“We are at war and we will win it,” declared Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, this past Saturday. It was his response to the attack by the terrorist organization Hamas, which had entered Israeli soil to carry out a massacre with around 300 dead and hundreds injured. And citizens, at least those far removed from the conflict that dates back to the creation of the State of Israel after the Second World War, are looking for a way to understand this Palestinian-Israeli reality. As? Going to the series Fauda on Netflix.
The starting point is directly linked to Hamas. Doron (Lior Raz) retires from the special forces after killing Taufiq Hammed (Hisham Sulliman), also known as the Panther. He now he has a vineyard. But, when the intelligence services receive information indicating that Hammed is alive and will attend his brother Bashir's wedding, he decides to return to the field. This means sneaking into the marriage and, whether you like it or not, returning to the spiral of violence, that “chaos” referred to in the title of the series.
The series received good reviews since its premiere in 2015 for offering a thriller with action, intelligence and both a human and political vision of the conflict to those interested in geopolitics and the reality of Israel. In addition to having dialogues in both Arabic and Hebrew, the scripts by Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff allowed the members of Hamas and their close circles to be understood, despite the fact that they themselves were inspired by their experience in the Duvdevan Unit of the Israel Defense Forces.
It also has to do with the perspective of Issacharoff, a critic of Netanyahu's management of the conflict and a journalist by profession before signing the Fauda episodes. In 2002 he won the award for best reporter for his work covering the Second Intifada, the wave of violence that began after the visit of Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the Al-Aqsa mosque with the permission of the Israeli security chief. in the West Bank.
Fauda has so far broadcast four seasons (2015, 2018, 2020 and 2022) and has a fifth planned on the way, and in this time it has shown the losses suffered by both those who attack Israel as a measure of denunciation of the occupation of its territory. as well as by those who defend a State that carries out apartheid against the Palestinian population.
Although some defend fiction as an objective vision of the conflict and of the figures who, from the ground, mark the path and suffer its consequences, there are also those who accuse Fauda of being, after all, the vision of one of the parties, even though Issacharoff has been critical of Netanyahu's actions. It is still his reality.
You just have to see that Lior Raz, protagonist and co-creator, this week uploaded videos on social networks about his direct involvement in the events of these days, joining a team of volunteers to help two families in the bombed city of Sderot.
Before, on his networks, he had shared a statement: “Our country has been attacked by a cruel enemy who has killed children, women and men in cold blood in their beds. They have kidnapped babies, mothers and elderly people (...). We Israelis are once again in a difficult time. We know how to fight for our lives and we will never abandon a Jewish child. (...) We ask you: please remember this day later during the war. Remember who started the massacre. Hamas is an organization that wants to destroy the Jews and that does not want to talk about peace under any conditions.”
