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Metro Families Mourn Loss of Mideast Land

By Gregg Krupa
The Detroit News
Posted on Tuesday March 29, 2005

They hire lawyers to fight Israel’s plan to seize acreage for a 180-mile wall

CANTON TOWNSHIP—On their summer vacation two years ago, Odeh and Fatima Odetalla, two schoolchildren from Canton, flew kites on a verdant hill in the West Bank, looking down on groves of apricot and olive trees and, in the distance, the holy city of Jerusalem.

It was their father Mike’s joy. He flew kites on the same hill when he was a boy, running freely on land that has been in the Odetalla family for hundreds of years, and which they still own.

“I took my kids over there to introduce them to what was important to me back then,” said Mike Odetalla, who, like many of the 15,000 Palestinian-Americans in Metro Detroit, left the West Bank after the Arab-Israeli War in 1967. “I showed them the gravesite of their forefathers who are buried there.”

Events in the Middle East threaten to overwhelm the large Palestinian community here.

About 200 local Palestinians, including the Odetallas, learned three weeks ago that the Israelis will confiscate about 600 acres they and their families have owned for generations to build part of the 180-mile barrier that runs through the area.

Disputes over land and Israeli settlements threaten to derail President Bush’s hopes for a two-state solution to the conflict.

Odetalla and other local Palestinians from the village of Beit Hanina have hired lawyers to fight the decision, first with Israeli military officials and then in an appeal to the Supreme Court of Israel.

Meanwhile, Odetalla clings to the memories of the trip with his children.

“I took them to the same olive orchard, where the oldest trees are 800, 900 years old,” he said.

“I said, ‘This tree was planted hundreds of years ago by one of your ancestors, and yet, you can still climb it.’ I’m glad we went. It was probably their last chance.”

The Metro Detroit Hanini—so-called because of the name of the village whence they came, Beit Hanina—say the wall runs through their souls. Many have stories about the land and their families. The Israelis routinely offer payment for the confiscated land, and the Palestinians just as routintely decline the money, saying they would rather have the land.

“It is very emotional,” said Joseph Abusalam of Dearborn, whose family owns a house in Beit Hanina on land that is to be confiscated.

“We were among the lucky ones who came to live in freedom in the United States, and we have been able to go back and to visit any time we want. Now, when we go back, we will be strangers.”

Abusalam and others explain they would feel estranged from the land if they are barred from it.

Local Palestinians are hoping to affect public opinion in the United States at a time when the Bush administration says it is working toward a two-state solution—“side-by-side”—to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a major issue stirring resentment of the United States in the Middle East.

“I was born there, and we go back every couple of years,” said Nuzmeya Elder of Dearborn, an educator and researcher whose family has several homes in Beit Hanina.

“I want peace, and since I was a little girl, the solution has seemed so simple: Treat these people with dignity. Convey to them that they have the same rights as you, and don’t continue to degrade them and attack their dignity.”

Israeli officials say that the barrier is necessary for Israel’s security because the Palestinian Authority is not doing enough to thwart terrorist bombers, who have inflicted a toll on Israel as the conflict simmers. They insist that only 3 percent of the barrier is a concrete wall and most of it is a fence, their preferred term for the barrier.

“The fence is being built only because of terrorists and the refusal of the Palestinian Authority to fight them,” said Andy David, deputy consul for Israel to the Midwest, in Chicago. “It is a defensive, temporary, passive and effective measure against terrorism, and there will not be any need for it once the terrorism stops.

“The route of the fence was not meant to establish some kind of political situation … it is just choosing the best geographical path in order to serve this defensive purpose.”

But the World Court at The Hague has condemned the construction of the barrier as illegal and a violation of Geneva Conventions and a number of resolutions adopted by the United Nations, and the Palestinians in Metro Detroit.

“We have about 25,000 people from Beit Hanina in the United States that immigrated since 1967 because of continued land confiscation and continued injustices by the occupying authority,” said Mike’s brother, Khalid Odetalla, in a phone interview from the family’s home in Beit Hanina.

After the 1967 war, Israel confiscated two-thirds of the land owned by residents of the village, including more than half of the Odetalla family’s land in the area, the Hanini say. Three Israeli settlements now sit on the land, Ramot, P’sgat Ze’Ev and Neve Yaacov.

“There are only about 3,500 of the original residents left in Beit Hanina,” Khalid Odetella said. “In 1993, after the Oslo Accords were signed, there was hope for peace. ... Now, you come and see the village, it is a village of ghosts. It is a catastrophe.”

The Odetallas say they realize their villages’ legal battle against the Israelis is a long shot. Most of the 200 Hanini in Metro Detroit have signed on to the effort, and eventually the Odetallas and others hope to gather most of the 25,000 former residents of Beit Hanina and their sons and daughters to join in the appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court.

The Palestinians say that far more than 3 percent of what they call “the wall” is constructed of 30-foot-tall slabs of concrete. They also say the meandering path of the barrier is clearly intended to claim the best green, arable land for Israel.

“You know, they say they want to build the wall for security,” said Mike Odetalla, who owns a large sports memorabilia shop in Westland, and who has written about the plight of the Hanini. “And even if you accept that, with the suicide bombers and all, why not build it on the Green Line, which is the 1967 borders?

“You could understand that. But it’s being built in the areas that take the most desirable pieces of agricultural land, where the olive groves and the orchards are.”

While the Israelis say their goal is to thwart terrorism, not all Israelis think they are planning the best course to a peaceful resolution of the dispute.

Mary Schweitzer, an American-born Israeli peace activist, said in a phone interview from Israel that the barrier continues the tension and violence in the Occupied Territories.

“I have worked with agriculture here, and what I discovered about the wall in a very short period of time is the way it gerrymanders itself around what is inevitably the water access and the arable land,” Schweitzer said. “I am torn by the conflict. After all, we are a Jewish state and we have Jewish values, and this just cannot be.”

But David said Israel said the barrier works and it can be moved when a peace treaty is signed.

“In the areas where it is built, the number of attacks has dropped dramatically, by almost 100 percent,” David said.

You can reach Gregg Krupa at (734) 462-2296 or gkrupa@detnews.com.