The Zombie Doctrine

Toward the end of the movie World War Z, Brad Pitt arrives in Jerusalem. By now, mindless zombies have overrun most of the world—but, thanks to a wall built by the Israelis, Jerusalem has been spared. The defenders have managed to keep out anyone infected with zombie-ism, preserving a space in which all—Israelis and Palestinians, Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike—are united against a common enemy. Just as Pitt comes on the scene, the survivors join to sing the Hebrew prayer, “May He create peace for us.” Drawn to the sound, the zombies climb up, one on top of another, until eventually they surmount the wall and tumble onto the singers below. Jerusalem, too, falls into the hands of al-Qaeda.

Well, not quite: nothing in the movie suggests an explicit identification of the zombies with Islamist jihadists. Still, the analogy is apt—and not least because many of today’s policy makers seem to have made such an identification on their own, conceiving of Islamic extremists in terms more appropriate to World War Z than to, for example, the doctrines and ideas of the Islamic State (IS). (That the anti-Israel cartoonist Eli Valley, in the New Republic, has reversed field by portraying Israelis as zombie cannibals is one of those predictable exceptions that prove the rule.)

Zombies make good horror-movie villains because they are mindless, flesh- and (in some versions) brain-eating creatures who can’t speak or even listen, and show no signs of rational thought. They just march around, usually in swarms, bent on a single aim: finding human victims into whom they can sink their teeth. How then to fight them? You can kill some, but there are too many of them; inevitably, you will be overwhelmed. Your best strategy is avoidance. Lie low and do nothing to draw their attention—lest, sensing your presence, they immediately converge on you and your friends.