Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

It’s not hard to see why many were drawn to Zionism’s promise at the start. After so much trauma, it must have felt irresistible to be offered a flag, a uniform, and a gun—to have more choices than whether to be a target or a charity case. If I had been on one of those boats full of refugees no one wanted, would I have had the strength and forethought to resist the promise of a fortressed state of our own? I have no confidence that I could have. Rendered invisible and unseeable by Israelis, many Palestinians respond by refusing to see the state that refuses to see them. “The Zionist entity,” some still call it, seven decades after its formation. “Will you or won’t you acknowledge that Israel has a right to exist?” demand Israel’s leaders and defenders, insisting that a refusal to make this acknowledgment proves that Palestinians favor a second Holocaust. But many Palestinians and their supporters refuse to budge, knowing that conceding Israel’s right to exist would change nothing about its actions, and would uphold an idea of an exclusively Jewish homeland that they contest on principle. I understand this refusal—it is one of the few tools available to an occupied and vastly outgunned people. But it also seems worth acknowledging that for Jewish people who have been treated as inhuman for so much of our history, being called an “entity” is a wounding thing, and wounding in a way that may not be particularly constructive.