The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) renews its call on people of conscience around the world to boycott the glaringly complicit, racist and colonial Israeli series Fauda, whose fifth season was recently released on Netflix. Fauda is no longer merely racist propaganda for the Israeli occupation army and its crimes against Indigenous Palestinians. It is now also desperately trying to justify Israel's ongoing genocide in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, the escalating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and the ongoing genocide against the people of Lebanon.
Additionally, Fauda’s main co-producer and original broadcaster, Yes TV, is listed in the UN database of companies operating in Israeli settlements on illegally occupied Palestinian land, a war crime under international law.
PACBI continues to call for the boycott of all other complicit Israeli films and series that are steeped in anti-Arab racism and settler-colonial dehumanization of natives, particularly those that attempt to justify Israel’s crimes. Such works are a key part of Israel’s desperate stratgey to launder its global image; to whitewash its decades-old regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid, and illegal military occupation; and to cover up its ongoing genocide and wars of agression against the peoples of the region. Fauda, Arabic for chaos, is among the clearest examples of Israel’s genocidal propaganda that promotes induced colonial chaos, expansion and mass annihilation of Indigenous people.
PACBI further condemns the participation of Arab (including Palestinian) artists and crew members in Fauda and other complicit productions, and calls for accountability. Some Palestinian actors and film workers from the 1948 territories participated in the current season, as did Algerian actor and playwright Hakim Djaziri.
Arab participation in Fauda today is one of the most dangerous forms of cultural normalization. It amounts to complicity in the deliberate justification and cover-up of Israel’s crimes. Such participation provides a figleaf for genocide and undermines the growing global, grassroots isolation of apartheid Israel and its complicit cultural sector.
During the genocide, the international cultural boycott of Israel has grown enormously. Last year thousands of film workers, including hundreds of leading Hollywood figures, pledged to boycott Israeli film institutions complicit in Israel’s crimes. Tens of thousands of musicians and writers have also joined the boycott, as have thousands of cultural institutions worldwide—to name but a few. All of this has been in solidarity with the Palestinian people and our struggle for liberation, the return of refugees, and an end to colonialism and apartheid.
This season of Fauda does not stop at equating the colonizer with the colonized, as previous seasons did. It fully adopts the official Israeli regime’s genocidal narrative, attempting to erase Israel’s long criminal history of ethnic cleansing, illegal occupation, and settler-colonial apartheid, as part of the state propaganda blitz justifying its ongoing genocide in Gaza. This season in particular tries to portray the Israeli regime, its soldiers, and the personnel of its criminal military intelligence apparatus as "victims" rather than perpetrators—justifying their criminal, genocidal acts across historic Palestine, Lebanon and the wider Arab region.
Some cast and crew members have even served as soldiers during the genocide, and several of them have supported and incited genocide against Palestinians. For example, Israeli actor Doron Ben-David, who portrays one of the main characters in every Fauda season including the latest, declared: "Gaza must be wiped out without leaving a single speck of dust in the place where such human animals come from." Idan Amedi, a main actor in previous seasons and part of the cast of the latest one, took part in criminal military operations in Gaza and posted a video of himself blowing up a residential block in Gaza, dedicating the explosion to a friend. According to Hebrew-language press, the series' creators, Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff, are veterans of one of the special military units, which are notorious for extrajudicial killings and disguising themselves as Palestinian civilians, both crimes under international law.
These "artists" should be brought before international courts for their participation in the genocide and other atrocity crimes, especially as they brazenly justify their own actions and the genocidal actions of their regime. Reflecting on this wide support for Israel’s genocide among Jewish-Israelis, including in the film industry, Orly Noy, the chair of Israel’s leading human rights organization B’Tselem, wrote, “Israel is unleashing a holocaust in Gaza, and it cannot be dismissed as the will of the country’s current fascist leaders alone. … What we are witnessing is the final stage in the nazification of Israeli society.”
PACBI renews its call on people of conscience around the world to boycott Fauda.