Published: 27 January 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
The Israeli thriller released its fourth season internationally last week. It has broken viewing records but it also has potential real-world impact.
Season four of Israeli thriller Fauda, released on Netflix last Friday in 190 countries, is achieving record viewership.
It tops charts from Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates to Romania, the Czech Republic and Greece.
The show is ranked second in Qatar, India, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands, and third in France and Kenya. It is also in the top 10 most-watched series in Belgium, Turkey, Morocco and Jordan.
Given this success, talks are already underway for a fifth season.
Experts explain that interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the major driver of the craze and that the fiction is even closer to reality in season four, whose plot is around Operation Guardian of the Wall, the last Israeli military operation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, in May 2021.
But the show is much more than just a well-constructed drama. Drawn from the undercover experience of its creators Lior Raz (who plays lead character Doron) and Avi Issacharoff, it is distinctive for enabling Israeli audiences to confront the reality of the conflict.
"The series Fauda describes so well our local reality that it becomes almost anxiety-provoking, I am unable to watch it," Franco-Israeli journalist Myriam Shermer said.
In Israel, where the new season was released last July, journalist Itay Ziv described Fauda asone of the most important channels through which Israelis can understand the enormous resources poured into the occupation.
“The undercover unit … is backed up by a support team with a high-tech war room and cameras on every street corner, vast manpower resources and analysis and deciphering of signals of every conceivable kind.
“The question arises: Where else in the Israeli media can we view this crazed mechanism? Where else is the Big Brother state that Israel operates in the territories portrayed? While Fauda is the subject of admiration – that in itself is a contentious issue – at least it shows the enormous resources that are poured into maintaining the occupation, the spectacular waste, the subjugation of the best brains and institutions to chase after Arabs. The news broadcasts certainly don’t show this to us.”
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Fauda's season 4 breaks viewership records in the Middle East (Ynet)
Photo: Lior Raz, left, and Inbar Lavi as Doron and Inbar in Season Four of Fauda (Promotional image)
