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.

XREF: Connects to the broader doppelgänger framework Rooney describes and to political psychology literature on scapegoating and projection.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 981