A Jewish surname can grant unchecked passage that Palestinians are denied.

Evidence

We weren’t sure it would be possible to get in—Israel tightly controls access to Gaza through the Erez checkpoint, and getting a press pass as a foreign journalist required going through the Israeli press agency. Any one of us could have raised a security flag. But probably because of our Jewish names, the person staffing the office didn’t bother looking into us, and we got the necessary accreditation. At the Erez checkpoint, our Jewish names activated our ethnic doubles once again and we were assumed to be sympathetic to Israel’s occupation. So while Palestinians stood in long interrogation lines, we sailed through with just a quick ID check, along with bag and body X-rays. Then, jarringly, we were on the other side of the concrete wall, surrounded by watchtowers. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1019

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete instance of the book’s core ‘ethnic double’ concept: a name activates a presumed political allegiance that flips checkpoint treatment.
• QUESTION: The device here works on Israeli state perception — but does the ‘doubling’ analysis risk collapsing all identity-readings into the same mechanism regardless of which side holds power?
• CANDY: The irony of Jewish names granting effortless passage where Palestinian bodies face X-rays is a striking, self-contained image.
• XREF: connects to: Israel’s right-of-return discourse asymmetrically privileges Jewish over Palestinian claims. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 582