An Inside Look at Israel’s War on Terror through the Small Screen

The Israeli television series Fauda—which, thanks to Netflix, has become an international hit—depicts an IDF counterterrorism unit and its duel with a Hamas mastermind in the West Bank. Reviewing the show, which takes its name from the Arabic word for “chaos,” A.E. Smith writes:

In a number of key respects, Fauda gets the reality of life inside counterterrorism agencies, probably helped by the fact that its creators . . . both served in the IDF’s Duvdevan special-operations unit. For if the series has a prevailing theme, it is disguise, deception, and the manner in which operators . . . lose themselves within their own dissimulations. Daily proximity to the adversary brings an unparalleled level of intimacy, and often the two sides come to identify with each other in unexpected ways.

Members of [the] team slip in and out of their identities as Palestinian Arabs, quite literally as easily as they change clothes. When [one] arrives at the wedding [where the Hamas operative is to be found], he transforms into an Arab before our eyes. His look, his movements, the genuine joy he seems to be feeling at being part of the celebration—he seems to have become what he is pretending to be.

The risk here—for [Fauda’s characters], for cops and intelligence officers, even for terrorists—is that such sustained intimacy becomes normal. The job and the adversary become more real, more meaningful, than husbands, wives, children, lovers.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Arts & Culture, Israeli culture, Television, Terrorism

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF