Palestinian Anti-Zombie Plan: Blame Israel

“This method has a proven track record.”

Ramallah, March 2 – Like most national governments, the Palestinian Authority has developed contingency plans for a number of unlikely scenarios, the better able to confront those events in the unlikely case they do occur. PreOccupied Territory was allowed a glimpse of the outlines of some plans at Central Planning, including the outlandish scenario of a zombie invasion or outbreak – in which case the substance of the Palestinian emergency response can be summarized as Blame Israel.

Plans to cope with a zombie invasion have been noted before, including at the Pentagon. For most countries, development of the plans involves less an assumption that the scenario will actually occur and more an exercise in thinking outside the box to assist the defense establishment in functioning more flexibly. For the Palestinians, the opposite is the case: it provides their strategic thinkers with yet another way to apply their customary, established mode of thinking – how to attribute fault for the event to Israel and avoid shouldering responsibility for addressing it.

The approach has proved effective through several decades of Palestinian planning – economic, defense, and otherwise – as generations of Palestinians have been conditioned to sublimate all conflict and challenge into opposition to Israel, and the international community has seldom, if ever, disabused them of that as a valid approach. Consequently, the binder at Central Planning containing the plans for a zombie invasion also has plans for numerous other scenarios beginning with the letters W-Z, few of which contain anything more specific than “blame Israel” as the mandated official response.

“This method has served us well, and you don’t mess with a good thing,” explained Fatah official Jibril Rajoub. “It’s almost a reflex by now: when something unpleasant occurs, or threatens to occur, we make noise about it being a result of the Occupation, and the world most often cooperates by pressuring Israel to give us what we want or need, with nothing serious demanded of us. Zombies are still a theoretical threat only, but you go with what works. This method has a proven track record.”

A similar approach characterizes the Ministry of Health’s contingency plans in case of an epidemic of, for example, smallpox or anthrax. “Seventy years of international policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taught us that someone else will address our needs,” said Minister of Health Ebbi Dimyalajji. “And if they don’t, we get violent, or at least threaten to get violent. Then the West relents and tries to force Israel to solve the problem at her own expense.”

“Essentially, our entire population is now leveraged against Israel in case of disaster, or even minor crisis,” he added. “Who says we don’t have biological weapons?”