By Mohamad El Sahily | Staff Writer
The last season of the Netflix TV series “Fauda” has skyrocketed into one of the top-watched titles in the Middle East. In particular, it tops the Netflix viewing charts in Lebanon, where much of the plot takes place, and the same is true in the United Arab Emirates, Romania, the Czech Republic and Greece. The show is ranked second in Qatar, India, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands, and third in France and Kenya. It is also in the top 10 most-watched series in Belgium, Turkey, Morocco and Jordan. Given the theme of the series, this is quite surprising to witness.
The series centers around a Shin Bet mista’arvim team which specializes in infiltration operations in the West Bank. Throughout its four seasons, the team operated in the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon. Written by Israeli star Lior Raz, who also stars as the protagonist Doron Kabilio, the plot twists and intense action, interspersed with the interaction between the Arab and the Israeli actors, was the ultimate catnip for an audience which has spent decades hearing news on Israel and Palestine. Unlike previous dramatization of the reality on the ground, everyone was introduced to aspects which they didn’t know of before.
To my knowledge, Arab audiences have never been exposed to such portrayals of Israelis. I think I speak for the majority of people when I say I was expecting to see a conventional portrayal of Israelis as soldiers, ones who did not care about the atrocities they committed, and the people they killed or hurt along the way. I was also expecting the portrayal of Palestinians either as victims or as bloodthirsty terrorists. This latter aspect was particularly jarring, given the racist vitriol emanating from Israeli governments. These are just some reasons for why Fauda had a large Arab viewership.
Let us focus on how the Palestinians were portrayed for a bit. Throughout the series, a more nuanced portrait of the Palestinian, as an individual and as a member of a bereaved society. Why is the portrayal of the grief of the Palestinians always dismissed? Why are they always supposed to fill a role whereby they are invincible, sheltered from human weakness, and resilient? This systematic dehumanization of Palestinian people is not particularly prominent in Fauda. We are exposed to a spectrum of emotions, feelings, mistakes, and miscalculations which leads to thrilling plot twists, which contributes to an amazing experience.
The last scene of the season, in particular, represented the “crescendo” of the series, and one can deduce so many messages from it. As the team lies wounded, in the middle of intense battle, they begin reciting a prayer in Hebrew. Suddenly, they switch to reciting the Muslim Shahadah, in near-perfect Arabic. I doubt many Arabs, if any at all, have seen Israelis speaking Arabic, much less the Muslim Shahadah. One cannot ignore that this was probably meant as an overture to Saudi Arabia, as part of Netanyahu’s promise to pursue further normalization agreements with Arab countries, specifically Saudi Arabia.
In summary, the series is amazing. You can choose to boycott it, in conformity to BDS principles, or you can just go ahead and watch it, and be exposed to a facet of humanity that you’ve never been exposed to as a resident in an Arab country. I must take this particular instance to emphasize that war, conflict, colonization, and social phenomena are nuanced, and rarely if ever stuck in binaries.