Intimacy, closeness, understanding, identification, affection, and love are often seen as virtues. Distance, strangers, otherness, disregard, and ignorance less so. It is hard to argue against the value of getting to know the other, understanding her, and becoming more like her. What could be wrong with that? Drawing on anthropological fieldwork among West Bank settler-colonizers, Amir Reicher analyzed how it is precisely through identifying with the Other that violence can turn real. By focusing on processes in which Jewish settlers in the West Bank mimic nearby Palestinians, he examined how the more one identifies and becomes like the Other, the more one may come to see the Other as a threat. He offered the term “dangerous mimicry” to explicate this dynamic.
Bringing together anthropological and comparative literature approaches, Reicher presented how a certain stream of settlers cultivate themselves as people of the land by closely imitating nearby Palestinians. In turn, this mimicry brings to the fore a haunting case of doubling, in which the settlers now see themselves and adjacent Palestinians not through the prism of radical otherness but of risky sameness. As they appear similar, the question turns into who is the “real” subject (and who, perhaps, is merely a double, a fake, destined to be eradicated). If the first Gush Emunim generation of settlers viewed the conflict with Palestinians as a national one, these settlers begin to see it as a personal rivalry unfolding among parties that are increasingly becoming similar—at times, even identical. He showed how such settlers also draw on biblical imagery of siblings and kinship to negotiate the imagined relationship they now have with Palestinians. Drawing as well on fieldwork material he collected in the aftermath of October 7th, Reicher demonstrated how, as time goes by, more and more, this “dangerous proximity” seeks resolution through violence.