The ‘Fauda’ Enigma

The fifth season of Netflix’s global thriller, “Fauda,” is now streaming, ten years after the hit television series first introduced the gritty realism and high drama of Israeli counterespionage to the world of undercover cop procedurals. It has been an improbable hit since its launch.

Each season landed in the top 10 in the 43 countries in which Netflix aired the show—doing especially well across Europe and Asia. Season five has already nabbed the top spot in both Israel and Lebanon. In non-English-speaking Netflix territories, the new season is charting at number four, its highest position ever.

That means in many of the nations that believe Israel has no right to exist and routinely root for terrorists to slaughter Jews, a TV show that depicts Israeli covert operatives outsmarting and dispatching Arabs has an inexplicably loyal global audience.

Counterterrorism dramas are fan favorites around the world. But that generally holds true for James Bond and MI6, and the CIA aided by Seal Team Six. Historically, cultural entertainment that showcases the derring-do of Mossad, Shin Bet and the IDF . . . not so much.

The world likes its Jews as victims, so long as they do not become objects of special pleading or self-pity. Leveraging the suffering of Jews is, apparently, intolerable. Dead Jews must end up devoid of sympathy. That’s the kind of plot conceit an audience can get behind.

The world likes its Jews as victims, so long as they do not become objects of special pleading or self-pity. Leveraging the suffering of Jews is, apparently, intolerable. Dead Jews must end up devoid of sympathy. That’s the kind of plot conceit an audience can get behind.

In no way can Jews be depicted as heroes. There is no room in prime time for that. Battled-hardened Jewish warriors or Israeli spy craft secret agents have rarely captured the public’s imagination. “Exodus” (1960), “Masada” (1981), “Munich” (2005), “Victory at Entebbe” (1976), “Raid on Entebbe” (1977), “The House on Garibaldi Street” (1979), “The Debt” (2010), “Operation Finale” (2018), “Uprising” (2001), and “The Red Sea Diving Resort” (2019) were all inspired, heart-stopping tales within the thriller genre. Some were modest theatrical successes, but none compared to Bond’s “Skyfall.”

“Fauda” is the one exception—in terms of its popularity.  As enigma, that is more difficult to account for.

The global public likes to see Jews “shaken, not stirred,” not their drinks, which ought to be Manischewitz, straight up. Wearing ill-fitting suits with catsup stains. Jews, after all, are crafty like New England Patriots owner, Robert Kraft, depriving an antisemitic, pro-Hamas rapper of a stage. They pull the levers of power; they don’t do cloak and dagger.

But in that way, “Fauda” always fit the bill. None of the cast members were stereotypically Hollywood Handsome. It featured Jews straight out of central casting: balding, gruffly unshaven, plodding but surprisingly spry with Krav Maga.

There were no “Fauda Girls” cast as vixens, villains or femme fatales. No field operative ever appeared in a tuxedo playing high-stakes poker or taking a spin at the roulette wheel at a casino. The characters had sex, but real sex—not tongue-in-cheek orgasms around the world.

Apparently, each cyber-skilled, GPS-savvy Israeli operative was licensed to kill, but received the same lukewarm support among Hollywood elites as any number of snubbed Taylor Sheridan shows at the Emmys.

“Fauda,” which means “chaos” in Arabic, is never short on taking its special undercover unit within the Israeli Defense Forces on nail-biting escapades. The series coincides with the last two wars Israel has waged inside Gaza, but many of the covert operations have taken place in the West Bank, Lebanon, Belgium and France.

The essential renarrative arc of the show is the subterranean depths of its undercover work. Because they are Israelis, they are comprised largely of Mizrahi Jews, and some Bedouins—meaning they look just like Arabs and not like the Jews of Poland, to the great disgust of Israel-bashers everywhere. These Jewish James Bonds speak Arabic and know their way around a mosque better than most Arabs. This makes their counterterror raids, hostage rescues, and urban warfare in dense civilian environments all the more death-defying, and believable.

And they are not, necessarily, always the good guys. “Fauda” could just as easily be Arabic for “flawed.” They grapple with moral dilemmas and often find a way to spare the Arabs they target. Their enemies are referred to as “terrorists,” not Muslims. They are very much unlike the Islamists who threaten their nation with terror, who have no ambivalence at all about murdering Jews.

The unit may disguise themselves as Arabs, but they do not masquerade their intentions or the inner conflict that has rendered them deeply damaged by all the death they have witnessed and participated in.

Season five is the first to have launched after the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel. One of its cast members, an actual reservist in the IDF, was seriously wounded in the Gaza counterstrike.

Its real time is two years after the attack, and “Fauda” takes full advantage of the backstory of Hamas’ bloody joyride and Israel’s traumatic demand for blood vengeance. The members of the unit take the losses of that day personally.

The unit’s former commander, Eli, loses his entire family on October 7—both children slaughtered, his wife raped by a Hamas officer, then murdered. Doron, the show’s central protagonist, portrayed by Lior Raz, who is a co-creator and co-writer for each of “Fauda’s” seasons, saw the events on October 7 play out firsthand.

We see him in flashback trying to rescue teenagers but arriving too late, haunted by the image of dead bodies piled high inside blast-resistant shelters. Girls with blood dripping from their pelvis, ringing the crime scene.

Doron is relying on psychotherapy to return to a life among the living. Eli discovers the man who murdered his family is alive and well in Marseilles. Another Hamas plot, an October 7 encore, is being planned and must be thwarted.  Both men return to both active and moral duty.

The fact that “Fauda” continues to be so popular around the world, and yet global public opinion still seems to be rooting for terrorists, tells you everything you need to know about the twisted reality, moral inversions, and upside-down perversions that Israel faces in waging these wars against the traffickers in terror.

The fact that “Fauda” continues to be so popular around the world, and yet global public opinion still seems to be rooting for terrorists, tells you everything you need to know about the twisted reality, moral inversions, and upside-down perversions that Israel faces in waging these wars against the traffickers in terror.

News gets misreported. Casualties count for one side only, and the numbers never add up. International law gets rewritten on the fly. Blatant lies—“genocide,” “mass starvation,” “apartheid”—are too beguiling to rebut. The world simply won’t allow Israel to humanize the reasons for why it has always been forced to defend itself—even when a hit global TV show reveals the truth so graphically but can’t seem to move its audience to translate what they see on their screens to what they feel in their hearts.

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is a contributing writer for White Rose magazine. His most recent book is titled, “Beyond Proportionality: Israel’s Just War in Gaza.”