“Doppelgänger politics.” That is how Caroline Rooney, professor of African and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Kent, describes the state of Israel and the complex psychological space it occupies as both victim and perpetrator. The doppelganger nature of the country’s identity is embedded in the dualistic language used to describe it, in which everything is double and never singular: Israel-Palestine, Arab and Jew, Two States, The Conflict. Based on a fantasy of symmetrical power, this suturing together of two peoples implies conjoined twins in a state of unending struggle, an irresolvable sibling rivalry between the two peoples, both descended from Abraham.

XREF: Connects to critical theory work on naming and framing, e.g., Edward Said's Orientalism and the politics of describing asymmetric conflicts with symmetric language.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 974