Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

In nations whose economies were built on the back of enslaved Black people’s labor, and whose very existences are owed to the stealing of lands from Indigenous peoples through campaigns of horrific violence, torture, famine, and forced relocation, the past is our collective, unshakable, omnipresent shadow.

Israel’s settler colonialism differed from its predecessors’ in another way. Where European powers colonized from a position of strength and a claim to God-given superiority, the post-Holocaust Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the reverse: on Jewish victimization and vulnerability. The tacit argument many Zionists were making at the time was that Jews had earned the right to an exception from the decolonial consensus—an exception born of their very recent near extermination. The Zionist version of justice said to Western powers: If you could establish your empires and your settler colonial nations through ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft, then it is discrimination to say that we cannot. If you cleared your land of its Indigenous inhabitants, or did so in your colonies, then it is anti-Semitic to say that we cannot. It was as if the quest for equality were being reframed not as the right to be free from discrimination, but as the right to discriminate. Colonialism framed as reparations for genocide.

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.

Because, though it may be tempting, Israel-Palestine cannot be written off as a confounding ethnic conflict between a set of intransigent Semitic twins. It is, instead, the latest chapter in that story of the construction of the modern world, a world that is now on fire. A world that was born in fire. A story in which we are all implicated, wherever we live. It began in the lead-up to the Inquisition, with the burnings, torture, and then expulsion of Muslims and Jews; continued with the bloody conquest of the Americas and the ransacking of Africa for riches and human fuel to power the new colonies; wreaked colonial havoc in Asia; and then returned to Europe for Hitler to distill all of the methods forged in these earlier chapters—scientific racism, concentration camps, frontier genocide—into his Final Solution.

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.

This bias against solidarity is particularly dangerous in our present moment, as our various fascist doppelgangers grow bolder by the day. The supremacist, annihilatory logic was never truly confronted, and now supermarkets and Walmarts and mosques and synagogues are being turned into slaughterhouses by young men with guns who are convinced that someone is trying to “replace” them. And it’s surging along the diagonal lines that connect the people with ideas about the supremacy of their race to the people with fixations about the supremacy of their immune systems and the perfection of their kids.