Of Zombies and Men

In February, and then again in April, Donald Trump labeled Gaza an “incredible piece of real estate.” A plot of land for sale, to be developed – “leveled out” and “fixed up.” A CNN article on the remarks describes Trump as a “former real estate magnate.” These statements, iterated first by Trump and then uncritically parroted by legacy media outlets, function to normalize the genocide in Gaza, and the apartheid in the West Bank. When the outlets that are supposed to be the voice of the people become the voice of complicity, what comes next? 

Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and Director of Indigeneity, Race and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College Zahi Zalloua tells me that Palestine is, in many ways, a litmus test for journalists. 

“The view of journalists as enemies has been a fascist position, but when you throw Palestinians in there, lots of Journalists are the enemies of Palestinians as well,” says Zalloua, “Palestine unsettles comfortable, binary oppositions.”

Indeed, pro-Palestinian views are often enough for outlets to remove journalists from their positions. Anti-Palestinian fervor reached such a fever-pitch that, in 2023, Newsweek compiled a list of journalists fired for pro-Palestinian views – finding, at the time, that fourteen reporters and artists had been fired from various outlets for statements, posts, and cartoons in support of Palestine. 

The censorship has continued. In 2024, The Intercept obtained an internal memo distributed by The New York Times that advised journalists to avoid using the terms “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory.”  

For Zalloua, Palestine, and the ‘Palestinian question,’ has the unique ability to expose the shortcomings of current news production.

“Is there a way of radicalizing this news?” says Zalloua, “Palestine does not really exceptionalize, it’s that it’s an exception, but it’s an exception that actually shows how coverage of anti-Black violence is always superficial.”

In February, Steven Donzinger reported that Israel has killed (directly or indirectly) at least 14% of Gaza’s population, or, 306,000 people. The report was published on Substack, a site that independent journalists are increasingly flocking to. A caption underneath the calculation Donzinger and his assistant, Coll McCail, ran to reach the statistic reads: “Hey New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC: is it really that hard to run this calculation? Stop sanitizing the scale and impact of Israel’s attacks.”

Chair of Film and Media Studies and South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at Whitman College Tarik Elseewi notes that this superficial coverage is not new.

“ It's that, same question that's been torturing us throughout the 20th century, really,” says Elseewi, “how do you actually engage in a rational or logical manner with someone who's utterly irrational or illogical?  How do you have a conversation with someone who doesn't even recognize you as human?”

Elseewi points out that this consistent dehumanization has led to a ‘zombification’ of people, wherein the bodies of these Others articulate a particular social anxiety. Comparing disembodied drone or helicopter footage of Palestinians fleeing their homes to zombie tropes, Elseewi says, demonstrates how we envision (and fear) unruly bodies that don’t yield to colonial authority. 

“ Zombie films make it very clear that [the] boundary between what is human and what is not human is wildly contingent and in seconds it could just totally disappear. So, your white mother could suddenly become this Palestinian other, in the context of a zombie film,” says Elseewi.

Other forms of resistance and solidarity from abroad, like die-ins and marches, seem to turn this dynamic on its head. Collective groups of people perform death and collective movement – mimicking in solidarity, perhaps, the movement of fleeing bodies and calling attention to the countless dead and dying in Gaza and beyond. 

In covering the pro-Palestine movement at my own college as part of our student paper The Wire, and preparing to begin a career in investigative journalism, I have been alarmed by the consistent failures by legacy media outlets to tell the truth about the atrocities happening in Gaza. 

Defunct is a play on words (and life). In one sense, to be defunct is a state of no longer existing or functioning. This, (un)fortunately, resonates with how my co-founder Nazaaha Penick and I feel as we finish our undergraduate degrees. It also resonates with a burnt out, listless, Generation Z (of which Nazaaha and I are a part). But, there’s another way we imagine the word. 

De-Funk’d. Every one of us has creativity, passion, and soul. Our lives intersect in fleeting moments, yet the impressions we make on one-another can last a lifetime. Funk, as a quality of being, is indefinable. The ineffable Miriam Webster takes a stab at it – “the quality or state of being funky” – but still relies on the word to define itself. We, too, are indefinable, complex beings. Yet, the various systems of exploitation – our tech oligarchy, capitalism, you name it – have taken the ‘funk’ from us. In effect, rendering us De-Funk’d. 

At Defunct, we combine arts, culture, and news. We believe that news is more than what the legacy media outlets monotonously produce and, more than ever, we need independent journalists to relentlessly prioritize the truth. 

We start by refusing to forget Palestine.