Zombie Land

The worldwide successful epidemic of zombie movies has finally infected Israel as well, with two local zombie movie productions which recently came out, and a whole episode that takes place in Jerusalem in the mega hit zombie epic World War Z (Marc Forster, 2013). The film was dubbed by some as “the greatest piece of cinematic propaganda for Israel since Otto Preminger’s Exodus.” However, the Jerusalem scene in the film suggests a far more complex situation, which goes as follows: Brad Pitt, after flying around the globe in an attempt to stop the world wide zombie epidemic, reaches Israel, which remains one of the last places on earth that is still protected from the zombies. The infamous separation wall, so it seems, helped Israel to protect itself from the endless sea of zombies outside. In front of the common enemy, Jews and Arabs inside the walls became friends, and Pitt finds them dancing and singing happily together. But the songs of peace are too loud and they draw the zombies. Attracted by the sound of the living, the zombies storm the walls and climb on top of each other like a swarm of ants. They finally reach the top of the wall and jump down straight to the heart of Jerusalem. Very quickly the city is overtaken by the zombies, and Pitt has to escape and find a cure elsewhere.
In fact, Israeli politics is already for a long time infected by the politics of zombie movies. The Israeli narrative of the conflict with the Palestinians makes a distinction akin to zombie films between two opposing realms: that of the living on the one side and that of the (living) dead on the other. While the Palestinians are presented as those who prefer death to life (an image the Palestinians partly exploit themselves), Israel is presented as the one which values and protects life. During the recent military operation “Protective Edge” in Gaza, Israel used this formula again in order to justify its massive bomb strikes on Gaza and at the same time to condemn the counter attacks of the Palestinians against Israeli targets. While both sides aimed to kill, this discourse suggested that there is a fundamental moral difference: the Israeli attacks are defensive while the Palestinians are the aggressors, even if the number of casualties was much higher on their side. The Palestinians were even blamed by Israeli spokesmen for their own deaths, since their armed forces are “hiding behind civilians” (an argument which in fact could be valid for both sides, as civilian society and the military are completely mixed in Israel as well). According to this discourse the map is already divided between the land of the living and the land of the dead. The war zone should therefore be limited to Palestine alone, and any slippage of war into Israel is deemed illegitimate.
Since the zombies are a form of disease which spreads by means of infection (a bite from a zombie will turn a living human into a living-dead which will continue infecting other people), the living survivors always try to separate themselves from the zombies in some sort of closed space. While the zombies are eating their way through the boundaries of individual and social bodies, destroying any fundamental dichotomy on their path, primarily that which separates life from death (as they are literally both alive and dead), the survivors` space of refuge is designated to re-establish the lost boundaries and restore the principle separation between the living on the one hand and the dead on the other. Surrounded by a separation wall, roadblocks and a heavy military presence that will supposedly keep the Palestinian threat at bay, Israel adopted a long time ago the zombie movies’ politics of separation. Even the so-called left parties which are in favor of the two state solution are promoting the fantasy of separation by their use of the formula “we are here – they are there”. It was Ehud Barak, former head of the military which later became prime minister appointed by the “left” coalition, who said that Israel is in fact a “villa in the jungle”. This crude statement was not only a testimony to Israel’s colonial fantasy of itself as a European, “civilized” enclave in the surrounding “wilderness” of the Middle East, but also an expression of the Israeli fantasy to create a zone which will be clean from Palestinians or Arabs - the zombies which must be kept outside.
Indeed, the Jerusalem scene in World War Z at first seems to support the Israeli “villa in the jungle” state of mind, as Israel is presented to be one of the last countries to survive the zombie apocalypse with the help of its powerful military and separation wall. From afar the zombies outside the walls can appear like a stereotypical image of hungry, dusty and wild Palestinian refugees. The Israeli opposition between Jews and Palestinians thus appears – as in the politics of the Israeli occupation – to be a dichotomy between life and death, the humans inside the civilized land of the living and the chaotic world of the zombies outside. However, quickly we see that Jews and Arabs within Jerusalem have become friends and join together in celebration. The appearance of the zombies as the ultimate otherness, so it seems, erased the old divisions and united the Jews and the Arabs against a mutual enemy. The separation wall is thus revealed in its deeper psychological function – not to protect from the Palestinians but from death itself. Nevertheless, zombie films show us that the living cannot really separate themselves from death, and in World War Z, a peace protected by walls and the military cannot really keep war from erupting within.
In George Romero’s classic living-dead trilogy, which became the hallmark of the genre, spaces of separation are revealed again and again as a fantasy of sterility which is doomed to fail. In Night of the Living Dead the survivors hide in a farm house, but the attempt to create a homogonous social collective and a stable family cell fails from the start with the appearance of a black man, which in the 1960s certainly did not belong within the American dominantly white hegemony. In Dawn of the Dead the survivors are barricaded in a shopping mall and live as tough in a capitalist utopia, a dream world of consumption disconnected from the zombie “jungle” outside - until the mall is eventually penetrated by the mass of hungry zombies and the film ends with countless living-dead flocking the mall like a horde of bewildered consumers. In Day of the Dead a military camp serves as the space which supposedly protects the borders and keeps the walking dead outside, but from the beginning there is a strong analogy between the zombies and the soldiers - as both are feeding from human slaughter – and at the end, indeed, they all turn into zombies.
While at first the zombie signifies otherness, what makes it so frightening (and appealing) is that it is not simply the other, but the lack of boundary that defines the difference between the other and ourselves. The zombie is not just death, but that which blurs the distinction between death and life, and hence it signifies a deeper fear of the loss of boundaries and the mixture of realms we usually attempt to keep separated. Zombie movies show that the realm of otherness cannot be separated from our own, just as death cannot be separated from life. What is perhaps most frightening about zombie films is the discovery that the zombies are in fact ourselves (normative family men, soldiers, consumers).
The end of the Jerusalem scene in World War Z does not give the impression of a pro Zionist film. On the contrary, it seems to criticize the Israeli politics of zombie movies and its obsession with the dichotomous discourse of separation. As in many other zombie films, the walls finally break down and the once sterile zone becomes a reflection of the otherness, war and death that was supposed to be kept outside. If Israel wants to understand the true effects of its politics towards the Palestinians, it should learn the chief lesson of zombie films: separation politics always leads to the ultimate form of purism – a truly homogonous space in which everybody becomes a zombie.