‘Fauda’ Is Back — and October 7 Changed Everything

The smashing success of the Israeli television show “Fauda” — the word is Arabic for “chaos” — suggests that the hunger for compelling depictions of the tragedies and triumphs of the Jewish state is no less ravenous among her enemies than her friends. The show’s fifth season, released with English subtitles last week, is being streamed with abandon across the Arab world, with good reason. It is the best — and most important — show on television.The show, created by Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff, has been excellent since its first episode aired a decade ago. Its achievement in this new season is something more significant: to metabolize the horrors of October 7, 2023, so that art amplifies the atrocity rather than distorting it. “Fauda” follows a group of Shin Bet commandos who go undercover in the harrowing heartlands of Islamist terrorism. The creators write from their own experience in such units.“Fauda” doesn’t waver in its conviction that Israel is beset by savage foes, but its strength comes from a commitment to show even monsters in the round. Its protagonists — led by Mr. Raz’s Doron Kabilio — are Mizrahi Jews who often seem more at home in the ambiguities and moral compromises of undercover assignments than in the bright light of civilian life. The show features tremendous violence, but also wounded hearts and tired flesh.Hakim Djaziri and Mélanie Laurent in ‘Fauda.’ NetflixThis latest season starts roughly in the present, but its action is set in bloody motion by October 7. The family of one of Doron’s fellow soldiers, Eli (Yaakov Zada-Daniel), was murdered by Hamas alongside the son of a Bedouin friend of his, Salem (Byan Antee). Footage shot by the perpetrators — Hamas was so proud of its barbarism that it captured it on GoPros — leads Eli and Salem to pursue the killers to Marseille, where a Hamas cell is regrouping.In familiar “Fauda” fashion, this is an off-grid and unsanctioned mission, one fueled by Tha’r, or blood vengeance. Bodies pile up and events spin off their axis as Eli’s quest sucks in Doron, their comrade Steve (Doron Ben-David), and eventually their superiors in Tel Aviv, most notably the indelible Gabi Ayub (Itzik Cohen). The show is unsparing in its account of how Islamist radicalism takes root on European soil. What blooms is poisonous fruit.The season’s villain is the fictional Saaed al-Khatib, known as the “Sinwar of Europe.” He harbors his own baroque fantasies of revenge behind impeccably tailored suits and a perfectly pitched French accent. Some of al-Khatib’s troops have done their stints killing Jews with the Nukhba forces, but he also recruits trainee terrorists from radicalized French youths searching for a cause. The intifada has well and truly gone global.Hakim Djaziri in ‘Fauda.’ NetflixWhile Europe has served as a backdrop for “Fauda” before — stretches of its fourth season unfolded in Brussels — this is its most extended consideration of how the Jewish state faces threats far beyond Gaza and the West Bank. One of al-Khatib’s most loyal followers is Anne (Mélanie Laurent), who was married to a Hamas commander Doron dispatches to his eternal reward. This is radical chic, kaffiyeh-clad, clueless and crazy in equal measure.An especially memorable character is the Marseilles detective Pierre Bruno, who discloses himself to be something of a sinister Jacques Clouseau. He tells the Israelis that they “are not in Tel Aviv anymore” and that “you Israelis walked in like you own the place, bringing your wars into our streets.” He portrays himself as a Marseillaise, but his accent is pure Montmartre, and his sympathies lean toward Hamas.The show’s homing in on the nexus between Islamist terror and European radicalism evinces awareness of the shifting geo-political terrain. Days before “Fauda” was released in America, a slew of European countries announced sanctions against the Jewish state. Antisemitism has crested across the Continent in the wake of October 7, and being an Israeli abroad has become, at times, a dangerous thing to be.“Fauda” offers a study in contrast with the documentary “NAZA,” which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month. That movie, from Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, alleges that the Israel Defense Forces used AI to inflict mass casualties on Palestinian civilians. Israel forcefully denies those accusations. “Fauda” refuses to tell a one-sided story of Israeli perfidy. Mélanie Laurent and Lior Raz in ‘Fauda.’ NetflixThis season’s plots have fully sprung when an extraordinary two-episode flashback returns viewers to the fall morning when Hamas breached the border. Each episode contains a warning, and the two are self-contained, so they can be skipped without sacrificing comprehension of the season as a whole. These directorial decisions acknowledge that, as one character explains, the horrors of October 7 have become the “air we breathe.”The show’s success across the Arab world could be attributable to the force with which Messrs. Raz and Issacharoff have remembered October 7. Amid a storm of slander directed at Israel over the last three years, this narration of the events of the day — the indiscriminate slaughter, the unfathomable cruelty, the hunting of the young at a music festival, the sexual violence, the wanton sadism — amounts to a form of witness. It might also be news to some.None of this season transpires at Gaza, a decision that some take as an evasion of the war that followed the massacres in the Negev. A new reality, though, is alluded to when one of the terrorists notes that the Israelis “are not as patient as before.” The show has never been overly concerned with restraint, but this season transpires in a new reality where even the farthest bounds of the fathomable have been breached. “I’m the last survivor,” Steve declares in despair.Lior Raz and Yaakov Zada-Daniel in ‘Fauda.’ NetflixThe force of “Fauda” as fiction is hard-won. One of the central characters of earlier seasons, Sagi (Idan Amedi), is absent because Mr. Amedi was severely injured at Gaza in 2024 while serving as a reservist in the Israel Defense Forces. A producer, Matan Meir, was killed at a booby-trapped tunnel in 2023. Mr. Raz’s family huddled in a bomb shelter while Hamas fighters prowled their house, and he and Mr. Issacharoff both worked to rescue people from the inferno.Mr. Raz told the Times of London this month that “It was very hard to have a narrative of the other side after October 7. We cannot sympathise and empathise with Hamas who massacred Israelis.” There are limits to empathy, and no civilized mind ought to be able to find common cause with, say, the architects of the Final Solution or October 7. An Israeli on the show knows that some know only the pull to “desecrate” all that Jews hold sacred in this punishing Promised Land.Yet “Fauda” offers a jagged hope. The parents and grandparents of its Israelis were the neighbors — for millennia, in some cases — of the Arabs with whom Doron and his company are locked in battle. They literally speak the same language, and the show is littered with moments of human connection shadowed by subterfuge. The season ends with the prayer of the Mourner’s Kaddish: “He who creates peace in His celestial heights, may He create peace for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen.”

‘Fauda’ Is Back — and October 7 Changed Everything

‘Fauda’ Is Back — and October 7 Changed Everything

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