Like others, I have long felt that Fauda, for all its thoughtfulness, devolved into gross and unpleasant conflict porn manys seasons ago. Unlike others, it will have bothered me less that season 5 of Fauda ignored the death and destruction in Gaza. I wasn’t going to watch and wanted to stop after the first episode, but I pushed on for professional reasons. I didn’t like it at all and then changed my mind.
[spoiler alert]
Across 11 episodes, Season 5 of Fauda is a plot of Israeli revenge, murder, and mayhem wrapped around two harrowing episodes (7 & 8) representing October 7. Bingeing the first 6 episodes, it was hard to catch the point of it all, i.e. of the series itself. The primary protagonists are dead souls, and like their country, they are broken, unhinged, violent, rogue, unheroic, and ugly and even grotesque to watch. At first, I did not think that this was the actual intention of the series’ creators to see them in such appalling light.
But look at Anne in the next to last scene of the final episode (11) of the season. A Frenchwoman, she too was motivated by revenge and joined the Hamas “resistance” in Europe. But at the last moment, Anne refuses to carry out her part in a suicide-bomb terror attack in Israel because she refuses the “collateral damage” of a single innocent child. In a quick and quiet dialogue between her and Doron strategically set in the penultimate scene, this act of refusal, considered in retrospect, gives the last word to Anne, not Doron and the Israel he represents. In an Israeli series, she is the one from the outside, not naïve but clearheaded in the end, who determines the meaning of the narrative arc that defines Israel and the trauma of October 7.
Referring to the violence and death that permeate the series and especially this season, Anne says Doron is still in it and he cannot even see it. He says that Israeli and Palestinian violence is not the same, and she says it is, to which Doron does not, in fact, respond. Can you stop it, she asks? He says he will try, and she says she hopes so. This is the final spoken word of season 5.
The concluding scene at the gravesite ceremony for a fallen comrade brings out and completes the representation of the funereal reality of Israel after October 7. As if against the spirit of revenge that clearly marks the entire season, the traditional graveside prayer El Maleh Rachamim invokes the God of Israel full of mercy for the dead under the wings of the Shekhinah; the Kaddish prayer invokes the holiness of God and the spirit of peace.
