[With his rugged looks and polished charm, Saladin Kader could be a movie star. He is friendly but never obsequious, self-assured but never arrogant. He is a professor of urban planning at Khalil Gibran University, and, naturally, the love of all his female students. We sit under the statue of the university’s namesake. Like everything else in one of the Middle East’s most affluent cities, its polished bronze glitters in the sun.]

I think this is to make up for the fact the rest of the chapter is every Jew-hating Arab stereotype that can be packed in.

I know only the basics about the conflict: people hate and kill each other a lot and it’s sad and unending. I could go try to educate myself to review this chapter, but information on the disaster is a mess of he said/she said and your reward for figuring anything out is being very depressed.

But wow this guy is one-note.

Anyway. This chapter we learn what the Israeli plan mentioned last chapter actually involves and how people reacted, although you can probably guess the answer is Of course we thought it was a Zionist lie from my comments already. Anyway.

Israel’s plan is voluntary quarantine, which I don’t think is ever defined, perhaps because it doesn’t make too much sense.

Was I supposed to really believe his crazy story that African rabies was actually some new plague that transformed dead bodies into bloodthirsty cannibals?

First, people will believe a lot of crazy stuff, like that witches steal their dicks. Second, does it really matter if African rabies isn’t undead and is just live people chewing your face off? Just look at what Africanized bees do and tell me you’d want to be anywhere near the rabies version of that. The author keeps coming back to people stupidly thinking it’s rabies, and it’s transmitted just like rabies so who cares if it’s literally related to it? It’s like getting all huffy about how the fever/aching/delirium epidemic totally isn’t related to the flu, it merely has the same symptoms and transmission vectors and the same treatment works.

Really. Think about it. Bullet to the head is how we deal with rabies too. The only difference here is that you can also kill rabid animals other ways, but mostly you want to take out the head to be really sure it’s not just faking. And then you destroy the body to prevent transmission after death. They are a remarkably good model. Granted, you can just wait for rabies to burn itself out in a population, but that’s not how we deal with rabies on our actual doorstep, so that’s not a big issue here.

I didn’t even hear the second part of that fat bastard’s speech, the part about offering asylum, no questions asked, to any foreign-born Jew, any foreigner of Israeli-born parents, any Palestinian living in the formerly occupied territories, and any Palestinian whose family had once lived within the borders of Israel.

Also, this kind of makes them into dicks.

Their reason for letting people in is because the human race is about to get overrun with zombies. So why wouldn’t you let anyone in, especially the many, many anyones who do not routinely suicide bomb you? Otherwise limiting it to people who are Jewish makes it seem like they’ve decided to fuck over everyone they aren’t related to. Like they’re really happy there’s finally a mass genocide for the other people!

Anyway, he assumes that they weren’t really voluntarily withdrawing but were forced out and knew the end was near, so they wanted Jews to bolster their army and Palestinians for human shields, and again, surely they could find more cooperative nationalities for that. Like, I don’t know, anyone else ever on the planet.

My father wasn’t quite convinced of my ingenious geopolitical insights. He was a janitor at Amiri Hospital. He’d been on duty the night it had its first major African rabies outbreak. He hadn’t personally seen the bodies rise from their slabs or the carnage of panicked patients and security guards, but he’d witnessed enough of the aftermath to convince him that staying in Kuwait was suicidal.

This is getting into one of the book’s themes about how the smart people react and the dumb people deny, but it doesn’t really follow. An outbreak of disease, while upsetting, doesn’t mean your own country won’t crack down on it or, and this is the important part, that Israel will do any better at actually keeping it out. In most epidemics, advertising you’re a safe haven is a great way to get riddled with infection. And flooding a tiny area in the hopes it’s safe are a great way to get infected. The best way to deal with plague is normally to stay where you are and stop interacting with potential vectors.

The only reason to go running to Israel is if the local governments are in denial of even “African rabies”, in which case yeah, nothing will be done to stop it and you’re screwed, but in that case you’re already living in the midsts of insanity and/or a totalitarian dictatorship run by someone delusional, so you really have bigger issues than just the rabid zombies.

I’d show the images from Al Jazeera, the images coming out of the new West Bank state of Palestine; the celebrations, the demonstrations. Anyone with eyes could see total liberation was at hand. The Israelis had withdrawn from all the occupied territory and were actually preparing to evacuate Al Quds, what they call Jerusalem!

Okay, this? Israel leaving Jerusalem should’ve made everyone sit up and take notice. I’m not convinced even Mary Sue Israel with their infinite intelligence budget would’ve been willing to do this. In the event they did, absolutely everyone would believe them – maybe not that there were actual zombies, but at least that the whole country was pretty damn convinced something horrible was going down. I can’t believe even the stupidest anti-Israel teen would believe Israel was willing to choose life over Jerusalem. If they were, they wouldn’t be keeping a country going surrounded by people that hate them in the first place.

I haven’t been to Israel. I plan to never, ever go near the place, because I understand you can get blown up if you do. This means I also understand that obviously, other people are way, way more invested in keeping possession of land than I could ever be, because they actually live there. Ergo, if something makes them leave, it must be something a lot worse than getting blows up.

Anyway, there was then a second African rabies outbreak in Al Jahrah, the details of which he doesn’t go into, and that ends the argument as far as his dad is concerned (his mom does not really matter in this narrative).

I, of course, scoffed at his timid ignorance, at his willingness to abandon “The Struggle.” What else could I expect from a man who’d spent his whole life scrubbing toilets in a country that treated our people only slightly better than its Filipino guest workers.

The elephant in the room this chapter is the tribalism of all of this. First Israel only letting Jews and Palestinians in, now this. I mean, why do the Filipino guest workers deserve to be treated like shit? Why do you deserve to be treated better? I guess that could be intentional, but it doesn’t seem like that.

He tells his dad he’s signed up with a terrorist recruiter (the book then footnotes to add that it’s a youth group that has the “strict recruitment code” of only under-eighteens, because did we mention Arabs are crazy and evil enough yet?) and he’ll see them again when he’s liberating them from the Israelis! He ends with a quote from the Koran, which is footnoted as from the Koran possibly because the author thinks we’re idiots.

The dinner table suddenly became very silent. My mother looked down, my sisters looked at each other.

So of the family, the majority are female. This is their only appearance. They likely had some option on it, but we’ll never know.

Anyway, his dad responds with a shitfit of

“I am your father! You WILL OBEY ME!” His next slap sent my vision flashing white. “YOU WILL LEAVE WITH THIS FAMILY OR YOU WILL NOT LEAVE THIS ROOM ALIVE!”

This, I think, is meant to be positive? I think? Anyway he’s properly terrorised and cries all the way there.

He gets there and sees the in-progress wall. I’d like to take a moment to complain about the fact the movie made it fail because humans should be able to do what they accomplish. I think the failure of the wall in Pacific Rim is a similar attitude that really boils down to defensive structures shouldn’t work, the only way to respond to a threat is with violence aimed at its face.

When they get there he sees an African guy, which surprises him, and the footnote this time is:

By this point, the Israeli government had completed operation “Moses II,” which transported the last of the Ethiopian “Falasha” into Israel.

Which not only confirms that they’re being tribal assholes, but also, there are other reasons why there might be a black Jew – if he even is one, given you can be a descendant of Israeli parents without being Jewish. This smacks of the author just being smug that he knows a factoid.

Anyway, they’re walked in single file past caged dogs. First they see an old guy set the dogs off.

Instantly, two large chaps in civilian clothing were at the old man’s side, speaking something in his ear and escorting him away. I could see the man was injured. His dishdasha was torn at the hip and stained with brown blood. These men were certainly no doctors, however, and the black, unmarked van they escorted him to was certainly no ambulance. Bastards, I thought, as the old man’s family wailed after him.

No, I think the word you’re looking for is idiots. It would be really easy to pretend you’re offering medical care. He even says that plenty of injured people go by who don’t set off the dogs, and they’re escorted to waiting ambulances, so it wouldn’t be hard. If you’re just dragging off people’s family members into scary vans, you’re risking a riot.

But they don’t riot, and his theory they’re getting rid of the weak naturally is contradicted by some well dressed white guy who looks fine setting off the dogs right afterward, and in the struggle his shirt comes open to show a black-goo stomach injury so we all know it’s zombieness.

And again, let’s compare this to rabies. People who know they have rabies don’t skip off to the nearest playground so they’ll be all set for max mauling ability. Facing a fatal illness that leads to you being all murdery, most people want to avoid harming others.

Now, I suppose you could say that maybe a lot of people did. Maybe lots of people went to the hospital or at least chained themselves up somewhere to try and wait the disease out. But looking at the numbers here, we seem to be following the standard zombie-apocalypse trope of people’s natural reaction being to hide their bite and try to get into the most crowded safe areas with the fewest exits.

And this is very different from the behavior in China. There, the disease was slow and rare enough that people are successfully restraining the turned and keeping a lid on things for quite some time. The issue was the illness, not the possibility of new infections – much like how, generally, our focus on someone infected with rabies is concern for their own treatment. Things hadn’t fallen apart there, and people were staying with their families who could more or less handle things in the short term.

So anyway, they end up in a camp with guards and barbed wire fences, where there’s weird medical tests all the time ranging from blood to feces. The footnote explains this was because they weren’t sure if the disease could survive outside the body. Despite the fact they already had actual infected people whose shit they could be studying. What sort of data could they possibly be getting here? “Okay once again no sign of the virus in this pile of shit. Another few hundred people and we’ll have definitively established the shit of uninfected people does not spontaneously generate and then transmit the virus!”

The only thing that made it bearable, and probably what prevented an all-out riot among some of the Muslim detainees, was that most of the doctors and nurses doing the examinations were themselves Palestinian.
…
He kept telling us, “You made the right decision to come here. You’ll see. I know it’s hard, but you’ll see it was the only way.” He told us it was all true, everything the Israelis had said.

Or they could’ve just chained up one of the many, many zombies they’ve got by now and shown it to everyone. If they’re worried about it somehow getting loose, cut off the bottom of its jaw and its arms – that’d only further hammer in that holy shit zombie, so it’d be more effective. That’d stop any riots for sure.

Three whole weeks were wasted on this! Don’t they have a wall to build? Maybe if they weren’t spending all their time playing with everyone’s shit they could’ve built one around Jerusalem too.

You know, the whole time they barely even glanced at our passports. My father had done all this work to make sure our official documents were in order. I don’t think they even cared. Unless the Israeli Defense Force or the police wanted you for some previous “unkosher” activities, all that mattered was your clean bill of health.

And also your genetics, because remember, this is limited to Jews and Palestinians only.

The Ministry of Social Affairs provided us with vouchers for subsidized housing, free schooling, and a job for my father at a salary that would support the entire family.

Wow, Israel really does take place in Infinite Resource Fantasyland! Here I’d expect that they’d be busy throwing all their resources at building that wall and then spending whatever’s left on processing new people, but no, apparently a massive military engineering project coupled with a huge wave of immigrants that have to be let into your country in single file and then housed for three weeks while a fleet of doctors run every test imaginable followed by having to find a place for all those people might kind of cut into their available resources and stuff but no, free schools and good jobs for everyone :D

This is too good to be true

Stop pointing out your plot holes, book.

Anyway, then the bus crashes and there’s shooting and homemade bombs and he can see it’s police vs civilians and he’s all OH BOY THE LIBERATION IS AT HAND but it turns out that no, it’s a civil war and everyone involved is Jewish. Oh now now who does he root for?

In your opinion, what do you believe was the cause of that war?

Well I’d guess the fact that they’re bleeding their population dry to hand out great salaries and free schooling to the immigrants – perhaps done because they were more concerned with unrest coming from that corner, but still, as soon as you show them the zombies I think that unrest would stop being your biggest issue. Boy’s fully grown, why would you send him to school when you haven’t even completed your anti-dying-of-zombie wall? Israel should be in total war mode. The people not building the wall should be frantically working on their farming capacity, which is going to be stretched to its limit supporting all these people. They should be considering if they can build other wall areas further out around particularly good land.

Which brings me to my next point – the rebels have a point. Processing the immigrants is taking away resources they could be using on everything else, it’s introducing an unknown factor to the country’s running that could bite them in the ass (the way castles fall is someone opens the gates), and I don’t see any evidence their current limiting factor is manpower – especially given that the first thing they did is withdraw a lot of people from outlying areas.

And let’s remember that if they’re trying to become an isolated area of safety, they can’t rely on importing resources. Current Israel is not able to feed itself – instead, it exports higher value food to help pay for the bulk needed. Cutting exports followed by switching most non-food cropland to produce cheap foodstuffs might make up the difference…before they gave up large chunks of their country and then invited even more people in. The only hope at this point would be massive stockpiles of food being purchased by the government, but with what money? All of that’s getting used up giving immigrants great salaries.

…

The official word is apparently people just super hate Palestinians and have religious objections to surrendering land. There was also the Strategic Hamlet Resettlement Program which apparently involved their houses bulldozed in order to make way for those fortified, self-sufficient residential compounds. because Infinite Resource Fantasyland never runs out of contractors or the money to pay for them.

I learned all this much later, you understand, as well as the fact that the only reason the IDF eventually triumphed was because the majority of the rebels came from the ranks of the Ultra-Orthodox and therefore most had never served in the armed forces. Did you know that? I didn’t.

Yes truly the shoehorning in of factoids is the best way of writing.

It wouldn’t be the ultra orthodox. It’d be anyone with a still functioning brain. What the Israeli government is doing here is suicide from either the zombie or non zombie standpoint – if you don’t believe the government, they’ve just gone insane and are abandoning huge chunks of your country. If you do, they’ve gone insane, you don’t have the resources to absorb all these new people even before we get into the fact a lot of them hate you and might decide to try blowing chunks out of your shiny wall just on principle and also are you really sure the dogs are catching all the potential zombies? We only saw them find people with visible injuries, the kind that’d easily be caught by just a medical examination. And it’s pretty hard to verify that they don’t miss any infected, all you know is they definitely bark at some percentage of infected.

Anyway, he then finally realizes factional differences aren’t important

when one of those unmarked vans came around the corner. A handheld rocket slammed right into its engine. The van catapulted into the air, crashed upside down, and exploded into a brilliant orange fireball. I still had a few steps to go before reaching the doors of the tank, just enough time to see the whole event unfold. Figures were climbing out of the burning wreckage, slow-moving torches whose clothes and skin were covered in burning petrol. The soldiers around us began firing at the figures. I could see little pops in their chests where the bullets were passing harmlessly through.

And like I’ve been saying…this? A pretty damn cool scene. Picture the setup: tensions are high as the government takes steps to deal with the outbreak while keeping it under wraps, leading to the explosion of civil war, only for one of the vans carrying the “sick” to be overturned in the conflict and ZOMBIES pour out. ON FIRE.

It just doesn’t work well here.

Suddenly I understood what my father had been trying to warn me about, what the Israelis had been trying to warn the rest of the world about! What I couldn’t understand was why the rest of the world wasn’t listening.

Because supposedly they’re being open about the whole business, yet instead of actually showing people the zombies they have everywhere, they’re keeping them hidden. Also, everyone else who does quarantine is stupid, but when Mary Sue Israel herds the infected into vans rather than headshotting them it’s fine.

Well, this marks the end of the first section, concluding WARNINGS. Next up is BLAME.