‘Fauda,’ the Israeli show featuring Israeli soldiers hunting and killing Palestinians, is back on Netflix for its fifth season this month. Based on an elite undercover Israeli military unit, whose members disguise themselves as Palestinian civilians in order to infiltrate, kidnap, and kill, the show unintentionally acknowledges the criminal nature of the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF). Such units are collectively known as mista’arivim or “those who disguise themselves as Arabs.” International Humanitarian Law forbids armies from impersonating civilians to kill, injure, or capture them and adversaries.
Though it comes as no surprise that the IOF is a military that routinely, even proudly, commits war crimes, ‘Fauda’ is a vehicle of such abject dehumanization and propaganda that it is a genuine struggle to understand how such a series can continue to be streamed by Netflix as we approach the fourth year of Israel’s live-streamed genocide in Gaza.
