Our Colonial Shadow (Doppelganger Review Pt. 3)
On Israel, language traps, and the nature of our fears
The fragmentation hurts. You know that gathering for a specific, focused purpose matters, but you underestimate how jarring it will be to go eight days without hearing the word “Palestine” except quietly, from your own mouth. On the sixth day, you read “Ginza” in one of your texts and see “Gaza.” A reader mentions a girl crushed by a building, somewhere else. You can’t finish reading the Mailer piece because of the carnage spilling across the page. When you open your phone in brief spare moments, you see it flickering, but what can you do in this moment? You shouldn’t even be on your phone. Tim calls, working on a story, to ask if you think young people will pull away from Biden over this and we’ll get Trump again.
On the seventh day, another person finally names it during a dinner conversation and you find relief in each other’s care. You talk about everything no one has been talking about this week and feel some small comfort. Someone asks a question that night at the reading (because the text was about war and mentioned a child character)—they say they don’t imagine children being present for a war. No? Even now? And on top of the silence, now everyone is coughing. You take in so many images of Mary, unfamiliar saints and Jesus himself that you begin to consider prayer as a solution. Just in case.
The worst part is, despite all this, you’re having a pretty good time.
I’m later than expected with this final installment of my Doppelganger review because I’ve just returned home (with covid) from a writing residency. It’s fitting that I started this review thinking about compartmentalization and the ways that our technologies facilitate separation from one another and even within the self, because it’s the same feeling I’m grappling with now.
Watching Palestine recede from my social media feeds as (some, but crucially not all, or even most) people lose hope, or endurance, or interest, and knowing that this absence reflects the reality that we are losing the people—especially the journalists—who have shown us the truth of their lives under siege. Watching the pandemic’s second-largest surge sweep across the nation as the White House Press Secretary rolls not only her eyes, but her whole head at the mention of masking. Watching it all through the little screen.
As I wrote in the last installment of this review, Klein does an impressive job connecting our nations’ (the U.S. and Canada) poor responses to covid with our ugly colonial roots and scarcely repressed eugenicist beliefs. She critiques the individualistic lens through which those in power urge us to view the pandemic, writing, “It recalls the ways in which colonial massacres were rationalized because, within the ranking of human life created by pseudoscientific racists, Indigenous peoples…were cast as ‘living fossils.’”
I remember the way that fellow young people in my classes at the time characterized the pandemic in its early days, half-joking that the elderly most at risk were “going to die soon anyway.” I remember the scarcely contained sigh of relief that escaped from the halls of power when we learned that the early stages of the pandemic had disproportionately killed and hospitalized Black and Indigenous people.
Klein continues, “Lord Salisbury, the UK prime minister, explained in an 1898 address that ‘you may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living and the dying.’ Indigenous peoples were, in this telling, the pre-dead, with extermination merely serving to accelerate the inevitable timeline.” In how many ways have we been prepared to accept certain people’s deaths as inevitable?
I did not expect for the final third of this book to be about Israel, and I expect that many other readers didn’t either, given that the focus on Naomi Wolf and the conspiracy culture she represents took center stage in most advance press for Doppelganger. While I feel it’s not my place to comment on or critique Klein’s analysis of her own Jewishness and her casting of Zionism as a shadow of Judaism, I will say that I learned a great deal about the complex web of identity that Jewish intellectuals and artists must navigate to survive and express themselves in our world.
Beset by long-standing anti-Semitic tropes on one side and the demand to stand with a genocidal regime on the other, there’s often nowhere to land without facing accusations of being Jewish in the wrong way. One of my many takeaways from this book has been a renewed admiration and respect for the tradition of Jewish thinkers and activists who have shaped historical and contemporary movements for social justice, up to and including the tireless members organizing against Israel’s latest attacks on Gaza with Jewish Voice for Peace.
While I can’t speak to the experience of being an anti-Zionist Jew the way Klein and others can, I was glad to see her acknowledge and explore the parallels I couldn’t help but notice when I visited Palestine. She writes about the many ways that the fledgling state of Israel would become a mirror of colonial projects from centuries past. “Many of Zionism’s basic rationales were thinly veiled Judaizations of core Christian colonial conceptions: Terra Nullius, the claim that continents like Australia were effectively empty because their Indigenous inhabitants were categorized as less than fully human, became ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’…Manifest Destiny became ‘land bequeathed to the Jews by divine right.’ ‘Taming the wild frontier’ became ‘making the desert bloom.’”
Meanwhile, in today’s Zionist movement, the Palestinian slogan “from the river to the sea (Palestine will be free)” is framed as “genocidal,” and banned on university campuses as well as on social media. Reading this slogan as a call for erasure of the Jewish people requires willful denial of the dynamics of Israel’s ongoing occupation and a bad faith reading of the demands of the broad majority of Palestinian people. What’s most interesting, though, is the strange mirror effect present in the slogan and its backlash. Because who has defined these borders, the (Jordan) river and the (Mediterranean) sea? From whom and from what treatment do those chanting wish to be free? Just who, exactly, is the oppressor here?
Klein doesn’t speak directly to this language conundrum in her extensive section on the doppelganger psychology of Zionism, but she does begin the book’s section on Israel by discussing the ways that language reveals the insecurities at the heart of right-wing movements closer to home. It’s been true in my own life. I remember a particularly shitty high school boyfriend howling that “a matriarchy would be just as bad!” when I first learned to articulate the perils of patriarchy. As though its only possible alternative would be an exact reversal of existent gender oppression. I remember a conversation with a relative in which he asserted that “white, straight, Christian men are actually the most oppressed!” Truly.
Complaints of “cancel culture” spew from the same mouths who ban books and attempt to increase the state’s power to curtail speech. The same grifters who peddle silver suppositories, sketchy supplements and all-meat diets warn about the health risks of vaccines.
This tendency to point elsewhere to avoid accountability and self-reflection reaches its zenith in conspiracy culture. Klein quotes a 2022 reflection from Indigenous climate activist Julian Brave Noisecat, who noticed some disturbing trends in right-wing conspiracies du jour.
He wrote, “‘I’m struck by the similarity of right-wing conspiracy theories to actual policies towards Indigenous peoples.
‘replacement theory’—Manifest Destiny;
QAnon (mass institutionalized child abuse)—boarding and residential schools;
‘plandemic’—smallpox, alcohol, bioterrorism;
It’s all so Freudian. The fear that it will happen to them stems from an implicit admission that they did it to others. As though the Black, Brown and Indigenous downtrodden are just as hateful as they are and are going to turn around and do to them what they did to us.’”
Klein responds, “Is that part of what we are seeing? Are increasingly violent conspiracy theorists in the Mirror World afraid of being rounded up, treated as second-class, occupied, and culled because on some level they know that these are the genocidal behaviors that created and sustain their relative but increasingly precarious privileges? Are they terrified that if the truths of the Shadow Lands—past, present, and future—are ever fully revealed and reckoned with, then it can only result in a dramatic role reversal, with the victims becoming the victimizers?”
Think about some of the language used even in mainstream, non-Fox-News world: “majority-minority,” for example, as a way to describe changing demographics in the U.S. Does that language itself reflect white anxieties about becoming the “minority?” Are “minorities” treated poorly or something?
Similarly, consider the way that right wing media (and the op-ed section of the New York Times) frame the acceptance of queer and trans people as some kind of slippery slope to mandatory decadence, a hyper-sexual reverse conversion therapy for all.
All of these tendencies to focus on and amplify our fears and divisions stem from trauma. The trauma we’ve endured, or that our ancestors have endured, alongside the trauma we perpetuate through our systems and which ripples out from our histories. Returning to Israel, Klein extends her understanding (as far as she can) to fellow Jews who stand with Israel, no matter what.
She writes, “I understand the primal terror that leads many of my people to co-sign that contract, because the same trauma has been passed down through the generations to me. But I still can’t do it; the price is too high. And not just for Palestinians and Jews. Because the deal offered us is a version of the same poisonous deal all who are relatively fortunate on this partitioned planet are being offered. Take the gun. Accept the cages. Fortress your escape pod, and your borders. Perfect your kids. Protect your brand. Ignore the Shadow Lands. Play the victim.”
What is the end result of all this partitionment? In our national politics, it’s the absurd theater of our failed two party system. A stalemate in which no one “can” do anything, because each party must be, first and foremost, the righteous victim of the other’s machinations. For the individual, maybe it’s the feeling of fragmentation I opened this piece trying to describe, the chronic cognitive dissonance of being alive in the dual spheres of the internet and the earth, and the way that feeling can act as an excuse to avoid taking action. In general, it looks like the digging deeper of trenches around our borders, our social hierarchies, our ideologies, and our truths, scarring the social and intellectual landscape into a stark, black-and-white death grid.
Israel-Palestine (commonly written this way, reflecting a built-in mirror relationship) is often presented as a stark and intractable issue, an impossible place doomed to conflict and chaos. Klein gently suggests to readers that this may only be true if we remain trapped inside of binary thinking.
She writes, “It would help if more conversations could hold greater complexity—the ability to acknowledge that the Israelis who came to Palestine in the 1940s were survivors of genocide, desperate refugees, many of whom had no other options, and that they were settler colonists who participated in the ethnic cleansing of another people. That they were victims of white supremacy in Europe being passed the mantle of whiteness in Palestine. That Israelis are nationalists in their own right and that their country has long been enlisted by the United States to act as a kind of subcontracted military base in the region. All of this is true at once. Contradictions like these don’t fit comfortably within the usual binaries of anti-imperialism (colonizer/colonized) or the binaries of identity politics (white/racialized)—but it Israel-Palestine teaches us anything, it might be that binary thinking will never get us beyond partitioned selves, or partitioned nations.”
This is not to say that the state of Israel is not a colonial project (it is), or that its state structures have not created a racialized, multi-tiered system of access and privilege (they have), but that our collective, binary ways of thinking through conflict and identity will not lead to any new understanding. I haven’t been able to attend any in-person rallies or demonstrations for Palestine yet, but I have begun to plan a sign for when I get the chance.
I’ve been thinking about the slogan “Free Palestine” as both a mandate and a statement of fact. When we chant “Free Palestine” as Americans, we mean partially to say “Stop using our money to send weapons to murder children and bolster an illegal occupation! People in power: free the people under occupation from tyranny.” But in our utterly broken political system (in which I still call my representatives, and hope to pivot to physical postcards in the coming weeks), we sort of know that change from above is unlikely. So now, when I hear “Free Palestine,” I hear it almost more as a cheer, or an affirmation that we see a people—and in Gaza a majority-child society—show what it means to keep freedom alive in the worst of circumstances.
It’s not right. It’s a horror beyond comprehension. Never before have we seen so intimately and so immediately into the daily reality of those whose lives our money and weapons and political cover have come to crush. And it is in no way worth the cost of those lives for us all to have a realization about ourselves. But, I hope that the lesson we’re taking from the past three months is more like: “Palestine, free us from our colonial mythology,” “Palestine, free us from the violence of our psychological projections.”
I’m still workshopping the sign.
Klein writes toward the end of this section and the end of the book, “…partitioning and performing and projecting are no longer working. The borders and walls don’t protect us from rising temperatures or surging viruses or raging wars. And the walls around ourselves and our kids won’t hold, either. Because we are porous and connected, as so many doppelganger stories have attempted to teach us.”
Please keep trying, keep calling, keep blocking the roads and mourning in public, and wear a mask when you do it, and remember there are so many other ways of being in the world. It’s not Biden or Trump (how depressing!). It’s not Evil or Diet Evil. It’s not you or me, them or us. Learning to hold complexity and contradiction might be the most important muscle we can build to survive the rest of this strange era.
Care for each other; don’t look away.
P.S.
“Here, then, is one possible portal out of doppelganger world: those ways of organizing societies that were once on the table, that were even tried, and that we could try again. Dig deep enough into any culture, and we will find alternative ways of resisting and living, and even some models that have been carefully protected from the steamroller that calls itself ‘progress’ and ‘civilization.’” -Naomi Klein