of Commerce, and served as an executive committee member. He is remembered as a man who had a gift for bringing together different sectors within the Arab community as well as other Chicago communities.

On Oct. 9, Samir took his children for their first trip to Palestine to see their grandmother, whom they affectionately called "Tata al-Quds," (Jerusalem grandma), and their many cousins, aunts and uncles. For Samir, it was his long-awaited first trip home after an adulthood of exile.

He received a hero's welcome. A cheering crowd of 150 people met his plane in Tel Aviv airport on Oct. 10 and a caravan drove up the Latrun road to the hills of Jerusalem. As his brother Yacoub drove Samir from the airport to their home, he pointed out the land that had been confiscated and the settlements that now occupied the fields and hills upon which the men had played as boys. The landscape of Palestine had been so altered in the 24 years since Samir lived there that when they reached the front gate of the family home, Samir did not recognize it. He could only ask, "Where is our house?"

Samir spent the rest of the day and well into the night receiving a constant stream of well-wishers—family members, community leaders, boyhood friends. There was dancing and merriment in the hours before his untimely death. In the early morning of Oct. 11, the last day of his life, Samir woke up with his children. He opened the windows and said, "Leena and Ferris, come and see how beautiful the sunrise is in Palestine!"

On the day of his funeral, Samir was draped in the red, green, black and white Palestinian flag. He was carried through the Old City, from Al-Aqsa mosque through the winding streets and out Damascus Gate. The procession went up Saleh al-Din street, where the crowd of hundreds broke into song. He was buried in the Muslim cemetery on Saleh al-Din street next to his father and his brother Daoud.

Samir Odeh, whose family name means "return," has returned finally to his land. He will never be forgotten, however, by those he led by example in the years of his exile. His death and burial in his homeland invoke the words of Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan:

Enough for me to die on her earth, be buried in her, to melt and vanish into her soil, then sprout forth as a flower, played with by a child from my country.

Enough for me to remain in my country's embrace, to be in her, close as a handful of dust, a sprig of grass, a flower.

Mary Abowd is an Arab-American free-lance writer living in Chicago.