The hit Israeli thriller Fauda — from creators Lior Raz, who also plays its endearing and reckless Rambo lead, Doron, and Avi Issacharoff — has long endeavored to depict Israel’s perennial conflict with its Palestinian neighbors with both accuracy and Hollywood grip. Earlier seasons indulged a more nuanced narrative, proffering glimpses into the deluge of hardships inflicted upon Israelis and Palestinians alike. Its fifth season reflects the hardened outlook of a country still reckoning with Oct. 7, and of horrified spectators abroad who watched the massacre unfold. It reflects an overdue realization that the conflict contains far less nuance than they had imagined.
Set two years after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, the season finds a bereaved Eli (an Emmy-worthy Yaakov Zada-Daniel), whose wife and stepchildren were murdered that morning, pursuing one of the Hamas Nukhba fighters responsible. He is joined by Salem, a Bedouin tracker who lost his own son in the attack, and together they follow their quarry to Marseille. Redolent of postwar Nazi hunters tracking fugitives to South America, Eli is after justice, something the pompous French bureaucrats have no intention of doling out.
Before long, Doron is reluctantly exhumed from therapy and retirement when he catches wind of his friend’s unsanctioned mission. (It must be the toughest job in the world, planning a surprise birthday party for an Israeli intelligence officer.)
“What’s wrong with these French women?” Eli asks as the pair surveil a suspected Hamas commander’s apartment and watch his ethnically French wife, Anne (Mélanie Laurent), embrace him. Colonial guilt is Doron’s best guess.
To her credit, Anne, who sympathizes with the Palestinian cause, goes considerably further than most white Westerners we see here in America, whose activism generally amounts to brandishing keffiyehs and harassing Jewish students on college campuses. Whether hers is a more palpable conviction or simply a product of geographic proximity, she eventually enlists in a local Islamist terrorist cell and straps explosives to herself. If you’re going to label yourself an “anti-Zionist,” these are the actions through which that ideology reaches its logical manifestation.
It is this burgeoning cell that Doron and Eli spend much of the season uncovering and infiltrating in classical Fauda fashion, relying on their Arabic, cultural fluency, and encyclopedic familiarity with Palestinian geography. I have seen few espionage series extract so much tension from an interrogation. Saeed el-Hatib (a menacing Hakim Djaziri), dubbed “Europe’s Sinwar,” stares down Doron, who is posing as a friendly fighter, and peppers him with questions about where he grew up, his neighbors, and the minutiae of life back home in the West Bank. Doron is one forgotten street name away from execution.
We soon see that Marseille, beset by a broken immigration system and plagued by corrupt officials such as intelligence officer Pierre Bruno (Clément Toyon) — all but cheating on his wife with Hamas as he feeds the group intel on police leads — has helped turn the Western port city into a satellite state for clandestine terrorist cells. Officials in the United Kingdom reportedly just (as of writing this) thwarted a major terrorist plot near an air base, arresting five, and have since released them on bail. The boundaries between fact and dramatized fiction on Fauda are so murky that it is never entirely clear whether you are watching the evening news or a television thriller.
The bulk of the season follows Doron and Eli as they entrench themselves among Saeed’s terrorists, guided through burner phones by returning favorite Captain Gabi Ayub — portrayed by Itzik Cohen, who I am certain could get me to reveal my Social Security number and mother’s maiden name with a mere glare.
Yet the season’s central mission — preventing another Oct. 7-style massacre — gradually gives way to the memory of the first. Doron suffers fragmented recollections throughout the season before episodes 7 and 8 return fully to Oct. 7. These are the season’s most wrenching hours, recreating the killings in southern Israel with an unsanitized brutality unusual even for Fauda. In one sequence, a teenager enlists Doron’s help hoisting his girlfriend out of a storage container where survivors are hiding. A gunman shoots him as he climbs inside, then throws a grenade after him. Other recreations of Hamas’s atrocities (which they livestreamed themselves carrying out) take the gunmen from house to house, murdering civilians and committing acts of sexual violence.
Since skyrocketing into Netflix’s Top 10 across dozens of countries, Fauda has prompted viewers across Europe and elsewhere to concede that they were only now learning the extent of the atrocities committed on Oct. 7 — though how anyone could have interpreted “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust” as anything less remains unclear.
Season 5 ultimately emerges as Fauda’s most morally uncompromising installment. Steven Spielberg’s Munich, for example, about Israel’s pursuit of those responsible for the 1972 Olympic massacre, is haunted by the fear that every terrorist killed will merely be replaced by someone worse. (Doron, in contrast, would be piqued by the opportunity to kill those terrorists too).
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Fauda doesn’t dabble in such defeatism. It is resolute in its framing of the conflict and bleakly honest about what its future may hold. Two years after Oct. 7, when the season is set, the Palestinian militant networks depicted here are raising money and recruiting sympathizers, not to build Gazan schools or hospitals or improve the lives of their people, but to plan the sequel to the massacre that precipitated the war. That grim reality — one Fauda captures with increasingly uncomfortable fidelity — is why Israel cannot afford to imbibe the same blithe naivety that has long plagued Europe.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.