Barbara Kay: Netflix’s fifth season of Fauda confronts the traumas of October 7

Fauda. Credit: Netflix Photo by Netflix

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Season five of the wildly popular Netflix series Fauda, meaning “chaos” was released in September. Reality-based, Fauda chronicles the fictional adventures of a special-ops Israel Defence Forces (IDF) counter-terrorism unit called Mista’aravim, which is the Hebraization of an Arabic word meaning “they who become Arabs.”

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Seasons one to four ran from 2016-2023. Season five tackles the effects of the greatest calamity to befall the Jewish state in its 80-year history — October 7.

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Charismatic actor Lior Raz, the series’ co-creator with fellow IDF veteran and journalist Avi Issacharoff, stars as Fauda’s protagonist, Doron Kabilio. Doron is a distinctly Israeli hero: scruffy, blunt, tenacious, he is respected for his extreme courage and competence, but his impulsivity and low tolerance for submission to authority, traits that often account for operational success, cause tension with his commanders and brothers-in-arms.

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The Mista’aravim actors are Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern provenance. Raz is of Algerian and Iraqi refugee descent, and Arabic his mother tongue. In the IDF, he served as a commando in Sayeret Duvdevan, the unit that mirrors what his character Doron does in Fauda. The Hamas roles are played by Arab Israelis, both Muslim and Christian. One of the characters in the Hamas team is an Arab but looks European. In Fauda, his superiors jokingly call him “the Jew.”

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Of Season five, Raz told the Jewish Chronicle, “We started to write from our trauma. It was the hardest thing we ever did in our lives, because it meant dealing with a wound that’s still open for us as writers, Israelis and for me, as an actor.” But they couldn’t wait for healing. They started writing when the hostages were still in the tunnels, not knowing how the war would end.

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Five opens two years after October 7. The mood is unrelievedly grim. Grief, guilt and a gnawing hunger for revenge consume Doron and his former Mista’aravim comrades, Eli and Steve, as the cameras follow them through the breath-stopping peaks and valleys of their daring mission to foil a major Hamas plot intended to take place on Israel’s Independence Day. This time, it is being hatched in Marseilles.

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Episodes seven and eight are stand-alone flashbacks of the October 7 invasion in which Eli’s stepchildren are murdered, along with his wife, who is also raped, prefaced by a trigger warning. These 90 minutes aren’t easy viewing, but discretion was observed; the scenes only point to similar depravities that occurred that day rather than re-enacting them.

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Like previous seasons, five is extremely popular. Already, it’s in Netflix’s top ten. This season, it’s number one in Israel and Lebanon.

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Why is Fauda so loved when Israel is so hated?

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For one thing, Fauda is earthbound, uncluttered by political distractions. The viewer is never subjected to theories about Zionism, settler colonialism, the Nakba, the Resistance, the two-state solution, the machinations of Bibi Netanyahu or debates over human rights. Fauda doesn’t tell but rather shows the viewer the means by which Israel’s security is maintained, which is not always pretty, and the personal sacrifices exacted from those who maintain it.