Why "Who Killed Alex Odeh?" is the Most Important Documentary of 2026.

As a child, I once asked my mother “There are Muslim terrorists and Christian terrorists, why aren’t there any Jewish terrorists?” My mother’s response was simple: “We barely survived The Holocaust. There aren’t enough of us for that.” As I got older and became more educated in history, my mother’s assertion began to fall apart. Not only had there been Jewish terrorists throughout history, but their numbers had grown in the wake of The Holocaust. I was upset with my mother, I thought she had lied to me, tried to indoctrinate me into a false worldview. I confronted her with what I had learned, and was shocked - she genuinely had no idea. While my mother is not exactly a scholar of history, she was alive during most of Meir Kahane’s reign of Jewish Terror, which made her total lack of knowledge somewhat baffling to me. For years, I wondered how she could have totally missed such an important era, at least I did until seeing Who Killed Alex Odeh? at Sundance Film Festival.

Who Killed Alex Odeh? details the murder of Palestinian-American activist Alex Odeh. Born to a Palestinian Catholic family in 1944’s Mandatory Palestine, Odeh studied in Cairo during the 1960s, and found himself displaced from his home due to the aftermath of Israel’s Six Day War. Odeh immigrated to the US to pursue a new life, where he became known for his poetry advocating coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, as well as his work as the West Coast Regional Director of the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee (ADC). On October 11th, 1985, Odeh was killed when a tripwire bomb placed in his office detonated.

The motive, the filmmakers argue, was a television interview Odeh had given the day before. Odeh’s goal was to give context to the recent hijacking of the Italian cruise ship the Achille Lauro by Palestinian commandos. Odeh stressed that the hijacking was not carried out by Yasser Arafat’s PLO, who he claimed were ready to make peace, but rather the fringe Arab Socialist PLF, with which he did not agree, but understood their act as one of desperation. After the assassination, the FBI immediately identified three suspects as persons of interest: JDL members Robert Manning, Andy Green, and Keith “Israel” Fuchs.

The investigation of these three individuals, none of which were ever charged with the murder, takes up the majority of the film. Israeli investigative journalist, David Sheen does the majority of the heavy lifting on this doc - and lift he did! Sheen’s reporting on the Israeli Far-Right is some of the gutsiest I’ve ever seen. So gutsy in fact, that I checked to make sure he was still alive after the film ended.

In gathering evidence, Sheen went as far as posing as an Orthodox man looking to move to the illegal West Bank settlements in order to infiltrate the home of a man who he (correctly) believed to be Fuchs, going by the nickname “Izzy” these days. Sheen is not the only investigator present in the film, but he was perhaps the most successful, later managing to secure a “smoking gun” interview with a detective who worked the case, claiming that both local authorities and the FBI had identified the trio as suspects, but said that they never pursued them because “The Mossad shut us down.” The detective further clarified this statement, stating that the State Department had asked the FBI to stop investigating after Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet, refused to hand over Green and Fuchs for extradition. Robert Manning was eventually extradited, but received parole last year and now lives in southern California, less than 20 miles from the family he tore apart.

Alongside their investigation, the filmmakers behind Who Killed Alex Odeh? also give a history lesson on the terrorist organization that Odeh’s murderers belonged to - Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League (JDL). I initially found the section about Kahane and his organization to be little more than historical exposition, but upon further reflection, I found that the filmmakers expertly used this background to tie the film together - using Kahane’s martyrdom, the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the rise of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud coalition to highlight the institutional reasons as to why the story of Jewish terror is so seldom told in America. 

It feels like no surprise that Jewish American existence is fraught right now. The majority of the vocal youth population abhor Israeli policy, but find it difficult to square that abhorrence with the views of their parents and the institutions that raised them. Institutions and individuals who are willing to, if not excuse or outright celebrate, largely erase the sordid history of  the state of Israel’s creation in Jewish dialogue and education. The phrase “a land with out people for a people without land” is a cornerstone of this aging ethos, and as most young Jews in America are now finding out, it was a bold face lie. If Eretz Yisrael - The Land of Israel - was truly a land without people, why has the Israeli state had to kill or displace so many to secure it? This cognitive dissonance, this total disavowal of the idea that you cannot kill your way to peace, is what I would call the greatest existential danger to Jewish life today. It is exactly the reason why we have been stuck in this seemingly unending predicament with our Arab neighbors for so long.

Who Killed Alex Odeh? is, in my view, the most important film of 2026 (rivaled only by Daniel Roher’s The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist). As a young, Jewish American, who has family born and raised in Israel, I want nothing but the best for my relatives, whom I love. That being said, the state that claims to represent them as well as myself has done horrible, possibly irreparable damage to what I once described as the Jewish people’s 2,000 year long losing PR battle. I feel that I owe William Lafi Youmans, Jason Osder, Anne Alvergue, Tyler Walk, David Sheen, and everyone else involved in the creation of this documentary a debt of gratitude for fighting that PR battle, not just for the Jewish or the Palestinian people, but for everyone everywhere. Peace can only be achieved through justice, and there is no justice without accountability.

There is a statue of Alex Odeh, raised in 1994 in his adoptive home of Santa Ana, California. I think I’ll visit him when I finally return to Los Angeles this February. As depressing and infuriating as it is to know that the men who murdered him roam free, I think he would be proud to know that the work he gave his life for, the work of peace and dignity, has succeeded in inspiring the next generation to carry the torch towards a better world.