Writers for the hit TV series Fauda proposed a storyline last year in which a group of Hamas terrorists broke through the Gaza border and took control of an Israeli kibbutz, but producers nixed the idea, deeming it too unbelievable.
“I remember saying ‘Guys, what are the chances that dozens of terrorists would get to the border and the IDF wouldn’t have any indication of it? That they wouldn’t be shot down?'” recalled Avi Issacharoff, the show’s creator. “They’d be killed before they got close, surely.”
In an interview with Nicole Lampert of the UK’s Jewish News, Isacharoff said that the Fauda team has had to return to the drawing board for its next season, in the wake of all that has happened since the morning of October 7: “What we had written became totally irrelevant,” he said, “and so we are reinventing the show just as, in some ways, Israel will need to be reinvented; we need a new IDF, a new government, a new prime minister because Israel is going to need to be rebuilt.”
Issacharoff said he is still shocked at how wrong he, and the country at large, was about the danger posed by Hamas: “It’s hard to explain,” he said, “unless you think of the policy towards Hamas through one word: ‘containment.’
“If you look at Hamas through a Western, logical point of view, then it is nuts what they did,” he said. “I think the whole of Israel is in a kind of post-traumatic national phenomenon. I don’t think there is anybody in Israel today who doesn’t know someone either killed or kidnapped on or since October 7.” That includes, in Isacharoff's case, Matan Meir, a Fauda crew member, who fell in battle in November, and Idan Amedi, an actor in the series, who was wounded.
Show's creator on western Hamas support: "I can't get over how ignorant these people are"
Isacharoff told Lampert that not only is he in shock over Hamas’s attack, but he also struggles to make sense of the world’s reaction in its wake: “They say we deserved it,” he told her, “They try and contextualize the slaughter of innocent people. They are so stupid; they use words like colonialism, but Israel wasn’t in Gaza since 2005… I can’t get over how ignorant these people are.
“When they say ‘Free Palestine,’” Isacharoff went on, “do they understand that Hamas is a dictatorship that took Gaza by force? That they killed 160 Fatah members? That they force people to follow Sharia law?”
“Now we realize,” he said, “that no matter what happens, even if Hamas slaughters thousands of Israelis, these people, these ‘good’ people, don’t care. At the end of the day, you can’t see it as anything more than antisemitism. It is pure antisemitism. So, excuse my French, but f*** them.”