Fauda and the Search for Moral Purity: What one Israeli series can teach us about holding conflicting realities together
29. 9. 2026 / Muriel Blaive
Season 5 of Fauda, the Israeli political thriller about an undercover counterterrorism unit operating in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is very, very good. It resists an impulse that has become extraordinarily powerful in contemporary political discourse: the search for moral purity. Indeed, there is no purity here. Political violence produces situations in which several realities have to be held in mind at the same time, even when they are emotionally or politically difficult to reconcile.
October 7 was a catastrophe for Israeli society and its victims deserve empathy. This is why the season has resonated so strongly in Israel: for many viewers, Fauda gives cultural form to an event that profoundly transformed their society and that they understandably feel must be told and remembered. Acknowledging this does not require endorsing everything that the IDF subsequently did in Gaza. Conversely, condemning the suffering inflicted on Palestinian civilians does not require minimizing October 7, relativizing terrorism, or pretending that those who deliberately murder, rape or kidnap civilians somehow cease to be terrorists just because the Palestinian cause itself is legitimate.
This is precisely where Fauda remains more subtle than some of the criticism directed at it suggests. The series never dehumanizes Palestinians. It does not even dehumanize Palestinian terrorists: they have families, affections, fears, loyalties, and contradictions. One can be a rapist, murderer and terrorist and still be a loving husband. Humanization is not absolution – to understand that somebody is human is not to deny their responsibility for what they do.
Conversely, the criticism that the season does not feature the destruction of Gaza seems to me somewhat misplaced. Gaza is not the subject of this particular narrative: the season is about October 7, the trauma inflicted on Israeli society, and the pursuit of those involved in terrorism. A work can legitimately focus on this particular episode without thereby endorsing the killing of Palestinian civilians.
Indeed, Fauda continues to make a distinction that is politically crucial: Palestinian terrorists are Palestinian, but not all Palestinians are terrorists. The show never suggests that the Palestinian population is collectively guilty. It distinguishes between those who organize and perpetrate attacks, civilians, ideologues, frightened people, and naive fellow travelers who have allowed themselves to be drawn into violence without becoming equivalent to its principal perpetrators.
Doron embodies this refusal of simple categories. He kills terrorists, sometimes brutally, but violence never becomes morally insignificant to him. And when the French wife of a Palestinian terrorist, who has herself been drawn into terrorism, tries to kill him, he does not simply eliminate her: his instinct is still to save her and speak gently to her. The distinction is important: her actions matter, but they do not exhaust who she is. Doron’s refusal to reduce her to an enemy even pays off: eventually, she helps the Israelis. His restraint restores, at least momentarily, the possibility of moral reciprocity. Whether that is entirely realistic, on both sides, is another question, but we can hope.
In any case, what the show ultimately asks of the viewer is something increasingly difficult in our political culture: the ability to hold more than one reality in mind at once. Israeli civilians can have been victims of an appalling atrocity, and Palestinian civilians can subsequently have suffered intolerably. Palestinian terrorists can remain human beings and still be terrorists who must be stopped. One can reject collective punishment without romanticizing those who deliberately attack civilians. One can recognize Palestinian suffering without making Israeli suffering illegitimate – and vice versa.
The demand that one reality cancel the other is a demand for moral purity. This is hardly unique to Israel and Palestine: as we know all too well, the same problem runs through Czech-German history and many other situations in Central Europe. Suffering and responsibility are rarely distributed with the moral neatness that political memory demands. The world is not pure; it is complicated, compromised, violent, and often morally dirty. Serious analysis begins precisely when we stop expecting one truth to erase another. Despite being firmly anchored in an Israeli perspective, Fauda never surrenders to the victimhood competition that has come to dominate so much of our political discourse – a rare and precious quality nowadays.
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