How to talk about Fauda

The first rule when discussing Fauda: do not begin by stating that you enjoy Fauda. It is unwise. It is preferable first to declare one’s intentions clearly: Netanyahu is not my ideal prime minister; Gaza is a tragedy; yes, I am familiar with international law. Only then, perhaps, can one acknowledge that Doron is a formidable character and that the Israeli series is one of the most gripping programmes produced for television in recent years. This minor cultural absurdity is captured well by Peggy Sastre in Le Point. With the arrival of the fifth series on Netflix, she writes, a significant section of the French cultural press – Libération, Télérama, Nouvel Obs – has treated Fauda not so much as a series to be judged, but as a political artefact to be scrutinised. Libération even ran the headline “Netflix fait le Tsahal boulot”: Netflix is doing the Israeli army’s job. The implicit premise, Sastre observes, is that Fauda isn’t really a work of fiction but essentially propaganda. So, rule number two: remind your audience that watching does not mean endorsing. It’s a basic convention when we watch any other story. We can watch The Godfather without supporting the Cosa Nostra, Narcos without becoming drug traffickers, or Sicario without joining a Mexican cartel. As Sastre writes, fiction serves precisely to ‘imagine without approving, understand without absolving, bring into existence without endorsing’. Strangely, as soon as Israel appears, this little miracle called suspension of disbelief is itself suspended. Rule three: do not accept the idea that every Israeli on screen is a spokesperson for the Israeli government. Fauda is full of Israelis who are violent, neurotic, arrogant, desperate and irresponsible. They are often heroes and often walking disasters. And on the other side, there are Palestinians who are rarely reduced to mere caricatures: they have families, ambitions, fear, love, a thirst for revenge, dignity and fanaticism. One might debate whether this balance always works. But that is precisely what it means to discuss a series, not to cross-examine a defendant.

This is where the article in Le Point becomes most interesting. Sastre argues that when faced with an Israeli work, we sometimes lose that ‘interpretative intelligence’ we normally grant to art: everything is absorbed by politics, as if Israeli artists and individuals could no longer exist, but only ‘messengers of a pariah state’. It is a harsh formulation, but it identifies a real tendency: demanding that every Israeli novel, film or series prove its innocence in advance. Rule four: calmly assert your sympathy for Israel without turning it into a blank cheque. You can believe that Israel has the right to exist and defend itself, regard 7 October as a wound that cannot be erased, feel a cultural affinity with a contentious, liberal, traumatised and contradictory Israeli society, whilst at the same time criticising its government’s disastrous decisions. This should be normal. It has become almost a balancing act. Final rule: when someone asks you whether Fauda is propaganda, reply with a less ideological question: is it a good series? Then discuss the script, the characters, what it shows and what it hides. It is even possible to conclude that it is biased: all stories are. What would be truly curious is to reach the point where Israel still has the right to be criticised, but not the right to tell its own story. And that is precisely where a conversation about Fauda stops being about television and begins, unwittingly, to reveal something about us.

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