ALL IRV RUBIN UNDERSTOOD WAS HATE LATE JDL LEADER REFUSED TO ESPOUSE COEXISTENCE.

Byline: Lionel Rolfe

IRV Rubin's death reminded me of the death almost two decades ago of another man, Alex Odeh.

Odeh was an Arab-American leader in Southern California who may or may not have been killed by Irv Rubin.

Rubin was the leader of the Jewish Defense League, and he fell or maybe was pushed from a balcony at the federal Metropolitan Detention center in Los Angeles earlier this month. We will probably never know which.

I knew Irv and his wife, Shelley, who was my typesetter during my long tenure as editor of the now defunct B'nai Brith Messenger, the nearly century-old Los Angeles Jewish weekly.

Shelley, Irv and I did nothing if not argue politics during that period. My strong impression was that Shelley was the brains of the pair, and although I was fond of both in a strange kind of way, it seemed to me that if you live by the sword, there's a strong chance you will die by the sword.

Part of me agreed with Irv. The part about ``Never Again'' was meaningful to me. I grew up getting beaten up for being a Jew. Back in the `50s Long Beach, I was chased home through the back alleys from Woodrow Wilson High School. The members of this gang of Christian thugs took turns slugging me, as they called me a ``Christ Killer.'' Their leader was a minister's son.

Establishment Jewish organizations were always made uncomfortable by Irv, and yet they now must defend the actions of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, which are essentially the same as Irv's. Irv was in jail facing charges that he tried to blow up an Arab-American congressman's office and a mosque, whereas Sharon has an army at his disposal on which to vent his murderous impulses.

The ideological mentor shared by Rubin and Sharon was Vladimir Jabotinsky, who in the `30s admired Mussolini's politics but not Hitler's, even though both men were fascists. Jabotinsky had so much hate for communists and other leftists, he sided with the Nazis against the communists who led the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. It was not just coincidence that Jabotinsky's ideological heirs in Israel were responsible for the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, whose crime was that he was successfully carving out a peace with the Palestinians.

Federal investigators regarded Rubin as a suspect in the 1985 bomb blast in Santa Ana which killed Alex Odeh, an official of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

I had had long conversations with Rubin and Odeh - I did a formal sitdown interview with Irv at Canter's Delicatessen, and Odeh came to my home where we drank coffee and spent the afternoon talking.

While some of what Irv said sometimes resonated with my Jewish soul, as he called it, he was obviously a demagogue, inspired by Rabbi Meir Kahane, who founded the JDL.

It was easy to dismiss Kahane when you spoke to him up close - as he spoke, strange ticks and twitches marched across his face. There was also an unwholesome intensity in his eyes that was most unsettling. Irv, for all his size and seemingly fearless strength and fanaticism, had a very shlub-like quality to him as well.

There was a certain similarity in the biographies of Rubin and Odeh. Odeh was born in the West Bank but had to go to Jordan, where he went to school. After the 1967 war, he couldn't return to see his parents - 35 miles away. Rubin suffered constant Jew-baiting in his native Canada.

Odeh, who was a Catholic and not a Muslim, knew something of the struggles of Jews throughout history, and joined in Hanukkah festivities with Jews who would have him - usually they were left-wing peacenik types. He had spoken to Jewish audiences, and found that most Jews were not like Irv Rubin. They didn't hate Arabs. They were sympathetic to his story and believed him. He was most struck by an appearance at a community Jewish center, where one woman kept hurling invective at him, but the rest did not.

Odeh was a literate man, an intellectual, an honest man. So when the murder occurred early in the morning, by late morning when I asked Rubin what he thought of Odeh's death, Rubin angered me by saying no Jew or American should shed one tear for the destruction of a PLO front in Santa Ana or anywhere else in the world.

I once asked Odeh what he most wanted to tell the Jews of Los Angeles. ``I would want them to know that the crux of the matter is that Palestinians are human beings, who have been subjected to a kind of Holocaust, genocide, abuse, harassment, such as their fellow Jews went through in Europe in the `30s and `40s,'' he said.

``Jews in Los Angeles have a legitimate concern about the survival of Israel, but they must take into consideration the Arab or Palestinian factors. No matter how much money Jews give to the support of the State of Israel, living conditions won't improve without a settlement.

``So long as Palestinians are not satisfied or their national aspirations are not somehow met, we won't have peace in the Middle East. Peace would be possible with mutual understanding, based in business, ideas, and technology. But here also must be mutual respect.''

Odeh made much more sense to me than Rubin. For what other conclusion can a sane man have, than that coexistence is the only alternative to continual warfare? That was the point Irv never seemed to comprehend. Or Sharon, or Bush, for that matter.

There are obviously times people have to go to war to defend themselves. But few who have ever been in war graduate into being thugs in civilian life. That's going over the line.