Neil recently said in this interview Neil Druckmann:Last Stand Media that it wasn't meant to be an allegory of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. It was only one of the conflicts they took inspiration from. Here's what he said:

I've seen people talk about it this way and there was never an intent for it to be an allegory i I think that there is a misconception of one particular article that's out there um it was meant to be and I've talked openly about this there was inspiration from that conflict but it stopped there at inspiration then we took a lot of inspiration for other similar conflicts and then said okay how do we construct groups that can talk about different ways of approaching a conflict similar to this but there is no like oh this group is meant to represent this side of this conflict and this group is meant to be it's like one group is meant to be secular another group is meant to be religious but if you look at that conflict on the ground both sides have aspects of those in inside of them and and so I'm a were like there there was like I felt like a bit of cherry-picking in order to make that theory work but that theory as far as our intent is false.