Before the trial even began, the set-up was clear. Under the guise of immigration fraud, the prosecutor would present Odeh as a Palestinian bomber to the jury, and just as Israel silenced her forty-years ago, the US, in silencing her once again, would deny her a defense.

To disguise themselves as defenders of the law, truth, and public safety, Odeh would have to be painted as an untrustworthy and violent criminal. And so Odeh’s physical and sexual torture and her post-traumatic stress disorder were barred from court, even while one hundred Israeli documents used to convict Odeh in 1969 became once again key to the prosecution.

With her defense gutted, on November 10, Odeh was found guilty of “unlawful procurement of citizenship.” Shortly after the verdict, Judge Drain decided Odeh should not be released on bond because he stated she has no sufficient ties to her community. The misogynist and heterosexist nature of the ruling was clear, suggesting that a woman has to be married with children to have community.

Belying this insult, an average of thirty elderly women, mothers, and co-workers traveled by bus from Chicago to Michigan overnight to pack the courtroom in support of Odeh that week, and most of Odeh’s defense focused on her role as a beloved community leader, friend, and mentor.

A Feminist Politics of the Collective

When Odeh moved to the US in 2004 and settled in Chicago, she developed the Arab Women’s Committee (AWC) within the Arab American Action Network (AAAN). When she testified in court, she described how she began this work shortly after arriving in the US:

I first came to Michigan to take care of my father [who had cancer]. All the time, I went to Chicago to visit family. On one visit, we went to a park and I saw a 6-year-old girl crying. I didn’t know her. I tried to speak to her and asked her why you don’t play with the other kids. She told me my mom didn’t allow me to play with boys. The girl gave me her address, and I went to her house. I knocked and was surprised to find she was from an Arab family, and I asked the mom to let me speak to her.

When she spoke to her, she learned the woman was living in fear of raising her daughter in America and that there were many other Arab immigrant women who shared the same struggle. Odeh continued: “I asked her if we could invite the women neighbors together and have coffee together one day. I talked with other immigrant women and saw they need my help [with the adjustment to living in the US].”

Through Odeh’s interactions with these women, she began envisioning a new future for herself working with Arab immigrant women in Chicago. Odeh tells the story of the six-year-old girl over and over, because she says she is the one who inspired her decision to stay in the US and work with the AWC. She also says that when her father came to the US for cancer treatment, she could not find anyone to help her mother, so she wanted to help the mothers she found around her.

The AWC originated in small in-depth discussions and trainings within the AAAN in Chicago on key issues facing the Arab-American community. It included organizers like Suzanne Adely, Ahlam Jbara, and Samira Ahmad, and immigrant women who were part of AAAN’s English classes, citizenship classes, and what was then its anti-violence program. The committee held meetings in the working-class neighborhoods of the southwest side of Chicago, focusing on women’s concerns. They lobbied around immigration and public benefit policies and joined rallies in Chicago on Palestine and a range of other struggles.

From the beginning, organizers focused on the struggles of working-class Arab immigrant women. In 2005, Odeh came in as a volunteer with AmeriCorps and helped run the women’s committee. “Rasmea is the one who really expanded it, took it off the ground,” Adely told me. “She was the right person for the job as she can quickly connect with the community, and she serves as a real role model for them.”

To help expand the AWC, Odeh went door-to-door in Arab immigrant neighborhoods. She called Arab names in the phone book, and she barely slept until she had established a base of six hundred women. As she said in her November 6 testimony to the jury:

My focus was to let women be independent, strong — not dependent on public aid and not staying in the house; to share decisions that affect their lives. I did this while also going to school and working until 5. I visited the women I worked with after work and took classes at night.

As a sixty-year-old woman, Odeh had been taking college classes to make up for the many times the Israeli state denied her an education. For example, when she was twenty and living with her family in the West Bank, they had sent her to college in Beirut. After one trip home, Israel did not allow her to return to Beirut to finish school.

Through her leadership, more and more immigrant women began coming to the AWC for English classes, social services, and life coaching, as well as a sense of safety, confidence, and community. Odeh recognized that English and citizenship classes were fundamental tools for women to be able to navigate society and build a sense of self-value and leadership within their homes and communities.

Her leadership focuses on a politics of the collective, based upon dialogues that build a sense of confidentiality and safety among the women. It also focuses on a practice of genuine care, love, and reciprocity — where Odeh’s own history of struggle inspires her to listen and respond to the stories of others. At one workshop I led with her, sixty women from nearly every Arabic-speaking country attended, even though many had to walk by themselves through a polar vortex snowstorm to get there. Some were recently displaced from places devastated by US-led wars such as Palestine and Iraq.

Others had been in Chicago for a few years and were still learning English. The workshop focused on the problems immigrant and refugee women faced, and strategies for solving them. Odeh inspired attendees to share their stories and to develop strategies for improving their lives. Attendees were sharing stories about coping with the aftermath of war and displacement and problems that arose with their spouses upon migration to the US.

They were also discussing the anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia they confronted in their interactions with the US medical industry, their children’s schools, their neighbors, and their local playgrounds. Odeh inspired women to turn to one another with matters that often remain undiscussed among immigrant women who live in fear and isolation, and come to the fore only through the phenomenal bonds of trust she established among the group.

As for immigrant and refugee women around the world, the women who participated in the AWC were uprooted from the support networks of their countries of origin. They often talked to each other about the increased patriarchal oppression they faced upon migration, having lost their support base back home and having only their husband or husband’s family to relate to after arriving in Chicago.

And as for many immigrant communities in the US, women talked about how their spouses would react to the pressures of assimilation, racism, and Americanization by increasing control over their bodies and their movements.

One woman told AWC members that the immigration-related problems that developed with her husband were compounded by what would happen after he left for work. Her racist, sexist neighbors would shut the door in her face because she wore the hijab, and her lack of English skills obstructed her from responding to them or interacting with the broader society. At the AWC, when several women shared similar experiences with anti-Arab/anti-Muslim gendered racism, she felt less isolated and developed tools for communicating with her neighbors.

Odeh’s leadership also relies heavily on the arts to discuss matters that are often too difficult to discuss directly. She organizes activities that inspire AWC members to write their own immigration stories, and she wants to publish these stories as a book. She also writes plays and invites AWC members to write them with her.

One of these plays, performed at an International Women’s Day celebration, focused on several generations of women in an extended Arab immigrant family who grappled with gender-related struggles both in the family and in American society, with recourse to their loving but often tense connections with one another. The audience was engrossed, laughing and commenting throughout the performance, perhaps because they rarely see their own life struggles thus affirmed in the US.

After the play, attendees listened to music and celebrated women’s newly acquired English skills. Odeh asked each of her students to bring something they had written in to be read out loud. The first woman, from Yemen, stood up and read: “I love my teacher.”

The Politics of Women’s Spaces

While most discussions about Arab-American feminisms tend to focus on Arab-American women’s work with US feminist movements or Arab-American women who struggle for gender justice within Arab-American political organizations, Odeh’s work calls attention to forms of feminist organizing taking place in women-only immigrant spaces.

In fact, while struggles for gender justice within Arab-American political movements are at a standstill, Odeh’s brilliant organizing has broken new ground. In Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism, I wrote about the challenges young women activists faced in late 1990s California when seeking to address heterosexism within diasporic Arab liberation movements.

Women activists were made to feel like we could not address sexism in our movement when, as the dominant movement discourse put it, “our people are being killed back home.” As an Egyptian woman living in Oakland, California told me at the time, “We didn’t even have a language to talk about sexism [in our movement].”