Fauda attempts tikkun
Fauda’s latest season grapples with the aftermath of the Hamas massacre on October 7, and was rewritten after the fact in order to do so. However, the new season marks a clear departure from the last four.
Before this season, the popularity of the show, which premiered in 2015, could arguably be credited both to charismatic leads and its avoidance of a clean good-guy-bad-guy dichotomy. The series is shot from the perspective of its Israeli writers, but the undercover intelligence unit led by Lior Raz is not glorified as a totally moral actor in the face of a ruthless enemy. As much as a blockbuster series could manage, Fauda tried to show the complexity and intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as both Israelis and Palestinians are driven to acts of cruelty, revenge, and betrayal.
It was also clearly fiction, with over-convoluted and very dramatic storylines that only vaguely resembled IDF operations. Real enough to be convincing, but fake enough to be entertaining. Fauda’s Season 3, broadcast in 2019, includes a storyline where two Jewish Israeli teenagers are kidnapped by Palestinians and taken to Gaza, one of whom, after being rescued, is murdered in cold blood in her own home in Israel. Though such an event hypothetically lay within the realm of possibility, it was probably not something that anyone imagined would happen at the time.
Season 5 is different. With a clear link to October 7, it is both more real and less believable. Mélanie Laurent’s acting is flat and unconvincing as a woman whose identity is reduced to the death of a man she had only known for a couple of years, who doesn’t even speak her native language. The Palestinians are, unusually for Fauda, reduced to caricatures, devoid of depth and exceptionally cruel. The French police officers are cartoonish. There are a high number of loose ends and questionable plot twists, even for a series renowned for doing absolutely anything to keep Raz alive.
Raz and Avi Issacharoff, the season’s writers, said in an interview with the New York Times that they wanted it to show the pain that Israelis felt after October 7, and that it was “maybe the most important thing that we ever wrote.” The end product reveals the traumatic break caused by the October 7 massacre and the ensuing war. There is no more room for nuance in renderings of the conflict. Gone are the bitter endings, fumbled operations and Palestinians with rich and human backstories. In this season, the line is clearly drawn in the sand. No Israeli dies but Eli, who, tortured by his loss on October 7, is given much sought-after rest. All the European terrorists, portrayed as mute killing machines, are killed, as are all of their Palestinian commandos. The terror plot is foiled.
The writers also make sure to convey clear, forceful lessons: Europe tolerates and even welcomes Islamist terror. Young European supporters of violent Palestinian nationalism are deeply ignorant of the region’s history. They are blind to the cruel reality of terror organizations, and even more blind to the futility of their enterprise. Faced with such terror, blood revenge – an eye for an eye – is not only just, but necessary.
On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, planned in Hamburg under the nose of the German authorities, some of these lessons may be relevant. Others are more wishful, or self-serving. What’s new is that Fauda is the vehicle to uncritically deliver them.
If anything, the season could be seen as a form of tikkun. In that world, a planned Hamas attack was discovered by Israeli intelligence and undermined before it could happen. A potential “flood” was reduced to a trickle, with the IDF and Shin Bet monitoring it closely. By the time Hamas attacked, security forces, already prepared and on high alert, effectively countered it. All the terrorists were disarmed or, to use military parlance, neutralized. There were limited casualties. The event was over relatively quickly, and everyone went home. If only it could have been so.
