Review: The Occupation as Entertainment

Sayed Kashua, foreignpolicy.com

Image from article, with caption: Lior Raz, right, and Doron Ben-David play undercover Israeli operatives in Fauda, now available on Netflix.

The second season of the acclaimed TV thriller “Fauda” obscures the dark realities of Israeli rule in the West Bank.

Excerpt:

The producers of the Israeli television drama Fauda launched the second season of their popular show late last year with an ominous billboard campaign. Posted overnight in several cities around Israel, the billboards featured two sentences in Arabic script against an all-black background: “We are coming to get you” and “The action begins soon.” (The wording varied from sign to sign.) Nothing about the billboards suggested that they were advertisements for a TV series, and, to some Israelis, they looked like flags of the Islamic State: dark and menacing. The mayor of at least one city ordered them removed. But, to me, the billboards looked like something else altogether: a fearmongering campaign by Jews against Palestinians. They reminded me of Israel’s 2015 election, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu exhorted Jewish Israelis to get out and vote because Arabs were “going to the polling stations in droves.”

Fauda is about an Israeli undercover unit, whose members pose as Arabs as they charge through the West Bank breaking up cells of Palestinian militants and thwarting suicide bombings. The name itself means “chaos” or “mess” in Arabic. In the series, team members use it as a code word to signal that their identities have been blown during a clandestine operation. The show is suspenseful and often surprising. Some Israeli heroes die, and some Palestinian characters are portrayed at least somewhat sympathetically (though mainly when they are victims of Palestinian extremists). The first season was praised by critics and loved by viewers in Israel. The New York Times named it one of the best TV shows of 2017, and Netflix snapped up the rights to the second season, releasing it in May.

The problem with the series is that it purports to say something authentic and honest about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its creators — one of whom, Lior Raz, is a veteran of a real undercover unit in the Israeli military — have touted it as balanced and fair, the kind of show that should resonate with Palestinians as well as Israelis. In reality, however, Fauda depicts a sanitized version of the occupation of the West Bank, where Israeli soldiers have ruled over millions of disenfranchised Palestinians for more than half a century. The show’s success represents yet another victory for Israeli hasbara — the Hebrew term for public diplomacy [JB emphasis] or propaganda. ...