The line between the terrifying stories of our people being hunted and exterminated and the existence of this state on the other side of the world, was, we were told, a straight one. It went like this: If fascist fervor ever surged again, and men in jackboots got it into their heads to purge their national bodies of Jewish genes, we would not be left helpless and unarmed once again, not be left to plead for our survival, not be locked out of every nation that might have saved us, not be devoured by the specter of our Shylock doppelganger. Why? Because next time we would have Israel—the white-and-blue flag that flew at every school assembly, the place where the trees we had donated our allowances to buy were standing tall, planted over the Palestinian villages we were never told existed.

XREF: Parallels settler-colonial erasure narratives and the hidden geography of Indigenous dispossession found in other postcolonial literatures. QUESTION: What role did school rituals like tree-planting donations play in normalizing the erasure of Palestinian geography for generations?

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 972