Reflections on “The Last of Us” in the Context of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
“But today, I bicycled to work and I got something in my eye. And I was really annoyed, and I got to work, and of course, I had killed a fly with my eye. So that bloody encounter was not very nice, especially for the fly! But you see what I mean, so all of a sudden, I started thinking, not how annoyed I was with this fly, but actually, this fly, in her whole encounter with me died. In my eye! So, it does matter the way you think about things, the way you interact with others because of the way that you think.” – Petra Ragnerstam
Back in 2013, I started playing this brilliant video game, a Playstation 3 exclusive at the time, from a renowned company that released the likes of Crash Bandicoot and Uncharted. The game was titled The Last of Us. I enjoyed the game from start to finish. It was heartbreaking and heartwarming then heartbreaking again. As a regular gamer, I would finish my studies and the part-time job that I had and spend an hour or so playing until I would fall asleep and repeat the same daily routines. But during the week I played The Last of Us, I recall that I played it so intensively that I did not focus much on my studies.
Something happened when I was nearing the end of the game: I struggled with the thought that I would play something else after I finished it. And true to my thoughts, the moment the credits rolled, I stayed still on the couch until they ended. I ejected the disc from the Playstation and I put it back in its case. I placed the case on top of the Playstation and I shut it off. I did not touch the controller for the following three weeks. I could not.
It was such a brilliant masterpiece that it won the Game of the Year award and then the Game of the Generation award shortly after.
Fast forward to the year 2020, the Last of Us: Part 2 was released. A couple of hours in, I encountered the heartbreak. After the moment of reveal happened and the cutscene ended, I turned off the Playstation and sank into my seat. My heart was heavy as if I was mourning the loss of someone so close and dear. I could not fathom the loss in the brutal and unforgiving world of The Last of Us.
In 2022, I started studying for my master’s degree in Cultural Studies. I encountered the course coordinator and professor, Petra Ragnerstam who spoke of things so far beyond my limited imagination—or at least I thought so. When she spoke of worlding the world, I understood; but perhaps things did not connect so closely until the big assignment of creating a podcast on a work of fiction. While this was an individual assignment, a few of my colleagues and I gathered and decided to create a podcast of five episodes, each following the other, and when it came to the time for me to choose a world, I went with The Last of Us.
In the podcast, I spoke of the gaming community’s outrage toward the second title and Joel’s death in the game. A fictional character that has touched our hearts was brutalized and murdered in an act of revenge. It was so vicious that I have not brought myself to replay the game again even though it was so well-made and I enjoyed every bit of it.
The Game Developer
There are two that I will briefly talk about in this article: Neil Druckmann and Norman Finkelstein. Both are Jews, both are philosophers, and both, I admire to a great extent. The first, Neil Druckmann, is the co-director and writer of The Last of Us: Part 2. By his means, Druckmann left an Easter Egg in the game in the form of a collectible card with his likeness on it. The title read: Doctor Uckmann, get it? Dr Uckmann. It’s not too clever, but it was a nice acknowledgment and reflection on what he has done.
Druckmann, born on the 5th of December, 1978, is an Israeli-American writer, and creative director, and currently, he is the studio head of the video game studio, Naughty Dog. Druckmann directed and wrote both of The Last of Us games. Through the first game, there are two things that were just too different from video games at the time: The type of relationship and how platonic it was, and the world which was cruel and unforgiving. The second game was too controversial for the gamers, though critically acclaimed on all accounts. It was crueler and more unforgiving than the first.
For the past few years, I’ve been thinking about the choices made in the direction of the game. Why would you kill such a beloved character that could make you so much money? Why would you disappoint the fans so much that you would receive death threats? Why would you choose to use two characters instead of one, and why would you show both sides of the story?
This piece is not about The Last of Us. This is about the ongoing conflict—a word I truly hate using—between Israel and Palestine.
Let me take you through some of the thoughts that I’ve had over the past few weeks when I decided to replay another of Naughty Dog’s games: Uncharted. The Uncharted series is one of my favorites with the Indiana Jones-esque style of narrative. However, when it came to the fourth entry, directed and written by Druckmann, it was clear that something had shifted. The game was more dramatic, it was not as fun as the previous ones.
As it happened, I started replaying the Uncharted series and, in my mind, I was wondering why the fourth game was much darker. In a way, I reflected upon the four main entries as stages of life, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune as childhood, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves as the teenage, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception as adulthood, and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End as… that’s where I stumbled. As an end? I do not know.
I then reflected on the writer and director of those games, Druckmann, who grew up in the West Bank, where he had undoubtedly witnessed many horrors, from both sides. The parallels in The Last of Us: Part 2 with the conflict between Israel and Hamas specifically were evident in the game with the organized WLF that resembles the IDF and the religious Seraphites who resemble Hamas. Now, that was not at all what I thought about when the game came out because I was not that familiar with the conflict between Hamas and the IDF. A brilliant YouTube video made some of those suggestions clear to me.
Druckmann’s philosophy in The Last of Us: Part 2 was that of breaking the cycle of violence. Of course, while the game was brilliant, summarizing how the cycle of violence could just end by walking away from it in Ellie’s quest is perhaps a little too uninformed. However, given the medium, it is a very appropriate way to set a standard.
While politics have always found themselves in video games, or video games were directly affected by politics, it is clear that Druckmann’s influence in video games can only grow. But Druckmann is a creative mind; a fiction writer who has been influenced by the politics of his home country. I personally would argue that he does not need to take that step any further than he has already gone.
The World As It Is
I believe in fiction as a method that reshapes the present and the future. To me, video games are the product of various means of fiction, starting with poetry then plays then a world viewable on screens, with characters that represent us, characters that we love, characters that we hate, and characters that we love to hate. Video games are a natural progression of a world of fiction, and fiction has always found a way to reshape our reality, from flights into space in the 2nd century imagined by authors long before they became true to films that reshaped small details in politics like women’s right to apply for divorce in Egypt.
I look back at the phrase worlding the world and I think of characters from video games. I look at the decision that Joel made at the end of The Last of Us and to this day, I do not have an answer to whether I could do the same if I was in his place or not. Then, I imagine the train of thought that Neil Druckmann must have gone through to make that decision. Certainly, I speak of Druckmann as an entity, not just his person, because the process of developing and writing a game hardly falls on one person. But with the controversial direction that the second game has taken, it is clear that Druckmann was heavily influenced by the state of Israel and Palestine’s politics and thus, created a narrative that sets the world of now, the world full of war and mutual—and almost global—hatred.
Much like the critically acclaimed video game, other media representations such as James Cameron’s Avatar have been likened to the Palestinian and Israeli conflict. It is no surprise that such a long-standing conflict has become the inspiration for films and video games, albeit none of them pose a clear solution. The lack of clear solutions is not something that is unique to this conflict, but I believe that it has become a generational problem.
The Jewish Scholar
One of the personalities that I have grown to follow since the 7th of October is Norman Finkelstein. Finkelstein is an American political scientist and activist whose parents were Holocaust survivors. He claims to be the current main living source of knowledge on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To emphasize my point on the lack of clear solutions, Finkelstein has repeatedly said that he abandoned his research and the conflict in Palestine sometime in the early 2020s and he has only received attention in 2023 and 2024 because of his knowledge on the situation.
In several interviews, Finkelstein expressed shame for letting go of the Palestinian cause over the past few years. Over the past months since the 7th of October, he has appeared in many interviews with mainstream and independent agencies. Finkelstein, often dubbed a self-hating Jew by the Jewish people who oppose his stance, brings a different perspective. Clearly, one of the reasons his opinion and stance matter to me is because he is a Jewish professor.
In one of his interviews, he states that many Israeli Jews do not oppose the Bibi policy in Gaza. This stance is not something that I perceive as unfamiliar. While I wholly disagree with what is happening in Gaza at the moment. I can see where the genocidal perspective comes from; the “us vs. them” perspective that has always been a rhetoric by politicians.
Connecting the Dots
As this opinion piece started with the darkness of The Last of Us: Part 2 and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, I have been trying to understand the reasoning behind that darkness that would make the games unplayable at this current period of time with atrocities being committed by the IDF. I try to understand the reasoning behind Druckmann’s cynical philosophy in the games. Growing up with the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I can understand the cynicism.
That understanding comes from tens of hours of listening to Finkelstein’s perspective and his own cynicism. It comes from tens of hours reading about the world that we do not live in. It comes from an understanding that the way we perceive and see things, the way we feel things, is different from that of the people who live those things.
While I was learning about worlding the world I opposed the notion that both understandings are true, I also came to realize that because I oppose that understanding, that does not mean it's untrue, but fundamentally true to those who live in it.
Those Who See and Those Who Live
There is a fundamental issue that must be addressed. In a previous article, I discussed the conflict that the Cálice Team had when it came to the different histories written around the Egyptian-Israeli war of 1973. I realize now that the issue is much more grave than I had thought and without intensive research into what happened where, there would not be a clear understanding of the situation.
The Jewish-Israeli people have the right to live in peace. But so do the Palestinians currently getting bombarded in Gaza. So did the Aboriginals and the Natives of Australia and America. The problem becomes an issue of colonizer vs. colonized and the issue leads to massacres, wars, and misinformation. With fundamentalists and conservatives shaping our current history, there have been movements that reject those notions.
Two of the biggest movements that have been fighting for the rights of Palestinians happen to be queer movements and student movements. Over the past few months, students have camped in many universities across the world to call for a halt to the war. One of those student movements happened to be in Lund University but those were dragged onto the streets by Swedish Police brutally and violently for peacefully protesting. Open letters were submitted by the students of Malmö and Lund Universities in solidarity with colleagues who have experienced police violence.
There is a division in the world, that division comes from politics that are meant and intended to divide and conquer. Druckmann’s understanding of his world has caused a divide in the fanbase. While I applaud and cherish his work, I believe that he, along with many others who show solidarity to one sect rather than the other or even both, were subjects of misinformation and propaganda. There is a lack of informative education in the entire world when it comes to the Arab World and the Middle East, primary education neglects some major aspects of understanding the rights of Israelis and the horrors that they have encountered before the creation of Israel. For Western Europe and North America, the notion of righteousness is evident in the language. I study language, and I understand rhetoric, even if not in full, but the education system of the world is based on one or the other, hardly ever seeing both perspectives until it is too late.
The Cyclist and the Fly
When the fly encountered Petra’s eye, the incident was fatal for the fly. From an outsider's perspective, especially of someone who managed to swallow a handful of flies while cycling, I understand that it was an accident. Petra did not intend to kill the fly. The fly was not suicidal. It was all a casualty that ended up being terrible for both. I almost wrote “both people” when it was about a human and an insect. Petra was very upset about the fly and the harm she caused it. In many of the seminars, Petra would refer to insects or animals as people who go on living their lives without a human-centric perspective.
If even the fly has the right to live and be mourned according to Petra Ragnerstam, would that not be a better place for us all?
Editors’ Note: The current Israel-Hamas war is part of a long and complex history. The issue is emotionally and politically charged which makes it all the more difficult to discuss the current situation in a rational and unbiased manner. Recognizing this, we nonetheless consider it important to debate and raise awareness on ongoing events and to provide a platform for diverse perspectives. In doing so we seek to be as reflexive, objective, and critical as possible while taking a firm stand against all forms of discrimination and injustice – racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, or otherwise. If you think that there is a mistake or problematic statement in our content, we are always open to feedback which you can send to us through our contact form.
Written by Amr Abbas.
Cover photo by Naughty Dog.