The fifth season of the Israeli series demonstrates that film and television can become decisive instruments for exposing the true nature of Islamist terrorism and restoring victims to the place they should never have lost

For far too long, part of Western culture has confused complexity with equidistance, analysis with justification and prudence with silence. When Islamist terrorism murders, kidnaps, rapes or tortures, a political, academic and media machinery immediately emerges, ready to shroud the facts in a fog of historical grievances, background explanations and mitigating circumstances. The crime has barely been committed before people begin demanding that we understand the perpetrator. Meanwhile, the victims are reduced to a provisional statistic, an uncomfortable photograph or a narrative obstacle that must be removed as quickly as possible so that the ideological debate can resume.

The fifth season of *Fauda* breaks with this moral perversion. The episodes devoted to October 7, 2023 do not attempt to maintain a comfortable distance from what happened. They do not seek to reassure viewers or offer them an excuse with which to emerge unscathed from confronting the horror. They do something much simpler and, in our time, much braver: they stand beside the victims and reconstruct the attack from the perspective of those who endured it.

This should not be extraordinary. And yet it is.

The Israeli series has led viewers in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Brazil, India and the United Kingdom to discover, perhaps for the first time in all its brutality, what happened that day. Many had seen the real footage, read the headlines and heard the figures. But they had not understood. Constant repetition in the news had eventually turned the massacre into background noise, while the ensuing propaganda battle progressively removed those who were murdered, wounded or kidnapped from the centre of the story.

Fiction possesses a power that daily news reporting frequently loses: it can restore a face, a sense of time and continuity to suffering. A news report shows a burning house for a few seconds; a narrative allows us to remain with the family trapped inside. A news programme announces the death toll; a series reconstructs the waiting, uncertainty, fear and helplessness that preceded each death. Statistics quantify tragedy. Fiction, when created honestly, restores its human dimension.

That is what 'Fauda' has done. It has not invented a hypothetical threat or exaggerated a distant danger. It has used the resources of drama to approach real events, many of which were documented by the perpetrators themselves. Those responsible for the attacks circulated recordings of their actions because they believed that this violence should be displayed as a victory. The series has wrested those images from terrorist propaganda and placed them within a different framework: not the celebration of the perpetrator, but the experience of the victims.

This deserves emphasis because we are not dealing merely with an artistic decision. We are also witnessing a moral stand.

Islamist terrorism is not an abstraction, a label invented by the West or an inevitable consequence of poverty. It is an extremist political and religious project that legitimises indiscriminate violence, glorifies death, dehumanises its adversaries and deliberately turns civilians into targets. Its victims have included Jews, Christians, Muslims, Yazidis, Hindus, journalists, teachers, police officers, children attending school and young people at a concert. From New York to Madrid, from Paris to Mumbai and from London to Baghdad, Kabul, Nice and Jerusalem, its path is marked by the names of thousands of innocent people.

Denouncing this reality does not mean holding all Muslims responsible or denying the injustices that may exist in the Middle East. It means precisely identifying a totalitarian ideology and judging it by its actions. It means rejecting the intellectual trap whereby recognising the Islamist nature of a terrorist organisation is equated with attacking an entire religion. No one would apply such reasoning to other forms of extremism. Naming terrorism does not spread hatred. It is the first requirement for understanding and combating it.

Yet part of the Western cultural industry has shown itself far more willing to examine the failings of democracies than to depict, without qualification, the cruelty of those who seek to destroy them. The terrorist has often been transformed into a victim of circumstance; the fanatic into a misunderstood rebel; and the murdered civilian into an impersonal consequence of “the context”. Beneath the appearance of intellectual sophistication, a profoundly reactionary outlook has spread: one that denies the criminal moral responsibility and ultimately abandons those who suffered at his hands.

*Fauda* rejects that imposture. Its new episodes do not ask permission to show Israeli suffering. Nor do they accept the demand, imposed almost exclusively upon certain victims, that they must first justify their existence before earning the right to be mourned. Those murdered on October 7 did not die as representatives of a government policy or as pieces on a geopolitical chessboard. They were killed as individual human beings who happened to be in their homes, their communities or at a music festival.

The series is also right not to turn fiction into an academic platform. A dramatic work is not required to condense the entire history of the Middle East into every episode, just as a film about the September 11 attacks does not need first to reconstruct a century of relations between the United States and the Islamic world. Demanding that a story about Israeli victims balance every scene with an equivalent depiction of Palestinian suffering is not an artistic requirement. It is a form of ideological surveillance.

Of course, the suffering of Palestinian civilians deserves to be told. The decisions of the Israeli government and the consequences of its military operations also deserve scrutiny. But neither obligation invalidates the right to tell the story of October 7 from the perspective of those who endured it. Memory does not operate through a system of compensation. Recognising one group of victims does not require silencing another, and denouncing Hamas does not entail approving every action taken by Israel.

The power of *Fauda* also derives from the proximity of its own creators to the tragedy. Idan Amedi was seriously wounded during the war. Matan Meir, a member of the production team, was killed in combat. Actors, screenwriters and technicians worked with events that had struck their families, their friends and their country. The fifth season is therefore not an opportunistic exploitation of someone else’s pain. It is also the attempt of a wounded society to understand what happened and transform traumatic memory into a work capable of crossing its own borders.

The extraordinary international response provoked by episodes seven and eight confirms that fiction can still breach the wall of propaganda. Those who write that they could not sleep, could barely keep their eyes open or had not understood the scale of the attack are not responding solely to the effectiveness of a screenplay. They are discovering the abyss between the reality of terrorism and the progressively sanitised version of it that they had received.

That realisation contains the series’ principal achievement. *Fauda* forces us to look. It compels us to remain beside the persecuted when it would be more comfortable to change the channel, retreat into political abstraction or dilute the crime within an endless sequence of historical grievances. It also recalls an elementary truth that our age seems determined to complicate: between the person who enters a home to murder a family and the family trying to survive inside it, there is no morally neutral position.

Art is under no obligation to remain neutral in the face of crime. It can denounce, identify, remember and take sides. Indeed, some of its most necessary works have emerged precisely from a refusal to maintain an antiseptic distance from barbarism. When culture stands beside the victims, it does not become propaganda. It recovers one of its essential purposes.

That is what *Fauda* has done. Against the noise, it has offered memory. Against relativisation, facts. Against dehumanisation, faces. And against Islamist terrorism, a work of fiction that has chosen neither to hide its dead nor apologise for mourning them.