Rewatching Fauda After October 7th

Conceptzia is a Hebrew term for a rigid, preconceived governing assumption or groupthink that blinds military and political leaders to contrary evidence and leads to strategic failure. (source)

I have been watching Fauda for many years. As a lifelong fan of action, I thought Fauda had found the perfect formula for an action drama series. I started watching it a year before I moved to Israel, and it helped shape and reinforce my perception of the tough Israeli you don’t mess with. It was a source of pride to see it on Netflix for an English-speaking audience, knowing that many of my colleagues and countrymen would be watching this portrayal of Israeli strength and self-confidence. I can’t think of another piece of Israeli TV that has broken into the English-speaking market in this way, certainly not in 2016. There was Prisoners of War, which inspired Homeland, but this was really the first show that put Israeli actors, writing and action in the spotlight. It also presented to a wider audience Israel’s ongoing, complicated struggle with terror, and the almost grinding daily vigilance that Israeli security forces endure to protect Israeli citizens. This was a side of Israel that, outside the headlines, I don’t think people appreciated at all.

I loved the ending of season 4, which reminded me in a way of the Kaddish scene at the end of Homeland season 2. I eagerly awaited finding out what happened to our heroes (I won’t say any more) when it aired in January 2023. Who could have imagined how, nine months later, life would become crazier than even an episode of Fauda could dream up.

Following the events of the past few years, I decided I wouldn’t watch the new series — whether because of the trauma of seeing the graphic content and tension Fauda is known for, or because it would no longer serve as escapism on the sofa in the evening when things had been so, so real. Post-October 7th, the real threat of our lives ending in a mass terror invasion, followed by the threat of missiles from Iran and Hezbollah, has made the whole genre redundant. I realise now why, all those years back, when I asked my mother-in-law, who is Israeli, whether she was watching Prisoners of War, she told me she couldn’t watch something that close to real life without getting anxious. It was around the time of Gilad Shalit’s imminent release.

Fast forward to last week. I decided to rewatch season 4 with my son, who made good progress over the summer holidays binging seasons 1 to 4. I wanted to remind myself where we left off. I was quite shocked at how radically differently I found myself seeing this series, following October 7th.

Let me say up front this is not an attempt to blame a television program for an intelligence failure, or to hold writers to a standard that nobody met. Season 4 was written and shot long before October 7th, and it is easy to be clever about fiction after the fact. What interests me is something else. The show was an accurate mirror of what we all believed. Watching it now is like having our own assumptions read back to us.

Firstly, having watched many videos from October 7th and read many accounts, much of the fighting, the shoot-outs and the special ops now seem fantastical and not very realistic at all. Small details grate — Eli, the unit commander, leaving his handgun on his office desk for anyone to pick up. Doron’s immortality, in a Bruce Willis / Die Hard sort of way, also plays out badly now. Throughout the series, the invincibility of the Israelis and the scenes in the control rooms with the commanding officers all feel flat, especially when you consider how little control those in the control rooms had on October 7th, often knowing less than people following their WhatsApp groups and news channels.

Fauda was Israeli culture’s own control room. Comfortable, confident, full of competent men who always win. We watched it for reassurance.

There is a scene at the end of season 4 where Doron and his team pose as a Hamas delegation and take over the funeral of Omar, the deep-cover Hezbollah asset from Jenin who is killed by Gabi. Adel, the militant at the centre of the season, can’t believe that these “politicians” have tried to steal the show and claim Omar as a martyr. Omar’s family and the mourners are presented as powerless, but go along with the Hamas procession anyway. All of this is happening in Jenin, in the northern part of Samaria, supposedly under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority. What strikes me now is, first, the total absence of the PA; second, the assumption that it is the Hamas “politicians” who are looking to score a political point; and third, that the real terrorist, Adel, is a Hezbollah-backed militant. The set-up captures the perception everyone held at the time — that Hamas were the relative moderates, and that groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad were the real problem. An illusion, we now know, that Hamas propagated and used to deceive Israel. In fact Adel resembles Sinwar more than anyone else in the show, in his extremism and his desire to hit Israel.

In fairness, this is also where Fauda got something right. Season 4’s central plot is an Iranian and Hezbollah network reaching into the northern West Bank, which was already the picture Israeli analysts were describing at the time, and which did materialize in Jenin.

The failure was not about the character. It was about scale, and about the assumption that there were rules. Even Adel, in that final season, manages only a relatively small number of rockets into Israel, forcing everyone into their mamad, the reinforced safe room in every Israeli home — a scene that pales in comparison with the onslaught of October 7th and the Iranian and Hezbollah barrages Israelis have endured in the years since. For years before October 7th we talked about the roughly 150,000 Hezbollah rockets pointing at Israel and the Radwan Force’s preparations to invade the Galilee. Fauda could imagine our enemies as dangerous. It could not imagine enemies who would do anything. These are minor points on their own, and there are many more we could discuss, but I think you get the idea.

It is hard to get our heads round what went so wrong on October 7th. Despite many published army reports into individual battles, we are still awaiting official answers about what really happened. I am purposely taking no notice of the electioneering and the narratives around October 7th that are being abused daily by all sides of our political class to score points ahead of the coming elections. We have the testimonies of individuals and the army reports to go by for now. So much remains unexplained that we may only learn some of it decades from now, when the material is declassified.

What is clear is that major, tragic errors occurred that day — errors which, looking back, were entirely preventable. The word for one aspect of this is conceptzia.

The term came out of the Agranat Commission into the Yom Kippur War, and led to the creation of the Devil’s Advocate Unit (מחלקת הבקרה, known as Ipcha Mistabra — Aramaic for “the opposite appears to be the case”). It sits as an independent part of the research division of AMAN, Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate. Crucially, its head, a colonel, reports directly to the head of Military Intelligence rather than to the head of research — precisely so that dissent could bypass the people whose assumptions were being challenged. Its job is to examine unlikely scenarios, question AMAN’s common assumptions, and propose adversarial evaluations.

By one account, the unit worked exactly as it was designed to. Channel 12 reported in January 2024 that its head issued four warnings in the three weeks before October 7th, arguing that Hamas was not deterred and would soon seek a confrontation, having identified deep processes that were changing the strategic situation. Two were written notes, dated 21 and 26 September, circulated to all senior decision-makers in the military and political echelons; two more were made during IDF discussions. They were not heeded.

There is a second, more uncomfortable account. In April 2025, Channel 12 reported that a devil’s-advocate team set up within the Gaza Division concluded, days before October 7th, that Hamas was stoking disturbances at the fence only to win better terms for continued quiet — that there was no other scenario. The report was unsourced, and the IDF’s published probes make no mention of any such check. If it is true, it is worse than warnings being ignored. It would mean the conceptzia was total enough to capture even the mechanism built to break it.

Either way, review and reform are plainly needed.

I accept there are layers of blame and guilt, and certainly those at the top cannot hide from their responsibility. But with Rosh Hashanah approaching, and with a little humility, I think we also need to look inwards. Society is the sum of the individuals who make it up. So when I bring an example from Fauda, I am not singling out the writers. I am pointing at all of us. The error did not happen in a vacuum, and culture is part of it. Whether it is journalists challenging the power and the elites of the day, or film-makers imagining things we haven’t imagined yet, culture and civil society have a role to play, and we shouldn’t underestimate it.

In an interview with Jewish News, Fauda’s co-creator Avi Issacharoff admitted his own failure of imagination, one shared by almost everyone here. He said he could not believe that even Hamas were capable of the atrocities they committed, and that he had been “naive to believe” they would respect the laws of war and the treatment of hostages and prisoners. What he found instead, he said, was that those who came from Gaza — Hamas members and the mob that followed them — showed no human aspect at all. They came to slaughter Jews, and they also killed Muslims and foreign workers from Nepal and Thailand who had no connection to the conflict whatsoever. And he made the point that stays with me most: in the days before the massacre, the national debate was about whether to let more Gazans into Israel to work, and whether some temporary arrangement with Hamas was possible.

Season 5 arrives on Netflix on 8 September. Raz and Issacharoff have said they threw out the scripts they had ready and rewrote the season around October 7th; it is set two years after the attack, and Doron’s first scene has him sitting with a therapist, trying to process what happened to him. Issacharoff has framed the season around a question rather than an answer: whether the revenge is worth it, and where the cycle takes you.

So I am going to watch, with fresh eyes and an open mind. What I want to see is characters who were wrong, and who know they were wrong. A control room that doesn’t know what is happening. A commander whose assumption fails him and who has to live in the wreckage of it. That would be a real heshbon nefesh, the accounting of the soul that this time of year asks of us, and it would do something for Israeli society and for the global Netflix audience that no army report can.

On the evidence so far, the writers may already have gone further than I expected. That would be a good way to begin a new year.