PDF Summary:Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein

In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein uses the concept of the doppelganger—a double or mirror image—to explore how modern society creates distorted versions of reality. She examines how capitalism's hidden exploitation creates instability, how shocks and crises make us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, and how our digital doubles can disconnect us from our true selves.

Klein uses her own experience of being confused with another writer to examine ideological divisions and political manipulation. She explores how authoritarian figures exploit language to trivialize serious issues and uses the Israel-Palestine conflict as a case study in doppelganger dynamics, where both sides mirror each other in cycles of victimization and aggression. Throughout, Klein suggests that understanding these mirror images can reveal hidden aspects of ourselves and society that we might otherwise ignore.

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Exploitation by Repressive and Governmental Regimes

Klein argues that authoritarian figures exploit language and concepts to trivialize serious issues. She calls this practice "pipikism." Authoritarian figures like Trump, Boris Johnson, and Rodrigo Duterte use pipikism to mock important concepts, making those concepts more difficult to employ when describing their actions. For example, Trump's use of "fake news" caused those who supported him to question the entire mainstream media. He took a term previously employed by communication experts to define fabricated propaganda meant to appear as genuine news, although it's completely fictional. Because he appropriated "fake news," we lack a helpful way to label the phenomenon.

(Shortform note: Klein's term "pipikism" is a reference to Philip Roth's Operation Shylock, in which the protagonist is haunted by a doppelganger named Moishe Pipik. In the novel, Pipik is a clownish figure who uses humor and absurdity to undermine the protagonist's authority and credibility. Klein uses this term to describe a style of rule in which an authoritarian leader behaves like his own doppelganger, constantly joking and making it difficult to tell when he's being serious.)

Social Vulnerability and Exploitation

Klein further notes that vulnerable minors have been mistreated and taken advantage of throughout history. For example, in the past, kids with disabilities were often hidden away in institutions. In some cultures, they were believed to be changelings—doppelgangers left by supernatural entities who took the authentic child. These stories were used to justify their abuse, and some parents still treat their children cruelly as they try to “cure” them of their disabilities.

(Shortform note: In early modern northern Europe, stories about changelings were a way for people to make sense of kids with disabilities or infants who failed to thrive. These stories recast the child as a substitute left by otherworldly beings, and families sometimes staged risky ordeals to pressure those beings into returning the imagined missing child. These rituals were a way to confront the unknown and assert control over situations that were otherwise beyond their understanding.)

Doppelganger Dynamics in Dispute and Crisis

Klein uses the Israel-Palestine conflict as an example of double dynamics, with both sides mirroring each other in a cycle of victimization and aggression. She explains that Israel’s doppelganger nature is intertwined with the way it’s described using dualistic language: Israel-Palestine, Arab and Jew, Two States, The Conflict. Imagining that power is equal on each side, this connection between two peoples suggests twins joined together in perpetual conflict.

(Shortform note: Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi, in his book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, challenges the notion of a symmetric conflict between Israel and Palestine. He argues that the history of the region is not a story of two equal sides in conflict, but rather a prolonged war waged by a settler-colonial project (Zionism and later the state of Israel) against the indigenous Palestinian population. Khalidi emphasizes the persistent power imbalance, with Israel enjoying overwhelming military, diplomatic, and economic superiority throughout the conflict.)

Klein writes that Israel's role as a doppelganger functions in two distinct manners. First, it mimics the type of European nationalism that has been prejudiced against Jews since long before the Inquisition. Zionism presented itself to European countries hostile to Jews as a solution to their "Jewish problem": Jews would emigrate to Palestine, creating their own state that replicated the nationalist militarism that had long subjugated them. Israel additionally mirrored colonialism, particularly settlement colonialism. Klein argues that numerous fundamental Zionist justifications were covertly Judaized versions of key colonial ideas originating from Christianity.

(Shortform note: In Pagans in the Promised Land, Steven T. Newcomb explores the historical roots of the Christian colonial ideas that Klein alludes to. He traces these ideas back to the 15th-century papal bulls, such as Dum Diversas, Romanus Pontifex, and Inter Caetera, which collectively formed the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery. These decrees granted Christian monarchs the right to “invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue” non-Christian nations, seize their lands and wealth, and reduce their peoples to perpetual domination. Newcomb argues that this doctrine provided a ready-made legal and theological framework for later European imperial and state practices toward Indigenous lands and peoples worldwide.)

For instance, Terra Nullius, which posited that regions such as Australia were essentially vacant due to the perception that Indigenous populations were subhuman, evolved into the phrase "A place with no population for a population without a place," a saying embraced by numerous Zionists. Manifest Destiny transformed into a belief in divine entitlement to the land for Jews. "Subduing the wild frontier" was altered to "causing the desert to blossom." As in every colonial endeavor, Israel's settlers had to actively ignore many things. Klein notes, though, that this doppelganger form of colonialism through settlement had significant differences.

(Shortform note: Klein’s analysis of the doppelganger relationship between imperialism and Zionism is compelling, but it’s important to note that the relationship between the two is not as straightforward as she suggests. For example, the phrase “A place with no population for a population without a place” is not as widely used as she claims. In fact, a 2016 study of early Zionist rhetoric found that the idea of an “empty land” was only sporadically used and was often contested within the movement. This suggests that the relationship between imperialism and Zionism is more complex than a simple inheritance of ideas.)

One difference was the time. Following World War II, the Global South experienced a strong surge of anti-colonial sentiment, with repeated national uprisings against colonial rule to affirm their self-determination rights. Israel, which gained statehood in 1948, emerged from those forces but stood out as an obvious outlier. Zionists characterized their cause as a pursuit of freedom for their nation, emphasizing that Jews, similar to other oppressed groups, were securing their own nation. Yet for Palestinians, who were being forced out of their homes, lands, and communities to clear space for a new nation, Israel didn't appear to be anti-colonial at all.

(Shortform note: After World War II, the Global South experienced a surge of anti-colonial sentiment, with repeated national uprisings against colonial rule to affirm their self-determination rights. The United Nations, established in 1945, played a pivotal role in this process by promoting the principle of self-determination and facilitating the decolonization of numerous territories. Key events included the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, the Indonesian National Revolution (1945-1949), and the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). In contrast, the establishment of Israel in 1948 followed the end of the British Mandate in Palestine, the UN Partition Plan, and the subsequent Arab-Israeli War, leading to the displacement of a significant Palestinian population and the creation of a state closely aligned with Western powers.)

Klein adds that Israel's approach to settler colonialism diverged from those before it in another way. European colonization was built on assertions of strength and divine superiority, but post-Holocaust Zionists centered their arguments for Palestine on Jewish victimhood and vulnerability. A lot of Zionists implicitly argued that Jews were justified in seeking an exemption from the prevailing anti-colonial view, as their near-annihilation had been so recent. Palestinians, in this situation, turned into what the anti-colonial scholar Edward Said called “the victims of the victims,” or, as scholar Joseph Massad said, “the new Jews.”

(Shortform note: Some Jewish and Israeli thinkers reject the idea that Zionism is a form of settler colonialism rooted in Jewish victimhood, and they also reject the idea that Palestinians are “victims of the victims” or “the new Jews.” In Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust, Israeli philosopher Elhanan Yakira argues that the now-common intellectual move that turns the Jewish national movement into a European colonial project and then reverses the moral roles of persecutors and persecuted—casting Jews/Israelis as the embodiment of historical oppressors and assigning their adversaries the symbolic place of the Jews of Europe—is not a serious historical analysis but a polemical construction that falsifies the record, instrumentalizes the genocide of the Jews, and serves above all to delegitimize Jewish collective self-determination rather than to understand it.)

Treating people as you were treated is psychologically intolerable. Indeed, Klein argues, these acts conflict with Jewish values so strongly that they necessitate intense denial and projection. If Israel participates in doppelganger politics by adopting the practices of European nationalism, it also manifests them in this additional way: by displacing all blame for crime and violence onto the Palestinians, preventing confrontation of the state's own founding crimes. Simultaneously, the colonial elements of the endeavor become increasingly blatant over time, as overtly racist and Jewish supremacist politicians amass power across the board. Klein argues that it's easy to understand why so many people were initially attracted to the promise of Zionism. Following such trauma, the allure of being presented with national symbols and military power must have been undeniable—it provided options beyond just being attacked or relying on charity.

(Shortform note: Klein’s reading of Zionism and Israeli politics is far from the only Jewish perspective. In Jews and Power, Ruth R. Wisse argues that modern Zionism is the effort of the Jewish people to resume responsibility for their own political welfare and collective self-defense. She contends that Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel is a fully legitimate and necessary exercise of national self-determination after centuries in which Jews were denied political power. Wisse argues that the responsible use of political power to protect Jewish life is not a corruption of Jewish ethics but the political framework that allows those ethics to be honored in the world.)

Being erased and unseen by Israelis, many Palestinians retaliate by rejecting the state that ignores them. “The Zionist entity,” some still call it, seven decades after its formation. "Do you or do you not accept Israel's legitimacy as a state?" Israel's leaders and supporters demand it, claiming that rejecting this acknowledgment shows that Palestinians want another Holocaust. Yet many people in Palestine and their backers stand firm, aware that recognizing Israel's legitimacy wouldn't alter its behavior and would reinforce the notion of a solely Jewish statehood, which they oppose on principle.

(Shortform note: The phrase “the Zionist entity” is a polemical term used in some Palestinian and Arab discourse to refer to Israel. It reflects a refusal to recognize Israel as a legitimate nation-state, instead framing it as a political project of Zionism. This language is part of a broader strategy to delegitimize Israel's existence and challenge its international recognition. The term is often used in official statements, media, and educational materials in some Arab countries and Palestinian territories.)

Klein argues that being labeled an "entity" is painful for Jews who have long faced dehumanization throughout their history, and it's painful in a way that might not be very helpful. She suggests that a more nuanced conversation could help—one that acknowledges the Israelis who arrived in Palestine in the 1940s as people who lived through genocide and were refugees in dire straits with limited options, as well as settler colonists who participated in the ethnic cleansing of another people. They suffered under European white supremacy and adopted a stance of whiteness there.

(Shortform note: Klein’s call for a more nuanced conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is well-intentioned, but it could create new problems. In Justice for Some, Noura Erakat argues that international law and dominant discourse have transformed a clear structure of colonial domination into a misleading story about a “conflict” between two equal sides. This language of parity obscures the vast power asymmetry and ongoing regime of control over Palestinian life. Legal frameworks have too often operated not as neutral tools of justice but as instruments that normalize and legitimize Palestinian dispossession under the guise of peace, security, and negotiations.)

Israelis are independently nationalistic, and their nation has served as a U.S. military base in the area for many years. All these things are true simultaneously. Contradictions like these don’t fit comfortably within the usual binaries of anti-imperialism (colonizer/colonized) or the binaries of identity politics (white/racialized)—but if Israel-Palestine teaches us anything, Klein writes, it might be that binary thinking will never get us beyond partitioned selves, or partitioned nations. This isn't meant to excuse the settler colonialism of Israel. Rather, it is an attempt, as the British scholar Jacqueline Rose put it regarding her book The Question of Zion, to “go into the mindset of Zionism without blocking the exit.”

The One-State Condition

Klein’s argument here is in line with the work of Israeli scholars Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, who argue in their book The One-State Condition that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can’t be understood as a simple binary between two sides. Instead, they argue that there is already a single political regime extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, in which different groups are subjected to distinct legal orders, administrative practices and degrees of violence, yet all of these heterogeneous arrangements are coordinated as parts of one structured system of rule that organizes freedom of movement, access to resources, and exposure to harm along a continuous hierarchy rather than along the borders of formally separate states.