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 The first two seasons took place mostly in the occupied West
Bank. This time, showrunners Avi Issacharoff and Lior Raz have
set much of it in the Gaza Strip, where the armed Islamist
faction rules and has fought three wars against Israel.
"This is going to be much more dark, much more emotional," Raz,
who also plays Fauda's tortured lead character, told Reuters at
a dusty, smoke-wreathed underground Tel Aviv power plant
repurposed to look like a Hamas tunnel and bunker network.
The show, which has bilingual scripts in Hebrew and Arabic, has
been praised internationally for its gritty realism - the New
York Times listed it as one of the best shows of 2017 - while
being criticized by pro-Palestinian campaigners who describe it
as gung-ho, pro-Israeli war propaganda.
The title means "chaos" in Arabic and is the commandos' codeword
for when an operation goes awry.
The creators acknowledge that they come to the conflict from an
Israeli perspective: "At the end of the day, Lior and I - we're
both Jews, Israelis, Zionists. We cannot be fair. This is not a
joint narrative," Issacharoff told Reuters.
Nevertheless, they say it succeeds because the Palestinian
characters are nuanced and complex. Palestinians, they hope,
could enjoy it too.
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On the set, Israeli Arab actors playing Palestinian militants milled
about in camouflage uniforms wielding replica Kalashnikovs. In
between exchanges of dialogue in Arabic, they took instruction in
Hebrew from the director.
Some pro-Palestinian activists have called for a boycott of Netflix
for broadcasting it.
"The series was not written by Europeans or Americans or Africans.
It was written by the aggressors, by the criminals themselves," said
a commentary on the Arabic website Vice.
Yet Yasmeen Serhan, a Palestinian writer in London, wrote in the
Atlantic that she found herself unable to stop watching, even though
"it sometimes had me yelling at the screen".
(Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi; Writing by Dan Williams;
Editing by Peter Graff)
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