Author: ppadmin

Moe-Lobeda starts her book by pointing out the connection between the exploitation of sugar cane workers in the Dominican Republic and the vast profits made by corporate owners of the sugar cane industry located in the United States.  As a child, she believed that if you simply knew what was on the other end of material wealth, our economic patterns would change.  But mere knowledge is not enough to enable social change.

The chains of structural violence can, however, be resisted and dismantled.  While structural evil may be beyond the power of individuals to counter, it is composed of power arrangements that are humanly constructed and therefore may be dismantled by other human decisions.  ‘What humans have joined, let humans also put asunder.’  Her book  does not seek to instill guilt in the overcoming of claims, but attempts to identify the moral-spiritual resources in our culture, resources that are to be found in all of earth’s great spiritual traditions.

Each chapter tells a story dealing with people’s linkages, e.g., a community in India whose land is being eroded by bauxite mining, with North America the beneficiary of the bauxite in all the aluminum product.  A compelling section deals with love as transformative power, and reiterating that G-d’s love is the foundation of human love for G-d, self, others and earth.

1948 in Palestine saw the Nakba (catastrophe) which accompanied the creation of the state of Israel and resulted in the destruction of 500 Palestinian villages and the creation of refugees, a ‘deliberate displacement’ of the Palestinians by Israel as a matter of policy (p 17).  This policy has continued with land confiscations (from Palestinians) and the construction of physical and legal barriers separating Palestinians from Palestinians, ‘resident aliens’.  This has been reflected in Israeli mapping practices.

It is in this perspective that the Nakba provides a counter memory to Israeli policies, an attempt to resist  erasure of the communities that once were home to the now displaced.  Mapping Exile is a look at the Israeli attempt to remove cartographic (mapping) reminders of villages that once stood here but have since been bulldozed by the Israeli army.  It is also a look at the concept of exile, built on the writings of Palestinian Christians.  Weaver also acknowledges his own location as a descendant of European immigrants who settled on land held by Pawnee and Cheyenne nations.

Kufr Bir’im is one of over 120 destroyed Palestinian villages over which tourism and recreation sites have been established (p 97).  Summer camps in these villages for children and youth descended from the original inhabitants map the memories across generations, emphasizing rootedness in the face of uprooting (p 106).

Mike Peled was born in Jerusalem in 1961 into a well-known Zionist family.  His father, Matti Peled, was an Israeli army officer during the 1948 Israeli war of independence, and a general in the war of 1967 when Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and Sinai.

The growing struggle between Israelis and Palestinians came into Peled’s family when his niece was killed in a suicide attack in Jerusalem.  Pele, who had been living in California, found the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and this began a warm relationship between Israelis and Palestinians.  Several other discussion groups were formed.  Here he heard Palestinian stories of people forced from their homes as children, and Peled and his new friends began to speak at Rotary clubs, sharing their stories of friendship and trust.

A major high point was when the two sons of a Palestinian friend slept over at the home of a Jewish Israeli home (Peled’s home).  The peace position for Peled developed as he heard more of what his father, an army office, had believed and held on to—how his father had “opposed the massive land confiscation Palestinians had to endure, helped those who had legal issues and spoke out against injustice when people were detained or deported” (p 137).