When Ground Ceases to Be Ground

There are books that can be rejected only after they have been read. Eyal Weizman has written such a book.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/305662/eyal-weizman

Ungrounding is not a comfortable text. Nor is it an innocent one. One may dispute its language, its frame, and its strongest claims. One may demand legal, military, historical, and moral precision. But one cannot do one thing: pretend that the question it raises does not exist.

This matters especially now, when Israel’s international position is being damaged not only by its enemies, but also by its own public theatre of humiliation, coercion, and strategic blindness. The recent images of detained flotilla activists, handled not as a security problem but as political trophies, were not a marginal embarrassment. They were a symptom. They showed how quickly state power can begin to perform itself before the world as if degradation were strength.

There is also another dome now. Not the Iron Dome that intercepts rockets, but an acoustic dome that prevents Israel from hearing what its own images have begun to say abroad. Under that dome, every criticism arrives as hostility, every humiliation of civilians as resolve, every diplomatic warning as proof of isolation, and every isolation as proof that the world never understood Israel in the first place. This is how a country stops hearing the difference between being threatened and becoming........

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