9/11 and October 7 have become universal shorthand because of the concentrated, spectacular violence that took place on those days—the sense of total rupture. Both dates marked the beginning of a new reality, leading to months and then years of compounding death and destruction. But as the calendar dates have become crystallized, made into historical dividing lines, the days themselves have receded. What fades is the detail: 24 hours in all of their sensory shock, ordinary mornings spent drinking ordinary cups of coffee before nothing was ordinary again.
What was October 7, 2023, before it was October 7? Recalling this seems nearly impossible. Today is only the third anniversary of the day, but it has become encrusted with layers of meaning and interpretation, and has been perceived in dramatically different ways—a catastrophic pogrom to some and a prison break to others. What matters more to the participants of the never-ending debates, the online flame wars, the screaming matches is what the day justifies, what it excuses, what it inspires, what it obscures. What might get forgotten is what it was.
I have also been caught up in these abstractions. But I was recently brought back to that date by an unlikely conduit: the Israeli television show Fauda. What it returned me to, particularly in two episodes that re-create the events of that day, was an elemental emotion that marked October 7 and many other world-changing moments of deep and terrible disruption: helplessness.
Before I get too far in my praise of Fauda, a show in its fifth season about a unit of Israeli soldiers who live undercover in Arab communities, I should say that the series, currently streaming internationally on Netflix, is popular entertainment, with all the reductive qualities and improbable plot twists of a ticking-clock War on Terror procedural such as 24 and Homeland. Most of this latest season plays out like a simple morality tale: A member of the unit, Eli, seeks revenge for the rape and murder of his wife and the killing of his two children on October 7. Along the way, a new plot to attack Israel is revealed—one that has been aided and abetted by gullible Europeans. By the time we reach the heavy-handed conclusion, the foreigners are forced to confront the true nature of the freedom fight they thought they were supporting. It’s a comforting arc for an Israeli audience, most of whom would much rather think that outsiders are being fooled about the conflict than believe that the country bears any responsibility for its increasing isolation.
In Fauda, vengeance is understandable and even righteous. The plot kicks off when a Bedouin man, Salem, whose son was killed alongside Eli’s wife and children, uncovers the location of one of the Hamas fighters who were responsible. Salem is possessed, we are told, by tha’r, the Arabic word for “blood revenge.” After he is killed in Marseille, where he and Eli had gone searching for the murderers, Eli continues the mission of retribution. “Salem was right,” Eli says. “I won’t have a life. If I don’t kill them, I have no life.”
[Read: Why Fauda is so popular in the Arab world]
If the whole show were just a revenge fantasy, Fauda would feel closer to propaganda than to anything like art. But embedded midway in the season are two episodes that act as an extended flashback; in part, they follow Eli’s wife, Hagit, and their two children—along with Salem’s son, Yusuf—almost in real time as October 7 unfolds. These episodes cut against the normally sleek and breathless style of the show, and slow down into the moment-to-moment cinema verité of re-creations such as Paul Greengrass’s United 93. They also come with a trigger warning: Viewers are told they can skip ahead and rejoin the main storyline without missing anything. And I can understand why some people would.
We already know the fate of these four characters as they hide out in their safe room, trying to keep Hamas fighters from entering. The camera sits just over Hagit’s shoulder as she rushes around, trying to calm her children while the room fills with smoke from a fire that has been set in the hallway to force them out. Yusuf tries to hold on to the door handle. In other scenes, we follow the main character of the series, Doron Kavillio. He is attempting to reach Hagit, and through his eyes we see the full, apocalyptic chaos of the day as he drives through towns and kibbutzim that are under siege. Dead bodies lie all along the road. The onslaught is unrelenting, a flood that can not be held back (Hamas’s name for the operation was Al-Aqsa Flood). Doron, normally cold and calculating, looks utterly disoriented, his face and body splattered in blood, his eyes full of fear. “What is this madness?” he asks.
What takes place in Hagit’s house, and in the fields of the Nova music festival, where teenagers are being hunted down like antelope, is a series of confusing and terrifying inversions. Israelis are not in control. In this depiction, Hamas is organized and deliberate, in uniform and with a clear command structure, while the Israelis are vulnerable and run wildly to evade bullets. One young man Doron comes across is shirtless, terrifyingly defenseless as he pleads for help rescuing his hiding girlfriend. And then he is shot. When the safe room is finally breached, Hagit is led away from her children to be raped, and we hear—as she does—a gun go off twice, executing her son and daughter. Nothing makes any sense.
Fauda allows us to see what the philosopher William James once referred to as “pure experience,” a rawness: “a that which is not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats.” For James, experience is almost immediately processed by our minds. Only babies or people on drugs are really capable of unmediated experience. But perhaps this also happens in moments of such heightened trauma, such unbelievable reality that the event is long over before, as James writes, the “salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted.” What we are witnessing in these episodes is sensation before it can be processed by language, and then further reduced into social-media posts and speeches by politicians.
[Read: What Israel knew before October 7]
Glimpsing this pureness reveals the weakness that Israelis felt—a primal fear of being chased, of being squashed, of having nowhere to hide. In this way, the episode reminded me of a celebrated docudrama from last year, The Voice of Hind Rajab. That film is also a re-creation of a single day, and of an experience of powerlessness. It uses the real audio of a phone call between a 5-year-old girl in Gaza, Hind, who is trapped in a car that has just been attacked by Israeli forces. All of the family members with her are dead, and a Palestinian emergency service based in the West Bank is trying to coordinate her rescue. The film is a reenactment of events that took place in the call center as the hours passed and the obstacles to extricating her mounted. Just as in Fauda, we know from the beginning that Hind will not make it—that she will die in that car. The desperation of the rescue workers, visibly playing out on their faces as they weep and throw things in frustration and try to stay composed for Hind, is excruciating. This one story, seen from the perspective of those who can do nothing to help, reveals a great deal about the Palestinian condition.
Why touch the wound in this way, as both the show and the documentary do? The exercise can make it impossible to move forward. To live forever in that original trauma, in that pureness, is not healthy. And at times over the past three years, I have felt that Israelis need to understand that day of vulnerability as a single day and not a continual condition. Returning to it, again and again, reinforces an impulse to harden, to become ruthless, to do whatever one can to block that feeling of helplessness, even if it means disregarding the humanity of one’s neighbors.
I don’t know whether Israelis really need to see those Fauda episodes—and maybe many of them, pained enough, are skipping ahead—but for those of us, like me, who are far away, who view what has taken place in Israel and Gaza in more and more “fixed and abstracted” ways, there is some value in them. They don’t absolve Israel, but one cannot understand the past three years without honestly facing that day, not just as one more battle in an ongoing war but as a sensation of the world collapsing and history compacting. I especially encourage those most convinced that they understand Israel as a uniquely nefarious force and all Israelis as genocidal maniacs to challenge themselves to watch. It may not change their minds about what Israel has done, but it might alter and expand their sense of why.
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