(Sept. 24, 2026 / JNS)
Season 5 of the Israeli drama series “Fauda” is making waves that no one expected.
The series has long been regarded as brilliant. A strong part of its compulsive appeal is that it’s closely modeled on a reality that’s scarcely less dramatic: the undercover Israeli counter-intelligence unit whose members pose convincingly as Palestinian Arabs to infiltrate the terrorist gangs that wage their war of annihilation against Israeli Jews.
Its fifth season, which aired two weeks ago on Netflix, plunges graphically into the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. No one foresaw that, at a time of unprecedented hatred of Israel, this show would have such a global impact.
In the Arab world, “Fauda” has always been popular, and this season has been an instant smash hit. In Lebanon, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Arabs who are programmed to hate and fear Israel are binge-watching a show about Israelis infiltrating Arab areas and fighting Arab terrorists, and about Jewish trauma suffered at their hands.
Maybe this is because “Fauda” presents Palestinian Arab culture with fairness, subtlety and a measure of empathy.
Even more striking has been the reception to this latest season in the Israel-hating West. People there are watching it with their hands to their mouths in shock, horror and tears.
For the first time, it seems, “Fauda” has made them understand the enormity of what happened on Oct. 7. For the first time, they have registered the depravity of the Gazan Arabs who invaded southern Israel, slaughtered, raped, burned alive or took hostage some 251 others, including children. For the first time, they have begun to grasp the devastation and trauma wreaked upon Israeli society.
How can it be, others are asking, that people are only now realizing what happened on that terrible day? How come this TV drama is cutting through when everything that the Israeli government has said about Oct. 7 could not?
The main reason why people are reacting as if they didn’t know what actually happened that day is because those atrocities were all but eclipsed by the coverage of the war that followed.
That has given rise to the grotesque belief that Israel wasn’t defending itself against genocide but was committing it, along with war crimes, ethnic cleansing and the latest evidence of its apparent monstrousness, “settler violence.”
These claims are becoming ever more hysterical and deranged, not least at the shameful anti-Israel hate-fest this week at the United Nations. The U.N. secretary-general, António Guterres, declared: “The scale of killing in Gaza is unlike anything I’ve witnessed in my years as secretary-general.”
Thus, he claimed that a war in which Hamas itself says some 74,000 Gazans were killed, of whom more than half were fighting-age men, was worse than the 377,000 killed in the savage war in Yemen, or the more than 600,000 who were massacred or starved to death in Ethiopia, or the 150,000 who were killed in Sudan.
Australia’s foreign minister Penny Wong claimed: “In the first six months of this year alone, ‘settler violence’ [in the “West Bank”] has driven more than 15,000 children from their homes.” There is no basis whatsoever for this figure, which she seems to have plucked out of the air.
And French President Emmanuel Macron beclowned himself by announcing: “Hamas has never been active in Judea and Samaria.”
The reality is that Jewish “settlers” in Judea and Samaria are being subjected to virtually nonstop attacks, both carried out and plotted, by Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups.
On the eve of Yom Kippur, a father of six, Netanel Shukrun, was murdered in a shooting attack at the natural spring in Samaria where he had gone for a ritual immersion.
Within the following three hours, elsewhere in these disputed territories, according to Israeli journalist Amit Segal, an Israeli was attacked and wounded after he took a wrong turn into an Arab village; an attempted car-ramming targeted Israeli troops; and a vehicle with no license plates tried to run down two more Israelis.
All this followed a weekend in which Jewish residents of these areas had reported at least seven other such attacks. On Wednesday, the soldier son of Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, was left fighting for his life after another car-ramming in Samaria.
On the same day, Israeli forces arrested a Fatah-affiliated man, reported by Palestinian sources to be an officer in the Palestinian Authority security apparatus, on suspicion of advancing terrorist activity.
And then Israeli forces discovered two shafts 12 meters deep in Qalqilya, an Arab city in Samaria only a few kilometers away from several Jewish cities. The shafts contained weapons, magazines and ammunition. Israeli forces arrested four Arabs suspected of terrorist activity.
In other words, the Palestinian Arabs are constantly attempting serious terrorist violence against Israelis within the “West Bank”—from where the West has decided that Jewish “settlers” must be ethnically cleansed.
The reason people are reacting as if they didn’t know what happened on Oct. 7 is because the atrocities were eclipsed by the coverage of the war that followed.
Virtually none of this systemic onslaught on Israeli Jews in these territories is ever reported in the West. Instead, it defames them as monsters wantonly killing Palestinian innocents and driving the rest out.
Many things have contributed to the insanity of the West’s obsessional delegitimization of Israel that has turned it into a pariah in mainstream political and cultural circles. This can only be properly understood as part of a broader and deeper Western civilizational crisis.
However, one factor, in particular, has turned truth and lies inside out in the minds of many. For decades, there’s been a settled view among progressives that Israel is a rogue state that behaves illegally and cruelly.
That’s because the overwhelming majority of media coverage of the Jewish state has consisted of lies and distortions intended to delegitimize it as a prelude to its destruction.
In recent days, a curtain has been lifted on a corner of this madness. Motaz Azaiza is a Palestinian Arab photojournalist lionized by Western liberals for his production of images that have fueled hatred and incitement against Israel. Time magazine listed him among its top 100 most influential people of 2024.
But in a long interview in Arabic, whose translation is now all over social media, Azaiza revealed that every claim or image coming out of Gaza during the war had been crafted to fit the Hamas narrative. If Gazan journalists didn’t toe the line, they disappeared. Every journalist in Gaza belonged to a Hamas-run group.
Said Azaiza: “They take the details of a specific person, publish his phone number in the group and instruct online activists to attack him, curse him and make his life miserable.”
As a result, photographers like him lowered their cameras the moment anyone said something bad about Hamas.
Furthermore, Azaiza himself supported Hamas terrorism. He related how he’d filmed Gazans beating and abusing Israelis who were captured and dragged into the Strip on Oct. 7, but he didn’t publish those videos because he didn’t want Israel to identify the abusers and kill them.
Not a word of Azaiza’s revelations has appeared in Western media. Of course not. That would reveal that they’ve been doing Hamas’s dirty work for it. Every report from Gaza should have carried a health warning that it was produced under Hamas censorship. Instead, it was all presented as credible or true.
And this has been the case for decades. The Western public has no idea that what it takes to be the truth about Israeli behavior and Palestinian suffering—because it’s “seen it on TV”—is a giant and monstrous lie.
Shockingly, many Diaspora Jews are now claiming that Israel’s terrible image in the world is due to the toxic nature of its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the extremists in his coalition government, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Such a ludicrous misrepresentation of the civilizational emergency that has engulfed the West can only be explained by the desperate need for such Diaspora Jews to deny the danger to themselves from their own society that has simply lost its collective mind.
“Fauda” is delivering to the West a truth that it doesn’t even realize it has so devastatingly denied.
