The wheels of justice grind slowly, but they do grind, and convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmieh Yousef Odeh learned that the hard way on November 10 when a Detroit jury found her guilty of committing immigration fraud. She faces up to 10 years in a federal penitentiary and deportation following her incarceration.
The story began on Friday, February 21, 1969 when two unsuspecting Israeli university students, Leon Kaner, 21, and Edward Jaffe, 22, stopped at a Jerusalem supermarket to pick up some last minute provisions for a hike the two were planning to take. They never made it and were blown to bits by a bomb placed in coffee cans on a shelf. Nine others were injured in the blast. Jaffe and Kaner, as well as the nine injured civilians, were targeted for no other reason other than the fact that they were Jews with the temerity to live in their ancestral land.
A second bomb, timed to go off just as first responders arrived, was diffused by security forces. A third bomb placed near the British consulate office in Jerusalem was also discovered and destroyed in a controlled detonation, though another bomb placed near the same vicinity some days later did manage to cause structural damage.
The terrorists had chosen Friday to carry out their act of depravity because they knew the supermarket would be packed with civilians shopping for the upcoming Sabbath. It was their intent to cause a bloodbath and inflict maximum civilian casualties. In a testament to Israeli resiliency, the supermarket, belonging to the “Supersol” supermarket chain, opened for business just two days later.
On March 1, 1969, Odeh, her sister and three others were arrested for the bombings. All were members of the notorious Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist group designated by the United States as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO).
Odeh was convicted of all charges and spent the next 10 years in an Israeli prison. She was released in 1979 as part of a prisoner exchange with the PFLP and spent the next four years living in Lebanon. Following that, she moved to Jordan and then made her way to the United States where her father lived.