Israel also became a doppelganger of the colonial project, specifically settler colonialism. Many of Zionism’s basic rationales were thinly veiled Judaizations of core Christian colonial conceptions: Terra Nullius, the claim that continents like Australia were effectively empty because their Indigenous inhabitants were categorized as less than fully human, became “A land without a people for a people without a land”—a phrase adopted by many Zionists and that originated with nineteenth-century Christians. Manifest Destiny became “land bequeathed to the Jews by divine right.” “Taming the wild frontier” became “making the desert bloom.”

DEFINE: Illustrates how the 'doppelganger' concept maps specific colonial justifications (Terra Nullius, Manifest Destiny) onto Zionist rationales via altered slogans. XREF: Connects to settler-colonialism scholarship by Patrick Wolfe and to comparative studies of national founding myths across Israel, the US, and Australia.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 976