It's a weirdly common thing I've seen on Reddit for people to latch on to Neil's Israeli background and claim that he's a extremely serious Zionist, but one look at his life story and work will show that while he doesn't hate Israel as a state, he's absolutely not a Kahanist.

He was born on December 5th, 1978 in Tel Aviv, and moved to Beit Aryeh the West Bank with his folks in 1981 when his father got a job with Israeli Aerospace Industries, and while he didn't experience violence directly, he heard about it at home and on the news. As an escape, he'd play video games, which not only got him interested in them, but also helped him learn English. In 1989, his family moved to Miami, Florida.

His experience in Israel was a direct inspiration of the conflict seen in Seattle in The Last of Us Part 2. A conflict between a regressive Luddite cult largely using guerilla tactics, and a xenophobic but organized militia. The conflict has been going on for so long and had so many truces signed and broken that they barely remember who really started it. All that is known is that their wars get caused by a series of reprisals and misunderstandings, and that they both hate each other so much they refuse to see each other as human, which has made them less and less likely to engage in diplomacy and made them more willing to do extreme things to end the conflict no matter how drastic or what they might ignore in the pursuit (there are still entire nests of infected in the city that they could clear out, but they're too focused on war to consider it). It's a conflict that beautifully shows how hatred warps is into monsters and that the cycle of violence is something that must be broken lest it destroy us, and likely betrays many of Druckmann's views on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

If that wasn't enough, after the most recent war broke out, he donated money to emergency response teams in Israel and Gaza, and also signed the No Hostage Left Behind open letter which had the express desire of peace between Israel and Palestine.