Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

Engaging with the form of Zionism that created the state of Israel in 1948 means accepting that a people, just like a person, can be victim and victimizer at the same time; that they can be both traumatized and traumatizer. So much of modern history is a story of pools of trauma being spatially moved around the globe like chess pieces made of human misery, with yesterday’s victims enlisted as today’s occupying army. The story we are trapped in is not about a people, or two people, or twins. It’s a story about a logic, the logic that has been ravaging our world for so very long. I think that’s why, after all of this mapping of mirrored selves and mirror worlds and fascist doubles, I find myself drawn to this place that for so much of my life has been my own Shadow Land—a place I have struggled with in public and in private and in my own highly divided family (which runs the gamut from staunch anti-Zionists to orthodox settlers). Because for me, while Israel is a place, it has also always been a warning. A warning about the perils of building identity based on re-traumatization rather than confronting our collective grief; about the dangers of building a group identity around insiders and outsiders; about what happens when once vibrant debate gives way to fiercely policed speech.