Doppelganger politics projects unbearable self-knowledge onto an externalized other

Evidence

To do onto others the same othering that has been done onto you is, of course, psychologically intolerable. Indeed, such actions are so antithetical to Jewish values that they demand extreme repression and projection. Doppelgangers in literature often embody a partitioned self, and, as Rooney writes, “doppelgänger politics is first of all a politics of self-partition,” with everything we cannot bear to see projected onto the other. If Israel practices doppelganger politics by imitating European nationalisms, it also enacts it in this second way: by projecting all criminality and violence onto the Palestinian other, lest the state’s own foundational crimes be confronted. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 981

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the doppelganger-as-analytic-device thesis from earlier chapters (the Naomi-Noami doubling) into the state level — Israel as collective self rotating its own crimes onto the Palestinian other, mirroring how Wolf’s Naomi projected onto Klein.