Zionism feeds on Palestinian zombification

This essay is Part Three in a series analyzing the zombie racial Other in media. It contains spoilers for The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II

"All Natives Resist Colonists… That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of 'Palestine' into the 'Land of Israel'… Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim." 

—Vladimir Jabotinsky, "The Iron Wall," 1923

"We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home… This is the fate of our generation, the choice of our life – to be prepared and armed, strong and tough – or otherwise, the sword will slip from our fist, and our life will be snuffed out."

—Moshe Dayan, former Israeli Chief of Staff, 1956 

Settler-colonial power survives through the abject creation of zombie subjects—subhuman beings suspended in the perilous space between living and dead, where proximity to death is so intimate that the killing of zombie subjects becomes utterly mundane. This death-making is a manifestation of necropolitics, which Achille Mbembe defines as the "subjugation of life to the power of death." The ability to wield this power—as in "the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die"—is what Mbembe understands to be "the ultimate expression" of sovereign power. 

Mbembe's formative essay offers necropolitics as a postcolonial extension of Michel Foucault's biopolitics, which accounts for the way state power and those who wield it not only manage life, but dictate and profit from who dies. Necropolitics, also called necropower or necro-sovereignty, is a framework for understanding:

"the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead." 

In other words: Necropolitics dictates who must be zombified in the settler-colonial (and imperialist) psyche so the state-sponsored death of the subaltern can be rendered morally just and upheld as paramount to the colony's survival. To zombify a people is to homogenize, dehumanize, and render them irreparably monstrous. They become nothing more than rapacious savages in the social imagination, posing a substantial and persistent threat to the colonizing ruling order. Therefore, they must be annihilated, with the same militaristic armament and mobilization society would reasonably deploy against a zombie horde. 

The zombification of subjugated people is, time and again, a prelude and pretext to genocide—the ultimate wielding of necropower. And, as Achille Mbembe named more than 20 years ago: "The most accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine."

Light and reason 

Zombies are everywhere, according to Zionists. Izabella Tabarovsky calls anti-Zionist criticism a "zombielike repetition of the state-sponsored propaganda of a dead empire." Scott Aaronson wonders how to keep one's sanity when one "[lives] on a planet filled with brain-eaten zombies" who oppose the Zionist entity. Molly Livingstone insists that the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian stance of college students is "like a zombie who has been dead and brought back to go after the living world," lamenting that "these Gen Zombies march to the same beat." Even Marco Rubio regards student protestors as "antisemitic zombies" for their stance against Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people. And Kathleen Hayes sees the post-2023 ascension of anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian support as a "zombie apocalypse." In reference to a group of "jihad-enthusing" and "keffiyeh-clad" demonstrators, Hayes writes, "It sometimes looks hopeless, but successes are possible; light and reason may reach even the most unlikely of zealots. So fight on we must. One zombie at a time."

The "light and reason" of Zionism—the ethnocultural nationalist, political, and ideological movement to displace Palestinian Arabs and establish a "Land of Israel"—emerged in the late 19th century. It was explicitly understood as a settler-colonial project by its founders and early leaders, as noted by historian Nur Masalha in The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory. 

In the Zionist displacement of Palestinians, "dispossession and occupation are by design. Zionism has meant profound trauma for generations, systematically separating Palestinians from their homes, land, and each other." It has also engendered and sanctioned heinous forms of capture, torture, and slaughter. To garner support for this genocidal project, the Zionist entity must present its ideology as "light and reason"—the same logic that justified the Christo-Liberal European imperialism it descends from—and any opposition to it as unenlightened and unreasoned. Branding enemies of Zionism as "zombies"—understood to be unthinking brutes—is the hideous but logical end of Zionist thought.

The (un)dead unhuman 

"But they are not human beings, they are not people, they are Arabs."

—David Hacohen, former Israeli ambassador to Burma, 1967

Since the zombie's first appearance in Western cinema—long before George A. Romero conjured the ravenous ghouls from which all modern zombies descend with Night of the Living Dead (1968)—it has embodied the subaltern. The Haiti-set White Zombie, considered to be the first feature-length zombie film, portrays the zombie of the early 20th century as a rank misappropriation of the zonbi or zombi from Afro-Haitian tradition and Vodou culture. As a token of colonial fantasy, the on-screen zombie linked zombification with racial Otherness, drawing clear connections between Blackness, slavery, and the non-sentient, non-human living dead. Simply put: the pop culture zombie is indivisible from racial Otherness.

Because of its origins, the zombie has long been a convenient stand-in for Black folks and others with proximity to Blackness. Those in and of the Arab and Muslim world are distinctly understood as adjacent to Blackness in the white supremacist psyche. The derogatory "sand n*gger" slur deployed against people of "Middle Eastern" descent demonstrates this logic quite clearly. Moreover, the post-9/11 outbreak of pop culture zombie mythology that drew connections to "Islamic extremists" and terrorism—sometimes explicitly with films like Osombie (2012)—illustrates the zombification of the Arab and Muslim racial Other in the cultural consciousness. 

The racialized, Otherized zombie horde is not made up of individual, sentient, self-possessed bodies. It's a single body, a single-minded form with a singular purpose: to dismantle the established order through the destruction of civilization. When the living dead mobilize, families and communities are eviscerated, infrastructure collapses, society unravels, the land is ravaged and conquered by the horde which knows only consumption and ruin. It's bleak and apocalyptic. 

In "Palestinian Zombies: Settler-Colonial Erasure and Paradigms of the Living Dead," Anna-Esther Younes argues that the dispute over land between human and non-human is critical to "teas[ing] out settler-colonial fantasies inherent in the post-apocalyptic 'survival of the few'" theme ever-present in pop culture zombie mythology. Per the foundational ideology of Zionism, it is the conflict over Palestinian land—whereby Zionists appoint themselves its rightful owners—that remains central to the Zionist understanding of Palestinians as a dangerous zombie horde and a threat to Israeli civilization. 

Director Yotam Feldman's 2013 documentary, The Lab, is a deep dive into the Israeli military-industrial complex, wherein Israeli weapons experts and military officers brag about testing their weapons on Palestinian civilians. In the film, former head of the Northern Command of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), Retired General Amiram Levin, opines on the systematic killing of Arabs in Gaza, as well as Lebanon and other regions in the Arab world Zionists intend to occupy:

"One mistake the army makes is judging each case individually, whether the person deserves to die or not. Most of these people were born to die; we just have to help them."

The regard of the Palestinian/Arab racial Other as already (un)dead and unhuman is explicit in the language and thought processes of Zionists. Palestinians and other Arabs/Muslims are, in the words of Mbembe, "subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead," firmly engraving the "Land of Israel" as a settler-colonial death-world. 

Blood for blood, blood for land 

The pop culture zombie myth, as outlined by Younes, propagates through "militaristic narratives that understand the killing of the contaminated non-human as essential to produce a humanity that can once again thrive on liberated, cleansed, free, and thus secured territory." In this way, and by virtue of the zombie's coherence with the racial Other, Palestinian displacement, dispossession, and dehumanization are readily conveyed through zombie narratives created for our entertainment. 

Spoilers for 'The Last of Us' and 'The Last of Us Part II' beyond this point

Sony released Naughty Dog's The Last of Us on PlayStation 3 in 2013, and it was adapted into an acclaimed HBO series a decade later. The game immediately took hold of survival horror lovers, selling over a million copies in the first week. In the game, the world has been overrun by insatiable "infected" for 20 years, and the U.S. has been divided into quarantine zones governed by martial law, under the control of homeland security and the military. Joel Miller (Troy Baker), a black market smuggler, must escort 14-year-old Ellie (Ashley Johnson) from the Boston Quarantine Zone to a university in Colorado where a resistance group called the Fireflies awaits. Though Joel is hardened by the loss of his own daughter years ago and is reluctant to accept the task of smuggling a teenager across a post-apocalyptic wasteland, he grows to love Ellie during their time together. 

The cannibalistic monsters in The Last of Us do not begin as zombies in the way we are accustomed to; they are first mutated humans infected by cordyceps. In a paper on this parasitic zombie fungus, it's described as:

"manipulat[ing] its ant victims to behave like 'zombies,' walking randomly and displaying convulsions that make them fall down, after which the ants climb up vegetation to bite the underside of leaves or twigs. After the ant dies, the fungus continues to grow inside the body, and the fungus's fruiting body sprouts from the back of the ant's head."

The cordyceps objective is simple: "self-propagation and dispersal." Its perpetual growth necessitates death—continued expansion and endless consumption, much like colonialism itself. 

Ellie is mysteriously immune to this infection, and the Fireflies plan to use her immunity to develop a cure. They believe the antidote lies in Ellie's brain. And so, she will need to die for them to test their theory. But Joel refuses, killing the surgeon and many other Fireflies to rescue Ellie. Israeli-born writer and co-director Neil Druckmann explained that Joel's decision was inspired by a real moment in history: the 2011 Wafa al-Ahrar prisoner exchange deal. In exchange for the return of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been captured by Palestinian resistance fighters, 1,027 Palestinians were released from Israeli prisons, known to be sites of abject horror: torture, abuse, murder, and even withholding the remains of deceased prisoners from their loved ones.

Some of these Palestinian prisoners, according to Druckmann, had "blood on their hands," having committed "horrible terrorist acts." He recalled a subsequent conversation with his father, who viewed the release of Palestinians as something that ultimately made Israel "less safe," but said confidently that he would release "every prisoner" to save his own son. 

Joel's decision to kill the Fireflies is the only playable option in the game, and Druckmann's construction of this moment leaves the player to sit with the fact that Joel/you may have just destroyed the only chance of creating a possible cure for the zombie plague, effectively ending the world to save one person. Druckmann said, "If it was to save a strange kid, maybe Joel would have made a very different decision. But when it was his tribe, his daughter, there was no question about what he was going to do." Druckmann explicitly draws a parallel between Israel's release of 1,027 Palestinians to save one member of their "tribe" and Joel (theoretically) allowing the zombie contagion to continue its decimation of humanity so that Ellie can live.

Free Palestinians amount to a zombie threat that makes the world "less safe." 

The Last of Us Part II dropped in the summer of 2020. A few years after the events of the first game, Joel is killed by the merciless Abby (Laura Bailey), flanked by fellow members of a faction called the Wolves. It's a death Druckmann made sure was "gross, unceremonious and humiliating." Though Joel and Ellie have had a strained relationship, she sets out on a quest for vengeance, her grief, anger, and bitterness turning her increasingly brutal. Ellie's search for Abby and the Wolves takes her to Seattle, where the high barrier walls bear an eerie resemblance to the checkpoints and "tall, precast concrete barriers and watch towers" Israel erected around the West Bank to isolate and control Palestinians. This apartheid wall is more directly engaged with in World War Z (2013) and its use of zombies, which will be explored in a later essay in this series. 

Druckmann has shared the emotional impact of watching footage of the "Ramallah lynchings" in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. It was one of the earliest events of the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation that has, of course, been framed as unwarranted terrorism by Zionist media. The crowd's cheers while Israeli soldiers were publicly hanged in Ramallah affected Druckmann so deeply that this moment inspired the game's entire story. 

In Seattle, Ellie finds herself caught in the middle of a war that has been raging for years between the Wolves, a rebel militia group, and the Scars, a primitivist cult—a war that Druckmann calls "tribalism on a very large scale, between two groups that are fighting for land." It is with their violent struggle for control of Seattle territory that Druckmann, who signed the pro-Israel "No Hostage Left Behind" open letter to President Biden, communicates his view of Israel's settler-colonial violence and Palestinian resistance to it. We learn that "Wolves" is a colloquial name for the Washington Liberation Front (WLF)—a perverse inversion of the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF), perhaps—while "Scars" is slang for the Seraphites. Within the metaphorical and narrative work of the game, 

"the secular, militarized Washington Liberation Front (WLF), equipped with advanced weaponry and resources, mirrors the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) as a 'brutal but well-intended' military, while the Seraphites, a religious cult engaging in ritual disembowelment and fanaticism, dehumanizes Palestinians as an extremist threat akin to Hamas."

In a clear callback to the hanging that inspired Druckmann to write The Last of Us Part II, the player witnesses the Seraphites disemboweling and hanging a WLF member in a forest. The player can do nothing to prevent the execution. We can only watch them string him up and listen as he dies. The characterizations of the WLF as "brutal but well-intended" and the Seraphites as "an extremist threat" align perfectly with the Zionist propaganda that constructs the Israeli military as "the most moral in the world" and Palestinian resistance fighters as "immoral barbarians" that fail to understand or honor the rules of war.

As the story unfolds, Abby is revealed to be the daughter of the surgeon Joel killed to save Ellie years before. In a challenging twist, the player must portray Abby for a huge chunk of the game after watching her brutally murder Joel. The player is left to reflect on how Joel's actions led to Abby's, and how Abby's actions led to Ellie's, and how violence begets violence. With Abby's revenge and Ellie's dark turn, Druckmann intentionally expresses a "both sides" centrism, framing the grief and ruthlessness of both Abby and Ellie as understandable and merited in this zombie-plagued world where they've both lost a father. Blood for blood. The cycle continues. 

"What Neil Druckmann saw in the lynching of two Israeli soldiers is artificially fragmented outside of its context, where Israel—the superpower—has allowance to colonise, pillage and otherwise eradicate Palestinian life and land. Neil Druckmann, in his post-apocalyptic vision, not only dismisses the significance of power but erases it altogether."

—Tarek Younis, "Veiling Colonial Violence: The Last of Us Part II, Israel and the Erasure of Power" 

The portrayal of the Israel-Palestine conflict as a symmetrical "cycle of violence" in The Last of Us removes culpability from the Zionist entity and recasts Palestinian resistance against genocide as irrational, barbaric, and terroristic. To insinuate that Palestinians and Israelis carry an equal share of pain is to ignore the realities of the settler-colonial state's death-making and the necro-sovereign zombification of Palestinians. 

It follows Zionist logic that Neil Druckmann's understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict would inspire a pop culture zombie epic. The zombie is an odious and opportune slate on which the perceived monstrosity, greed, and repugnance of the racial Other can be easily projected. Palestinians become the mindless zombie swarm with the singular impulse to annihilate—the Other, the terrorist, the diseased and disturbed, the living dead—and necropolitics dictate that Palestinians must be eradicated for the safety and survival of Israeli civilization. 

Zionist logic—whether consciously or unconsciously—continually asserts the existence of Palestinians as an end of the world. In the settler-colonial imagination, resistance is always terrorism and the unwanted movement of the racial Other is always zombie contagion.