Palestinian Community Unsettled by U.S. Deportation Inquiry

Some political magazines have vanished from dealers’ shelves. Conventions, fund-raisers and even neighborhood meetings have been shunned by individuals usually considered activists. Photography is frowned upon at folk dances for fear the film will find its way into FBI hands.

Southern California’s Palestinian community appears to still be in a state of shock, brought on by the deportation case against seven Jordanians and a Kenyan accused by the government of being national security risks. Deportation hearings, interrupted last April, are scheduled to resume in Los Angeles on June 26.

“They feel they’re being hunted,” Vicki Tamoush, a Southern California Arab rights activist, said. “Now we find that we have neighbors and colleagues who are not neighbors and colleagues, but who may be undercover agents.”

After an FBI investigation of more than three years, the eight aliens were arrested last January and accused of subversion under the McCarran-Walter Act for allegedly associating with a Marxist faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. All of the aliens, none of whom faces criminal charges, have denied the accusation.

Tamoush, lawyers for the defendants and leaders of Southern California’s Palestinian community--bolstered by an array of civil liberties organizations--contend the case has had a chilling effect on Palestinians’ daily lives.

They say, for example, that shortly after the arrests, PFLP-supported magazines, which had been available in Palestinian-owned video shops and grocery stores in Los Angeles and Orange counties, suddenly disappeared. One of the government’s key allegations was that the defendants were active in distributing such publications.

“A lot of people are still nervous,” said a Palestinian merchant here who sold the magazines but who added that copies from the Mideast almost immediately dried up after the arrests. “How do they know the next day it won’t be us? Palestinians don’t feel safe.”

Palestinian meetings, fund-raisers and conventions experienced sharp attendance drops immediately after the arrests and attendance has remained low, community sources said.

Officials of the Washington-based American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, for example, said they had sold more than 500 tickets to the group’s annual California fund-raiser in Los Angeles only a few days after the arrests--but only about half that number showed up, one source said. Palestine Arab Fund dinners in Garden Grove and Los Angeles, also held shortly after the arrests, drew only a few hundred individuals each, a fraction of their normal attendance, someone close to the group said.

On this note, a recent amici curiae brief challenging the constitutionality of McCarran-Walter, on behalf of the American Assn. of University Professors, the Southern California Ecumenical Council and others, asserted:

“Aliens fearful of deportation because they believe their speech is being monitored are not, as students, likely to contribute to classroom discussion when controversial topics are raised. As teachers and university professors, they are likely to steer away from ‘dangerous subjects,’ contenting themselves with safe, but commonplace approaches and ideas. As potential citizens, awaiting decisions on ‘permanent residence’ or legalization . . . or naturalization, they are not likely to raise their voices at City Council or school board meetings. . . .”

FBI surveillance of suspected PFLP activists throughout the country, knowledgeable sources have told The Times, included infiltrating a number of Southern California Palestinian events; pictures of the defendants were reportedly taken at church and other events. FBI officials have denied the bureau had any desire to curtail Palestinians’ constitutional right to express dissenting political views.

Supporting the fight to exonerate the Palestinians is the Committee for Justice, a Los Angeles group formed after the arrests to raise funds and develop political support for the defense. Among its member organizations are the American Civil Liberties Union; the American Friends Service Committee, an arm of the Quakers, and Arab civil rights groups.

The aliens’ chief defense counsel, Dan Stormer of Los Angeles, estimates that more than $500,000 worth of legal time has been spent so far to defend his eight clients. A spokeswoman for the committee, Linda Lotz, won’t say how much has been collected to pay for defense costs; or how much fund-raising it will take to underwrite a defense team of more than a dozen attorneys.

Nonetheless, government surveillance, subsequent arrests of the aliens, their brief imprisonment and the deportation hearings have clearly touched nerves in the Palestinian community here, which numbers about 20,000. This was apparent in interviews with dozens of Palestinians living in Southern California--ranging from students to American citizens, many of whom were reluctant to be quoted by name.

They stressed that, in their view, the entire Palestinian community--and the PLO--are on trial as well as the eight aliens. Almost all interviewed expressed unflagging support for the PLO as the only hope for achieving Palestinian statehood. The eight defendants, they said, were doing what any overseas Palestinian would do--supporting such PLO efforts as fund-raising for refugee camps and speaking out on behalf of Palestinian causes.

“It’s the PLO who brings the food to feed the hungry (Palestinian refugees),” Joseph R. Haiek, publisher of the News Circle, a Glendale-based magazine aimed at the Arab community, said. “Who else wants to take care of those people?”

The terrorist label has stuck on the PLO largely because of a series of airline hijackings, assassinations and other international outrages beginning in the late 1960s through the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, as well as continuing attacks inside Israel today. Most Palestinians defend PLO tactics, although some are uneasy when questioned about the violence.

“All liberation movements go through a period of violence,” said Sami Odeh, 36, an Orange County real estate agent who still has a father, brother and sister living on the West Bank.

“Palestine and Israel are at war,” added Odeh, whose activist brother, Alex, was the victim of a still-unsolved 1985 bomb blast murder in Santa Ana. “And in war, nothing is fair. I denounce acts of violence. (The) Achille Lauro (murder) is deplored by most Palestinians. But there are splinters in the PLO that have committed acts of violence in desperation.”

Some Palestinians, although proud of their heritage, said that they disguise it because of strong feelings in this country about the PLO and its record.

One successful Orange County engineer said, for example, that, when asked, he says he’s a Jordanian Arab--not a Palestinian. The engineer, who asked for anonymity, explained: “There is an image of the Palestinian associated with terrorism. And the average Palestinian doesn’t want to be associated with terrorism. If I say I’m a Palestinian, I’m suspect. What can I do?”

Still, when asked, most Palestinians unhesitatingly declare their support for the PLO.

“The PLO is the only group that has some claim to representing Palestinian aspirations,” said Dr. Sabri El Farra, a Los Angeles physician and a leader in the Palestinian community. El Farra added that violence has been a fact of life, “one of the means” that Palestinians have used in their conflict with Israel.

“I do not consider it a terrorist organization. To me, the PLO is a national liberation movement,” said Nadia Saad Bettendorf, an Orange County high school teacher who became an American citizen almost two decades ago and is considered a leader in the Palestinian community. “The PLO is not as despicable as it looks.”

Palestinians have put down roots throughout Southern California, which has no concentrated Arab neighborhood. They have tried to preserve some of their homeland tradition by, for example, cooking traditional food and speaking their native tongue to their children. But they are also quick to point out that they have the same social and economic motivations as their neighbors.

“We’re trying to live like any average people. We don’t want to be treated better or worse than any other Americans,” Haiek said. Many of Southern California’s Palestinians were part of the last, or third, great wave of Arab emigration to the United States after the Six-Day War in 1967. (The first wave--a group unhappy with their Turkish rulers--came in the years just preceding the turn of this century. A second wave occurred after World War II.) Included in the third wave were many Palestinian professionals who settled in the Los Angeles area.

Practically every one of these Palestinians has been touched by Middle East turmoil. Most have had relatives killed or wounded amid the constant bloodshed. As a result, politics is a consuming passion.

“Palestinians eat, breathe and smell politics,” said Odeh. “It’s their food. I can’t recall being more than 20 minutes with a Palestinian before politics came into the picture.”

Their perception of statelessness, he and others said, has served to reinforce among Palestinians an almost-holy concept of sumoud-- steadfastness toward someday resurrecting a land of their own while maintaining a national identity and culture in the United States. But the issue of awda-- “return”--is a complex one open to fierce debate over the land which was once called Palestine.

Palestinian politics are unfathomable to many Americans who cannot comprehend how American Palestinians can espouse Ronald Reagan conservativism, as many do, and still wholeheartedly support the PLO, which most Americans view as an umbrella group for a corps of dangerous radicals.

However, USC Prof. Shibley Telhami said there is a logic behind this seeming contradiction. “Support of the PLO is an affirmation of Palestinian nationalism,” said Telhami, coordinator of USC’s Middle East Study Group. It is this driving force of nationalism “whose primary goal is to achieve a national homeland,” he said, which really distinguishes Palestinians from other Arabs--and not so much cultural or religious differences.

Their bond, he said, is “their common suffering of the last four decades. Forty years of struggle, misery, refugee camps. Shared suffering. Psychologists tell us that people who suffer together develop the closest bonds. It’s also true with Judaism.”

Palestinians have conservative roots in terms of close-knit families and religious beliefs and tend more toward individualism and, hence, capitalism than to socialism, he says.

Palestinian students, generally, are more sympathetic to the left, said Laurence Michalak, vice chairman of the UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies. “You can tell from talking to them. Many support (PFLP leader George) Habash. Many argue that moderation wasn’t really getting the PLO anywhere.”

A center for Palestinian cultural life is the church or mosque. About 80% of Palestinians living in the Middle East are Muslim; in this country the community is divided about evenly between Muslims and Christians.

“Everything revolves around the church,” said the Right Rev. Charles Aboody, pastor of St. Anne Melkite-Greek Catholic Church in North Hollywood, which counts about 250 Palestinian families in its congregation.

And although Aboody eschews political discussions in his church--”no way,” he said--from time to time Palestinians do use church facilities for meetings with highly political overtones. One such event took place in March, drawing about 500 Palestinians to St. Nicholas Antiochian Orthodox Church near downtown.

Under an imposing Palestinian flag, with its red triangle and black, white and green stripes, musicians played traditional Arab instruments, the guitar-like oud, the durbakke, a vase-shaped drum and the tambourine-like duff , the music reverberating through the big hall. Members of the audience joined hands and danced a traditional Palestinian debka. Cash was collected both for overseas refugee relief and to bolster the defense fund of the eight immigrant defendants in Los Angeles.

“We promise to rally behind (the defendants),” an Arabic speaker said. And in a rising voice he also exhorted the crowd to “stick behind the PLO.”