‘Fauda,’ an Israeli TV Hit, Lets Viewers Escape — Into the Conflict

TEL AVIV, Israel — No one in Israel’s television industry was much interested when Avi Issacharoff and Lior Raz first pitched “Fauda,” about a team of undercover operatives hunting Palestinian terrorists across the West Bank. And no wonder.

Audiences here liked to escape — into talent shows like “The Voice” or “Master Chef,” where the competition is individual, not national; or reality shows like “Big Brother,” where the conflict is personal, not political; or fiction like “Loaded,” a dramedy about a high-tech startup whose owners become overnight millionaires, playing to Israel’s self-image as the next Silicon Valley.

Issacharoff and Raz, who began writing the series in 2010, had the last laugh. “Fauda,” Arabic for “chaos,” was a hit with audiences and critics alike: In Israel, it’s the most successful show in the history of the Yes satellite network, while The New York Times called it one of the best international series of 2017. Its second season, which debuted in Hebrew and Arabic last December in Israel, becomes available on Netflix with English subtitles Thursday. A third is already in the works, though the show’s popularity also put a target on its back: The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement demanded that Netflix dump the series, calling it “racist propaganda” that “promotes and legitimizes the war crimes committed by death squads” in the Israeli army.

What explains its success here is a different kind of escapism: a chance for Israelis to visit places and engage with subjects that they ordinarily avoid — and then return home safely with the flip of a switch.

Living in Israel means living with the conflict in a way that Americans may have a hard time understanding. Smartphones routinely buzz with text messages about the latest knife attack or vehicle-ramming. Apps tied into the civil defense system send people running to bomb shelters when incoming rockets threaten their communities.

For many Israelis, the tall concrete wall cordoning off much of the West Bank provides a kind of needed mental barrier: They can tune out the conflict, and the Palestinians, if they choose. And many do.

“People want to have fun,” Issacharoff said over breakfast near his home in Tel Aviv. “People want to go to the beach, to eat in restaurants, to sit in coffee shops, to listen to good music.”

Yet the work being done in their name by Israeli counterterrorism forces never ceases.

In “Fauda,” that work is shown as gritty, messy and morally complicated. Members of the undercover unit, career operatives in their late 30s and 40s, show tenderness toward their children and lovers at home, and then go off and commit torture and worse.

“It’s like we lift up the curtain to a place that nobody talks about,” said Raz, who once served in Duvdevan, an elite commando force known for posing as Arabs, and plays the lead character, Doron Kavillio. “You don’t understand the mental price those people are paying for their actions. What the real job is.”

Rules and laws are routinely broken; orders are flouted. What is unquestioned is the righteousness of the cause.

By portraying Israeli violence and depicting some of the humiliation that Palestinians experience daily, its creators said, “Fauda” allows viewers to peer across the barrier wall at some of the ugliest aspects of the occupation, then retreat to safety while consoling themselves that it’s all just make-believe.

“When you see a group of Israelis executing someone, it’s not an escape. But then you say, it’s a TV show, so it is an escape," Issacharoff said. “When you see a group of Israelis beating the crap out of an old man, it’s terrible, it’s really terrible. But you can say, it’s over there — it’s fiction.”

Slightly different from an escape, but no less transporting, is how “Fauda” can allow viewers here to momentarily remove themselves from the numbing zero-sum game of the conflict and its dueling narratives. Ordinarily, each side sees itself as victim, the other as perpetrator. Empathy is in short supply, as is interest in reviving a peace process that may have run its course after a quarter-century.

But by creating textured characters on both sides — Israeli heroes who show themselves capable of the worst kinds of evil, Palestinian villains who show themselves capable of the best kinds of love — “Fauda” may have pierced some of the calluses caused by so many years of friction.

“I’m getting emails from Israelis who are saying for the first time in their life they feel empathy and compassion for the other side,” Raz said. “And the same from Gaza and Kuwait and Lebanon and Turkey.” Helping create those emotional connections was the casting of appealing actors as the lead adversaries: Hisham Suleiman as Abu Ahmad, a feared Hamas militant, in Season 1, and Firas Nassar as Nidal al-Makdasi, a radical who breaks with Hamas and affiliates with the Islamic State, in Season 2.

“It gave them the option to love the Hamas terrorist,” Issacharoff said of viewers. “It allows women to think about the Hamas guy who becomes an ISIS guy as a sex symbol. But it’s a show. I mean, a true terrorist cannot be a sex symbol.”

Issacharoff and Raz concede that their show is an escape for Israelis, its intended audience, far more than for Palestinians. (Season 3 will be the first written with an international audience in mind.) Their writers’ room, for example, includes no Palestinians.

And the show has met with a great deal of Palestinian criticism. Some seized on the Israeli-accented Arabic of the undercover operatives sent to infiltrate West Bank villages and cities, calling it ludicrous to suggest that their true identities would not be discovered the moment they opened their mouths to speak.

Issacharoff, a fluent Arabic speaker, pleaded guilty to this: Few of the Israeli actors spoke the language before joining “Fauda.” One major character — a feared interrogator named Capt. Gabi Ayub — is played by Itzik Cohen, a Jewish comedic actor who made his name as a drag queen.

But Issacharoff said the cast needed to meet only the threshold of realism for an Israeli audience, not of survival behind enemy lines. “I’m not going to send them to an undercover operation in Ramallah,” he said.

More substantively, Palestinian critics observe that “Fauda” shrinks from fully conveying the oppressiveness of the Israeli occupation.

The indignities Palestinians experience aren’t entirely overlooked: The very first episode showed the confiscation of a Palestinian car at an Israeli checkpoint. But other pernicious aspects of the occupation — the demolitions of Palestinians’ homes, the evictions of whole villages of Bedouins — have yet to make it on screen.

Issacharoff said he didn’t want to belabor the occupation — and suggested that “even for Palestinians, it’s boring.”

“Among Palestinians it’s kind of a joke,” he said. “A student’s late for class, the teacher asks him why, and he says, ‘The occupation.'”

But Sayed Kashua, an Israeli-Arab humorist who wrote the acclaimed 2007 series “Avoda Aravit,” or “Arab Labor,” said he found nothing funny about “Fauda” and complained that marketing the show as telling the story of the conflict from both sides was misleading.

“If an Israeli creator feels he needs to humanize Palestinians, it means that he begins with the idea that they’re not human,” Kashua, now a professor at the University of Illinois, said in a telephone interview. “And making them cry or fall in love is not humanizing. That’s an exotic way to portray Palestinians. You cannot humanize a murderer by showing him crying when he hugs his mother.” He also argued that “Fauda” too easily jibes with a widespread Israeli belief that there is no partner for peace on the Palestinian side, and that even the most ardent Palestinian militants are motivated by personal revenge, rather than by political beliefs or national aspirations. “It’s a given,” he said. “Like it’s from God. There are murderers; there’s an always ongoing struggle. But it’s not true. There are reasons for that situation, and there are good people who are trying to solve it. And if you’re not pointing to the historic or political reasons, then you’re not talking about a possible solution.”

Still, Kashua allowed that that might be a bit much to expect from a commercial drama.

While Issacharoff said he was content, for now, merely to open a few hearts and minds, he and Raz made no bones about their own biases. Asked about a villainous character who blows up one of his friends — a plot point many Palestinians objected to — Issacharoff observed that years ago, when suicide bombings were more frequent, terrorist commanders had exploited emotionally weak people to carry them out, rather than volunteering themselves or their own children.

“I’m an Israeli, I’m Jewish, I’m a Zionist,” he said. “I have the Israeli narrative. I cannot understand, still, after 18 years in the field, these suicide attacks. So if someone is sending his guy to do one, yes, he doesn’t care about him, and he’s a terrible human being.

“And you know what else I’m sure about?” he added. “That the majority of the Palestinians, deep in their heart — they know that.”