Undercover agents and Hamas terrorists, true love and escalating hatred… The TV series FAUDA (Arabic for 'Chaos') has it all to become a thrilling story about good and bad in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But this is exactly what it succeeds in avoiding: colouring the conflict in black and white, showing the hero and the villain. FAUDA manages to depict the two-sided story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its complexity and intricacy.
The story sounds simple at first: A team of Israeli undercover operatives hunts down Abu Ahmed, a notorious (and fictional) Hamas terrorist. But the series gets into the depth of the personal struggles of every character involved. It has been lauded for its, the use of Arabic as main language and the empathy it creates in viewers for the undercover agents as well as for the Hamas characters. It shows the human face of both sides, the daily sorrows of the protagonists and their families.
The series is based on the personal experiences of its creators Lior Raz, also leading actor, and Avi Issacharoff. We met Lior Raz in Brussels where he shared with us his personal take on the show. He suffered from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder after being discharged from the army: “I couldn’t sit with my back towards the door... While having a conversation I would imagine a terrorist getting into the bar with a Kalashnikov, shooting everyone and what I should do in that moment, if there is something in the room that I could use to stop him. This is how I thought until I wrote the series. Writing the series was for me a kind of healing process because I started to talk about these issues and deal with them.”
Next to his trauma from his army service the show also helped Lior Raz to deal with the loss of his first love that died in a terrorist stabbing attack at the age of 19: The fourth episode, in which one of the protagonists loses his girlfriend in a suicide bombing, is dedicated to Lior’s first love. “I didn’t talk about this for 20 years. And now we gave her life again, to my girlfriend.”
To the creators’ big surprise the series turned into one of the highest ranked shows in Israel – with huge support from the Israeli as well as the Palestinian public, no matter where on the political spectrum. Although it “opens wounds” of the past and present on both sides FAUDA “shows the other side of the border, it humanises the other side“, says Lior Raz. He received reactions from much unexpected audiences. A girl from Kuwait wrote to him that her education was that Israeli soldiers are like Nazis and that FAUDA made her feel compassion with Israelis for the first time. Similarly, a Jewish settler girl admitted that she felt compassion for Palestinians for the first time.
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