Why Fauda Is So Popular in the Arab World
· The Atlantic
Before this week, I’d never watched an episode of Fauda, the Israeli-made, Netflix-distributed counterterrorism thriller. The show stars Lior Raz as Doron Kabilio, an undercover Israeli mista’arvim (Arabic-speaking) operative who over the course of the show infiltrates various Hamas and Hezbollah cells.
What drew me to binge all 59 episodes in less than a week was the news that the show had catapulted into Netflix’s Top 10 across a range of Arab countries. In the second week of September, it was the No. 1 show in Lebanon, No. 4 in both Jordan and Qatar, No. 5 in the United Arab Emirates, and No. 9 in Kuwait.
Visit xsportfeed.quest for more information.
For any Israeli drama—much less one about undercover operatives apprehending (and often killing) Palestinian and Lebanese militants—to become a hit across the Arab world is remarkable. For it to happen in a season partially devoted to the events of October 7, 2023, and their aftermath is nothing short of astonishing.
Cross-pollination between Israel and the Arab world has been limited ever since Israel’s independence in 1948, with only six out of the 22 Arab states even recognizing Israel’s existence as a state. But although negative tropes and stereotypes about Israelis and Jews have been commonplace for decades across the Arab world, that doesn’t necessarily preclude people having a human interest in seeing the other side, or hearing its side of the story.
Fauda is also a show with a large and diverse cast of multifaceted Palestinian characters, with their own dilemmas, backstories, and motivations.
[Read: Watching Israeli TV’s Fauda as a Palestinian]
What I took away from the early seasons was a sense of sorrow at the circumstances of life for Israelis and Palestinians, dwelling amid the chaos. I’m Palestinian myself; my father was one of 10 siblings from a rural village in the West Bank. I grew up in England. But I always hoped for peace, and for a solution that could end the military rule in the West Bank and give people on both sides a chance at a more peaceful life. I lived through and witnessed the repeated failures of peace processes in the 2000s, and the gradual deterioration of relations—and loss of hope for peace—in the 2010s that ultimately led to October 7.
Fauda dramatizes this spiral in a compelling way. It shows people on both sides—often spurred by their grief, fear, or hunger for revenge—convinced that one more operation or one more act of violence is the answer, only to create the next impetus of grievance driving the next round of revenge.
Violence in this story rarely settles an old score without simultaneously creating a new one. So chaos feeds more chaos. Doron’s unassailable plot armor allows him to bounce from chaotic event to chaotic event. It’s almost Shakespearean. Where Hamlet’s fatal flaw was indecision, and Macbeth’s fatal flaw was “vaulting ambition,” Doron’s flaw (albeit not one that has yet proved fatal) is simply a tendency to keep riding on his instincts.
I read this, at least in part, as a critique of the Israeli political direction of the 2010s and early 2020s. Israel survived many wars and intifadas, and emerged stronger. This may have stoked the delusion that the conflict, rather than needing to be resolved, could simply be contained.
But trying to contain the conflict would not work.
In April 2014, when Fauda was being developed, one of its co-creators, Avi Issacharoff, was expressing such fears: writing in The Times of Israel about the faltering Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, arguing that both sides had an interest in keeping peace talks alive, and warning that the two sides might be “headed toward conflict” if not.
One of the most memorable moments in the show comes in the first season, when Abu Ahmad, a Hamas commander who is that season’s major antagonist, seemingly anticipates Hamas’s real-life logic behind the October 7 attack. He plans to unleash a sarin-gas attack in a synagogue, intending to provoke Israel into an overreaction that might cause a wider Middle Eastern war that could threaten Israel’s existence. He says: “The Jews will respond with an extremely severe retaliation. They’ll be committing such unprecedented war crimes that all Islamic states will intervene, including Iran.”
Abu Ahmad is ultimately taken down by his own young protégé, Walid, who discovers that Doron has penetrated the organization under an assumed identity. Walid shoots his mentor from behind. The proposed sarin attack never takes place.
Across the next three seasons—as the counterpunching between Israel and the Islamist Palestinian groups continues—Doron gets sucked back into espionage again and again, in storylines that can feel eerily contemporary, including the kidnapping of Israeli hostages and the kidnapping of Doron’s family members.
In real life, the strategic logic that Abu Ahmad describes in Season 1 is not far removed from what Hamas’s leadership appears to have contemplated before October 7. Hamas documents captured in Gaza show that Yahya Sinwar hoped a spectacular attack on Israel would invite a devastating Israeli response in Gaza and ignite a much broader confrontation.
The October 7 attack did not quite produce the regional uprising that Hamas appears to have hoped for. But the consequences were still immense. Hamas killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostages. The subsequent war in Gaza left more than 71,000 Palestinians dead, according to Gaza health-authority figures accepted by the Israel Defense Forces, including thousands of combatants. The majority of the housing and infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed, displacing most of Gaza’s roughly 2.1 million people. The conflict spread, as Hezbollah attacked from Lebanon, the Houthis joined in from Yemen, and, eventually, Iran launched direct exchanges of fire with Israel—just as Abu Ahmad had hoped.
Equally consequentially, images of the war in Gaza generated mass protests abroad, disputes between Israel and allied governments—including the United Kingdom, France, and Canada—and a fierce international argument over the proportionality of Israel’s campaign. Today, for the first time in history, polling suggests that more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis.
That is the world into which Fauda’s fifth season arrives. The chaos escaped all of the boundaries that had previously contained it.
Season 5 feels very different. For one thing, it starts in 2025, and depicts October 7 in a two-episode flashback. This seems to have been done as a way to make viewing them optional for those who do not want to relive the events of that day.
The show’s depiction of October 7 is extraordinarily effective, although it’s nowhere near as difficult to view as the real footage, which shows militants doing things like beheading agricultural workers with garden hoes. But it does convey the confusion, the panic, and the brutality displayed by Hamas toward Israelis, including Muslim Israelis. It’s brilliantly shot, emotionally raw, and captivating.
This will no doubt challenge some of the Arab viewership that the show has built up. Depicting these events in great detail is a challenge to those who falsely claim that the war in Gaza was unprovoked, as well as to those who do not believe that Hamas committed war crimes, or that October 7 was an Israeli false flag.
I suspect that few of Hamas’s true believers will be swayed to sympathy. But at the very least, some of them will watch and have their ideas challenged.
I struggled, though, with the fact that Fauda shows October 7 in clear detail, while avoiding showing the military response by Israel. The war in Gaza, which killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, exists mostly off-screen. The drama of the season is instead concerned with stopping a repeat of the October 7 attack coming from Hamas forces in Syria.
There is a broader asymmetry, too. Fauda shows the ideology of its Palestinian antagonists in great detail, with jihadist speeches, cries of “Allahu Akbar,” and green Hamas headbands. But across the entire show’s span, there’s much less heed paid to the ideology of Israelis.
Doron and his team are treated as, more or less, nonideological counterterrorism professionals. But I always found myself wondering: In an election, whom would Doron vote for? What is his opinion on the West Bank settlements? How does he feel about Benjamin Netanyahu? Did he ever believe that a permanent peace is possible between Palestinians and Israelis? Did he lose that belief after October 7, as so many of his countrymen did?
The show gives us very little in the way of answers.
We learn little to nothing about the ideas sustaining the military occupation of the West Bank. Nor do we really see any of the religious-nationalist and far-right currents within Israeli society that have become more influential in the years over which the series has aired.
[Graeme Wood: Israel can’t postpone its reckoning forever]
That doesn’t diminish the show’s intrigue, or its achievements. But it’s a blind spot—and one I hope the showrunners can address in future seasons.
Still, this has not hindered the show’s popularity with Arab audiences. Part of that comes down to accessibility—a lot of the dialogue is in Arabic, many of the jokes are in Arabic, and the characters listen to Arabic music. It may also reflect curiosity at seeing an Israeli show portraying Palestinians as complex characters rather than as an unknowable menace on the other side of the checkpoint. And some viewers may simply be wondering, Did they portray us accurately, or are they making things up?
But the core of the show’s appeal surely rests on its ability to tell a gripping story, with propulsive characters. Drama is a universal language; in its own way, it can bring people together even if they drastically disagree with one another. Viewers don’t need to share Doron’s politics or nationality to understand his grief, loyalty, recklessness, fear, or love for his family. The same is true of the Palestinian characters. We all share the same vocabulary of human emotions and mistakes. That enables us to become invested in characters with whom we may profoundly disagree.
And—no doubt—there are also some Arab viewers who are fed up with conflict with Israel, and are tired of the anti-Israeli “resistance” narratives popularized by Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. They may find, in the fictions of Fauda, a more realistic portrayal of their world than they are usually offered. As Mohammad El Sahily wrote for Now Lebanon last week: “Hezbollah’s decision to initiate war with Israel in 2023 and again in 2026 has increased the sensitivity of this topic, especially as Israel killed thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.” In place of a long-deferred national conversation, “Lebanese citizens watch Fauda on Netflix and try to reconcile what they watch with what they see in the news about Israel.”