This much-acclaimed show about Israeli anti-terrorist operations in the Palestinian territories has always been raw and gritty, but its fifth season takes it to an unprecedented level. The series, once again written by Lior Raz and Abi Issacharoff, was conceived in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, and an aura of anguish and despair hovers over the narrative. Episodes seven and eight, which are dedicated to depicting the October 7 events, are preceded by trigger warnings (if you’d prefer not to watch them, you’ll still be able to follow the unfolding narrative).
Inevitably these make agonising viewing, even though they don’t go into the fine detail of the episodes of rape and torture widely reported to have taken place. They show enough of the horror to let your imagination fill in the rest of it, not least the moment when Raz’s character, Doron, finds himself inside a container full of the bloodied corpses of revellers who’d been attending the Nova music festival. The way these episodes are placed towards the end of the season’s 11 instalments makes dramatic sense, since it crystallises the sense of ominous foreboding which saturates the show and has been steadily building in intensity. We’ve seen the effects of the appalling conflict on the characters, and now we see the cause.
The stocky, bullet-headed Doron is once again at the core of the action (though he’s still struggling with post-October 7 PTSD), while one of the dominant themes is the fate of his old comrade Eli (Yaakov Zada-Daniel). The action kicks off when Eli is visited at his home in Israel by his Israeli Bedouin friend and neighbour, Salem. Eli’s wife and children were slaughtered on October 7, while Salem lost his son, Yusuf, in the same attack. Salem proposes a trip to Marseille, where he has discovered that their killer is living. He wants revenge. Eli’s despairing admission that “I have no life… it’s all black” aptly depicts his state of mind.
The trip to France sets off a chain reaction of fateful events, not least the arrival in Marseille of Doron, despatched by secret service chief Gabi Ayub (Itzik Cohen) to stop Eli doing something catastrophically stupid. But it’s too late, since the bloodletting has already begun. The upshot is that Eli and Doron, in their undercover personas, end up being recruited by the local Hamas cell in Marseille, and find themselves part of a plan for a major attack inside Israel to coincide with the country’s Independence Day and Memorial Day.
The French connection helps to underline the international nature of terrorism (Season 4 featured terrorist operations in Brussels), and it has also brought about the casting of French actor/director Mélanie Laurent as Anne Aubert, who adds new colours to the mixture. She’s married to Maher Zeytoun (Carlos Gharzuzi), who, as far as Anne knows, is an accountant working in Marseille who also helps out at Yummah, ostensibly a Palestinian community centre in the city. The subsequent revelations of the extent of his involvement in terrorism will come as a crushing blow to her.
Her presence in the plot is a useful device to throw light on the way the intractable Israeli-Palestine conflict can seem incomprehensible from the viewpoint of a (relatively) safe European home, and she brings a human perspective that often gets lost in the ongoing struggle. Meanwhile, Marseille is a city with a large Arab population, a legacy of France’s colonial history in North Africa, so the depiction of a Hamas collaborator inside the French police, Pierre Bruno, feels entirely plausible.
As usual, this is a finely-written and skilfully produced piece of work, but while Fauda has always managed to incorporate both Arab and Israeli viewpoints, this season, for obvious reasons, feels more decisively tilted towards an Israeli perspective. It also doesn't address the issue of Israel's retaliatory invasion of Gaza, with its horrifying body-count. Nonetheless, it topped the Netflix chart in Lebanon, and has reached the Top 10 in other Arab countries including Jordan, Qatar, Morocco and Egypt.
But the way that the October 7 attacks were greeted in many quarters with jubilation felt like the world had suffered a giant electric shock, while the traumas which have rocked Ed Sheeran’s current US tour are further evidence of the fierce emotions evoked by the Palestine issue. Perhaps politics and showbiz shouldn’t mix... but they frequently do.
