Fauda – HolyLandJustice.org

Israel Palestinians — An Israeli policeman from a Mista’arvim unit disguised as a Palestinian protester raises a pistol in air as he arrests a Palestinian demonstrator in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Dec 13, 2017. (photo: Nasser Shiyoukhi / AP)

We would all do well to remember that Fauda is part of Israel’s well-oiled public-relations machine, which knows how to transform Israeli brutality into sexy, heroic images.

By Miko Peled | Mint Press News | Jan 12, 2018

Palestinians often identify [Mista’arvim] when they show up, even though dressed like locals. At some point, they will pull down their ski masks, pull out their guns and arrest young Palestinians who participate in the demonstrations. They are also known to provoke violence, which is then used to justify the violence perpetrated by the Israeli forces against Palestinian protesters.

Palestinian resistance is legitimate and sanctioned by the inalienable right that all oppressed people have to resist their oppressors and occupiers, even with the use of arms. Israeli violence is raw and unchecked brutality intended to keep Palestinians from raising their heads. But the conventional wisdom is that Palestinian resistance is terrorism and Israeli violence is counterterrorism.

From time to time equivalency is drawn between the two, pointing out that both sides are “human.” While this can be misconstrued as “progress,” it is actually an insult to the cause of justice because there is no equivalency to be drawn between oppressor/occupier and the those fighting for their freedom.

In early 2017 a friend asked me whether I had watched the Netflix series “Fauda.” I said no, and this was the beginning of several weeks of persuasion, at the end of which I succumbed. “Fauda” is an Israeli-produced series about an Israeli paramilitary unit that is called in Hebrew “Mista’arvim.” The word “Mista’arvim” is a cross between the Hebrew word for camouflage and the word for Arabs.

While regular soldiers in the field wear uniforms and camouflage so that they will not be spotted by enemy forces, these are armed, undercover units that wear civilian clothes but dress and talk like Arabs.

Continue reading “Fauda: An Israeli Netflix series that makes oppression sexy”

170904_r30450 — “Fauda” follows an undercover Israeli unit trying to ensnare a terrorist mastermind. (illustration: R. Kikuo Johnson / The New Yorker)

What the thriller “Fauda” reveals about what Israelis will watch — and what they won’t.

By David Remnick | The New Yorker | Sep 4, 2018

“Today, a film like ‘Khirbet Khizeh’ would be impossible. You won’t be jailed for it, but the subject of the Nakba” — the Arabic term for the “catastrophe” of Palestinian expulsion and exile, in 1948 — “cannot be mentioned unless you want to be branded a ‘leftist.’ ”
— Rogel Alpher, television critic for Haaretz

In 1949, Yizhar Smilansky, a young Israeli veteran, national legislator, and novelist writing under the pen name S. Yizhar, published “Khirbet Khizeh,” a novella about the destruction of a lightly fictionalized Palestinian village near Ashkelon, some thirty miles south of Tel Aviv.

Writing from the point of view of a disillusioned Israeli soldier, Yizhar describes the Army’s capture of the village and the expulsion of its remaining inhabitants. The time is 1948, the moment of Israel’s independence and its subsequent victory over five invading Arab armies that had hoped to erase the fledgling Jewish state from the map.

It would be forty years before the New Historians — Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and Simha Flapan among them — marshalled the nerve and the documentary evidence required to shatter the myth that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs had all voluntarily “abandoned” their cities and villages.

Yizhar was there to bear witness in real time. Continue reading “How do you make a TV show set in the West Bank?”