For international customers: The center is staffed and provides answers on Sundays through Thursdays between 7AM and 6PM “That the majority of the Palestinians, deep in their heart — they know that.”‘Fauda,’ an Israeli TV Hit, Lets Viewers Escape — Into the ConflictLior Raz, left, and Avi Issacharoff, the creators of the Israeli TV show “Fauda,” which has become a surprise international sensation.Mr. Asked about a villainous character who blows up one of his friends — a plot point many Palestinians objected to — Mr. Issacharoff observed that years ago, when suicide bombings were more frequent, terrorist commanders had exploited emotionally weak people to carry them out, rather than volunteering themselves or their own children.“I’m an Israeli, I’m Jewish, I’m a Zionist,” he said. The Jerusalem Post Customer Service Center can be contacted with any questions or requests: Firas Nassar is on Facebook. ‘All thriller, no filler’: (left to right) Rona-Lee Shim’on, Idan Amedi, Lior Raz and Firas Nassar. “You don’t understand the mental price those people are paying for their actions. “It’s a given,” he said. TEL AVIV — No one in Israel’s television industry was much interested when Avi Issacharoff and Lior Raz first pitched “Fauda,” about a team of undercover operatives hunting Palestinian terrorists across the West Bank. “I have the Israeli narrative. I cannot understand, still, after 18 years in the field, these suicide attacks. It was the actor Firas Nassar, who plays the lead terrorist on “Fauda.” In my jet-lagged state, caught between two worlds and two time zones, my brain could not process the difference between fiction and reality. Copyright © 2020 Jpost Inc. All rights reserved Members of the undercover unit, career operatives in their late 30s and 40s, show tenderness toward their children and lovers at home, and then go off and commit torture and worse.“It’s like we lift up the curtain to a place that nobody talks about,” said Mr. Raz, who once served in Duvdevan, an elite commando force known for posing as Arabs, and plays the lead character, Doron Kavillio. “Fauda,” Arabic for “chaos,” was a hit with audiences and critics alike: In Israel, it’s the most successful show in the history of the Yes satellite network, while The New York Times called it one of the What explains its success here is a different kind of escapism: a chance for Israelis to visit places and engage with subjects that they ordinarily avoid — and then return home safely with the flip of a switch.Living in Israel means living with the conflict in a way that Americans may have a hard time understanding.
Telephone: *2421 * Extension 4 Jerusalem Post or 03-7619056 Fax: 03-5613699E-mail: subs@jpost.com Telephone +972-3-761-9056 But you can say, it’s over there — it’s fiction.”Slightly different from an escape, but no less transporting, is how “Fauda” can allow viewers here to momentarily remove themselves from the numbing zero-sum game of the conflict and its dueling narratives. “People want to go to the beach, to eat in restaurants, to sit in coffee shops, to listen to good music.”Yet the work being done in their name by Israeli counterterrorism forces never ceases.In “Fauda,” that work is shown as gritty, messy and morally complicated. Issacharoff and Mr. Raz concede that their show is an escape for Israelis, its intended audience, far more than for Palestinians. Their writers’ room, for example, includes no Palestinians.And the show has met with a great deal of Palestinian criticism.Some seized on the Israeli-accented Arabic of the undercover operatives sent to infiltrate West Bank villages and cities, calling it ludicrous to suggest that their true identities would not be discovered the moment they opened their mouths to speak.Mr. And many do.“People want to have fun,” Mr. Issacharoff said over breakfast near his home in Tel Aviv.
Gabi Ayub — is played by Itzik Cohen, a Jewish comedic actor who made his name as a drag queen.But Mr. Issacharoff said the cast needed to meet only the threshold of realism for an Israeli audience, not of survival behind enemy lines. “It allows women to think about the Hamas guy who becomes an ISIS guy as a sex symbol. An hour later the mystery was solved: The man in the suit was Firas Nassar.
For so many in Israel, the evening of December 31 was not the end of 2017 but the beginning of season two of Trailer for Fauda Season2 (Israel FilmCenter/YouTube) “A student’s late for class, the teacher asks him why, and he says, ‘The occupation.’”But Sayed Kashua, an Israeli-Arab humorist who wrote the acclaimed 2007 series “Avoda Aravit,” or “Arab Labor,” said he found nothing funny about “Fauda,” and complained that marketing the show as telling the story of the conflict from both sides was misleading.“If an Israeli creator feels he needs to humanize Palestinians, it means that he begins with the idea that they’re not human,” Mr. Kashua, now a professor at the University of Illinois, said in a telephone interview.