# How Fiction Will Remember October 7 - with Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff

An episode of [Call Me Back - with Dan Senor](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1539292794), 1 Oct 2026, 50 min.

Audio: https://podcasts.beehiiv.com/d9ee47aa-cc91-4ad0-b1e2-000191888049/01a0599f-c7dc-725e-a326-2afd78c94e7e/01a0f55e-e272-769e-a323-b04fc2c5437e/01a0f55e-e34d-78d2-824c-e20be2cb58d0.mp3

How do you turn October 7th into fiction when it still feels like the present? For more than a decade, Fauda has turned the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a global television phenomenon. But Season 5 takes on something different: two episodes that put its fictional characters inside the events of October 7th, while the trauma is still very much alive. Dan sits down with Fauda creators Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff to discuss the responsibility of dramatizing a real catastrophe, what they chose to show—and leave unseen—and what happens when fiction begins to shape how the world remembers history. Read John Aziz’s Atlantic piece on Fauda here. ___ RSVP to our October 5th Virtual Announcement Event: https://arkmedia.org/rsvp/ Get your tickets to a live taping of Call Me Back at the Streicker Center in NYC on October 22. ___ This episode is sponsored by The Israel Democracy Institute: For resources on Israel's upcoming election and to learn more about IDI, visit https://en.idi.org.il/ Call Me Back is made possible by our subscribers. If these conversations are where you turn to understand Israel and the Jewish world, consider joining them. It's what keeps this show going. Become a subscriber - Inside Call me Back ___ In this episode: - How Fauda reconstructed the events of October 7th - How the co-creators determined the level of violence they could portray - Why the creators saw Season 5 as more than just another season of TV - Why Fauda is drawing a huge audience across the Arab world - Can a television show become part of the historical record that’s still being written? - In an era of misinformation and anti-semitism, why it’s important to tell this story during a still-living trauma ____ More Ark Media: • Want to join Ark Media? Check out our careers page for new openings. • Explore Israel Votes • Listen to Ark News Daily • Listen to For Heaven's Sake • Newsletters | Ark Media | Amit Segal | Nadav Eyal • Instagram | Ark Media | Dan • X | Dan • Dan Senor & Saul Singer’s book, The Genius of Israel • Get in touch Credits: Ilan Benatar, Devan Schwartz, Brittany Cohen, Mindy Schaper, Ava Weiner, Martin Huergo, Mariangeles Burgos, and Yuval Semo

## Transcript

[0:00] Quick note before we start. Big things are coming to Arc Media.
[0:03] Somewhere in the small gaps of time between putting out three episodes each week, we've been secretly working on something we think all our listeners are going to be really excited about.
[0:13] We're announcing everything live on October 5th. If you want to be the first to hear about it, RSVP to our virtual announcement event. You can find the sign -up link in the show notes. See you there.
[0:24] \[short upbeat music\] You are listening to an Arc Media podcast.
[0:34] Today, we will hear a conversation with Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff about the new season of Fauda and the audiences it has reached, which, especially after the past three years, would have seemed impenetrable.
[0:46] But I couldn't help but think that we may have just witnessed what could be the basis for the next season of Fauda.
[0:53] Before our conversation, which I recorded a few days ago, I wanted to share a few thoughts on the dramatic events of the past twenty -four hours. Imagine you're on a routine three-hour flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv.
[1:05] There are numerous flights like this every single day back and forth. It's a Wednesday morning, the fifth day of Sukkot. Your kids are in the seats next to you, and then the plane starts falling out of the sky.
[1:18] That's what happened to the passengers of FlyDubai Flight one zero seven three. Had the attack been successful, it would have been the worst attack against Jews since October 7th, twenty twenty-three.
[1:33] Arc Media contributor Amit Segal wrote in the Free Press today that this is the first time in more than twenty years that someone has tried to hijack a plane bound for Israel.
[1:44] He describes the whole region holding its breath as the flight sent out an emergency signal, flashed the hijack code, and seemed to veer off course over Saudi airspace.
[1:54] The co -pilot had stabbed the captain repeatedly, taken the controls, and pointed the plane at the ground. It dropped over seventeen thousand feet in just over one minute.
[2:05] One passenger said she was certain everyone would die, and she sent goodbye messages to her parents. And then something miraculous happened.
[2:16] Someone from the cabin managed to get into the cockpit and threw the co -pilot out, as three others jumped on him and tied him up with the cables of the airline headphones.
[2:26] The plane had an emergency landing in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, and then on the way home, Israelis on board were heard singing Rabbi Nachman's Kol Ha'Olam Kulo.
[2:38] The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to be afraid. Younger listeners may need some context to make sense of the past twenty-four hours.
[2:50] Between nineteen sixty-eight and nineteen seventy-six, Palestinian terror groups carried out or attempted sixteen hijackings and a similar number of other aviation attacks, including strikes on El Al targets in Athens, Brussels, Istanbul, and Rome.
[3:06] Their goals were always to isolate Israel, reach a global audience, and terrify Israelis. And as Amit Segal writes, they succeeded.
[3:15] Entebbe in nineteen seventy-six actually ended that era by showing the West an alternative to capitulation. And once a rescue became credible, hijacking was a far worse bet.
[3:28] So what are the lessons we've learned so far from today?
[3:31] Well, there are probably many, but three that jumped out at me are, one, it wasn't the long arm of the Israeli military apparatus or intelligence services that played a major role here. In fact, not really any role.
[3:44] It was civilians, many of whom had military training, but they organized themselves as civilians and took action. Two, the attacker may have been aiming at the UAE-Israeli alliance itself. And three, the Saudi dimension.
[4:01] The Saudi medics treating the Israeli passengers, the plane landing in Saudi Arabia shows how far we've come on a path to normalization, and yet how far there is still to go.
[4:13] Each of these topics will be addressed in episodes on Call Me Back in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, please be sure to check out the latest episode of Arc News Daily.
[4:22] Now on to the episode we recorded with Lior and Avi a few days ago. It's not like season one, two, three, four. It's something else.
[4:32] Now there's a real story, a real event that when you follow the real events, you got to be very careful about what you do.
[4:39] And I felt like that there's a shlichut, that there's a mission here to tell a way bigger story than, you know, just another season of Fauda.
[4:48] We knew that we had to tell our truth because you hear so many stories, people trying to say that October 7th wasn't real, that it was some army things, a war. No, we want to show to the world this is what happened.
[5:02] \[upbeat music\] It's nine AM on Sunday, September twenty-seventh here in New York City.
[5:18] It's four PM on Sunday, September twenty-seventh in Israel, as Israelis begin to wind down their day. For more than a decade, Fauda has done something very few Israeli cultural exports have ever managed to do.
[5:32] It has taken an intensely local conflict and turned it into a Hebrew-speaking global phenomenon. The new season, season five, released globally earlier this month, reached Netflix's top ten in dozens of countries.
[5:47] It rose to number one in Lebanon while also charting across Jordan, the UAE, Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the region. But this season is different.
[5:59] Two episodes take Fauda directly into October seventh, placing its fictional characters inside events that actually happened just shy of three years ago.
[6:09] And in doing so, they are entering a much larger process that is only just beginning.
[6:15] Films, television series, novels, plays, eventually October seventh will exist not only as something people experienced, but as something millions of people who were never there will encounter only through stories.
[6:28] And that raises a difficult question. How do you turn history into fiction when it barely feels like history yet?
[6:36] When survivors are still living with what happened, when families are still grieving, when the facts themselves remain politically contested, when almost every creative choice, whose story you tell, whose suffering you show, what you leave out, can become part of how the event is ultimately remembered.
[6:56] We often think that history produces stories, but stories also produce history. Think about Saving Private Ryan, Platoon, The Hurt Locker.
[7:05] For people who did not experience the events themselves, a film or television series can become the memory. So how do you dramatize October 7th without exploiting it?
[7:16] How much license can fiction take with something this traumatic? And what responsibility comes with knowing that your version of the story may travel much farther than the historical record itself?
[7:28] This is what we're gonna talk about today with the creators of Fauda, Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff. My conversation with them right after this short message.
[7:37] \[gentle music\] This message is sponsored by the Israel Democracy Institute. Every election cycle in Israel is accompanied by the words, "This is the most consequential election in history." It's become a cliché.
[7:51] But this time it may actually be true. As followers of Israeli politics, you know how hard it can be to distill the issues from partisan spin, to go behind the headlines to understand what's really going on.
[8:03] If you enjoy the kind of thoughtful, fact-based conversations we have on this podcast, I think you'll appreciate the work of the Israel Democracy Institute, IDI, a leading nonpartisan center of research and action.
[8:16] IDI offers practical proposals for strengthening Israeli democracy and clear, accessible analysis of the biggest challenges facing the Jewish state.
[8:26] Their explainers on everything from Israel's electoral system to the ultra-Orthodox draft make complex issues easier to understand, and their regular polling and public opinion research are among the best tools available for tracking where Israeli society is moving in real time.
[8:42] As Israel heads towards a pivotal election, regardless of where you stand politically, IDI is an essential resource for making sense of what's at stake and where the country may be headed after the votes are counted.
[8:55] To learn more, visit elections.idi.org.il/2026 or follow the link in the show notes. \[gentle music\] Lior, Avi, welcome to Call Me Back. Thank you, Dan.
[9:13] Hi, Dan. Great to be with you guys, both of you joining me from Tel Aviv. Lior, I'm gonna start our conversation with the two episodes that dramatize the morning of October 7th. They were devastating to watch.
[9:28] That's where the line between fiction and nonfiction, and the lines between reality and memory completely blurred. How did you go about restructuring that day?
[9:40] So first of all, when October 7 happened, it was a shock for all of us. We were devastated. We didn't know what to do.
[9:49] In Israel, we all-- we didn't know what, what happened to us and how it could happen to us, this crazy situations. And when Avi and I started to write the fifth season of Fauda, we couldn't ignore October 7.
[10:04] We thought that in the beginning when, when we had a plan to write something else, but then October 7 happened, and then we decided that you cannot do anything without October 7.
[10:14] For us, it's such a major event in our life. It's a trauma that we cannot even express to the world. We couldn't. And then we decided that we need to write something about it, and we knew that it's gonna be out.
[10:28] We knew that everything, that people will see it in Israel and outside of Israel. And then how do you write something about it when it's still very fresh?
[10:36] We started to write the show immediately after October 7, and the show happening three years after October 7, these days. So we had to imagine what will happen after October 7. And this is how we started to write.
[10:48] And we knew that we have a responsibility to the world and to show the story that we all had, we all, uh, got affected by.
[10:57] It wasn't easy, because how you tell a story s- of such a big event, such a huge event for the Israelis, for the Jewish nation, how do you tell this story?
[11:06] And we decided to tell the story through the characters that everybody knows, and through their emotional journey, what happened to them on those days, in this day, where they were, what happened to them.
[11:18] So for us, it was much easier, and I think to the audience as well, to understand what happened in October 7 because they went through with Doron that they know for so long, with Eli that they know for 10 years already.
[11:31] All the viewers, the people who watch Fauda, they all know those characters very, very well. So if you put those character in October 7, they will understand much better what happened to all of us in Israel in this day.
[11:43] And Lior, just to kind of set the context, I just want to spend a very quick moment on this.
[11:49] You learned about October 7th obviously from the images, but also your sister was living in a kibbutz in the south, right, in the Gaza envelope, and she had reached out to you.
[11:58] Yeah, she went just for the weekend to this kibbutz, Erez, Kibbutz Erez. I was in Romania when October 7 happened. Right.
[12:05] And I woke up with a phone call of my sister saying that there is an attack, and she needs me to come and save her, and she's with knives inside a shelter, and I didn't understand what she's talking about.
[12:15] It was crazy for me to wake up with this call. And she said immediately, "Just watch what happening in the news." And, and I opened TV, and what we saw was devastating. So October 7 was a shock for me.
[12:26] It was because I didn't have the ability to go and save my sister as well. She's okay. She managed to run away with her sons.
[12:32] But for me, it was the hardest thing to understand that I cannot do anything until I went back day after. Okay.
[12:39] Avi, war films, as I mentioned in the introduction, and TV series like Band of Brothers and other shows typically come out years and years, sometimes decades after the war's ended.
[12:51] October 7th is still a living trauma for Israelis. How do you dramatize something that for many of your viewers has not yet become history?
[13:01] It's something they're either actually living while you're in the writer's room writing this, or there's just still PTSD by the time the show comes out.
[13:10] So this is part of the conversation that we were having, part of the dilemma.
[13:13] 'Cause we knew at the end of the day that, you know, many people are still there in the trauma, not even in the post-trauma, but inside the trauma, living it, breathing it. And how can you deal with something like that?
[13:25] How can you deal with knowing that, you know, 1,200 families lost their son or daughter or relative or whatever.
[13:33] The 251 people were taken to Gaza, kidnapped by Hamas, and while we were starting to write the fifth season, they were still there, meaning the hostages, most of them were still there. And then what do you do exactly?
[13:47] Like, what can you show? What can you write about, what you cannot? Maybe this is something too much of, you know, touching, not even the, the, the scar. It's an open wound.
[13:59] So how can you touch this open wound without really damaging it, damaging the body or the soul of the people that suffer too much and the people that were living in Israel.
[14:09] And for us, you know, it's a nation in a trauma. It's a nation not even in a post-trauma. It's still there. We're breathing it. We're living it.
[14:18] I guess that each and every one of us is carrying some kind of memory from October 7th. And we knew that while we are going to do something, two episodes about October 7th, it's going to raise the trauma again.
[14:31] It's gonna show the trauma not only to people all around the world, but to people that were really living and breathing the trauma.
[14:39] Lior, what was the hardest decision you guys had to make about what to show and what not to show?
[14:45] Trying to be a fly on the wall in the writer's room when you guys are thinking this through, like, "Ooh, that's going too far, or that's too close to the bone. We can't do that." It wasn't just in the writer's room.
[14:54] It also was on set because while we were shooting those devastating scenes-- So let's take this as an example. There was a rape. Terrorists raped Israeli womens in the party, outside of the party, in the kibbutzim.
[15:08] How much do you allow yourself to show? So we decided to do it in very delicate way, if you can say that about what you've seen there, but you see blood under skirts.
[15:21] You see when the terrorists take Eli's wife to the room, you don't see that. You see him take her to the room, but you don't see what he does to her in the room. Exactly. But you know, you know what he does in the room.
[15:34] Exactly. You know exactly what's gonna happen there. But on the other way, there was two scenes that were very hard scenes that every Israeli knows about.
[15:43] One was the container, that people in the party were hiding in a container. Yeah, like a big dumpster, like a big garbage container. Yeah.
[15:50] And, and the kids who had escaped the Nova Festival, there's a scene where they're hiding in this big container. Yeah. And I'm climbing there, and they're all dead. Yeah.
[15:59] So it was like 20, 30 dead kids over there, and it really happened. It really happened, meaning you, you guys were recreating something that actually occurred. Yeah. And also, there was the migunit scene.
[16:12] How do you say migunit? It was a shelter, like a, a mobile shelter. Kind of a safe place, yeah. Yeah, a shelter on the side of the road, right, where there's a bunch of the kids from the Nova Festival hiding in there.
[16:23] By the way, when I saw that scene, I was thinking of where Hersh Goldberg-Polin was taken hostage from, where Anna Shapiro was killed. I've been to that actual shelter.
[16:31] That was the immediate thing I thought of when I watched that scene. So was that trying to recreate those kinds of scenes that you knew actually occurred?
[16:38] Yeah, and you can see it also in our faces as actors who, going into this place and going out from this place, you can see it in our eyes that the acting and the reality are very-- You don't understand what's acting and what's reality.
[16:55] And you can see it in those two episodes. All of the team, the actors, were so deep inside the situation that I'm standing there after I did what I did in the Nova Festival, and you see in my eyes that it's real.
[17:10] I wasn't acting. I was really inside of the situation like my friends. We were all part of this scene that you're saying that sometimes you shoot movies or TV shows 20 years, 10 years after it happened.
[17:23] For us, it was so real because it was like a year ago, two years ago, and we were, we were living it. So as an actors, and this is why it's so hard and so bleeding, these two episodes. You feel that you are inside of it.
[17:36] Avi, go ahead You know, the question is how graphic can you be? How... You know, what's the body count that you can show? How many dead bodies? How many times can you repeat that? The rape, as, uh, Lior mentioned.
[17:50] There's a dilemma here.
[17:51] It's in the writer's room, it's during the production, and it's in the editing room because usually you shoot more than you show, of course, and then comes the, the discussion, "What should we show? What shouldn't we?
[18:03] Can we show the kids being shot or not?" And of course, the answer was no. We don't need to show the kids being shot. We don't need to show many of the things that happened in reality, though.
[18:13] Some people that, you know, their head was beheaded or some body organs that were cut by machetes. And by the way, we insisted on showing a sword, a machete that Hamas Nukhba people were carrying with them. Why?
[18:27] Because we understood through a research that we've done for the show, each and every Hamas member that was part of the invasion into Israel on October 7th took with them not only an AK47 and a hand grenade or RPG, but also a machete, a sword.
[18:42] And that brings the question of why on earth would a terrorist with an AK47 invade a kibbutz or a town with a huge sword on his back? And that's real, and I have to emphasize this.
[18:54] Almost each and every scene that you see in those two episodes, seven and eight, are taken, are inspired by true events, starting from the starting point in which Eli gets the phone call around 3:00 a.m.
[19:05] and, you know, the Shin Bet tells him, "Get ready. We need you to come as a kind of, uh, what they're, they're calling tequila force."
[19:12] Tequila force was the unit that Israel deployed to the border, obviously before they knew the scale of the invasion. It's an intervention team for the Shin Bet. Yeah.
[19:22] It's a kind of a SWAT team of the Shin Bet with the YAMAM that were sent early in the morning, the police on the terror unit that are working with the Shin Bet together, and they were sent there because the Shin Bet and the army had some kind of an intelligence that something is happening on the border.
[19:40] They didn't know what is happening, so this is why they sent the first team, and this is why we s- we show Eli going there. Then of course, the Bedouin guy that was murdered there.
[19:49] Then you have the junction, the junction with the police and all of it, and the kibbutz.
[19:53] And each and every event that you see in those two episodes, including the old man on the roof in the kibbutz that is shooting some Hamas people, it's taken from real stories that happened there.
[20:06] So every one of those details, I just wanna be clear on this, every one of those details that you show you could trace to actual incidents or events, as horrific as they are, that actually occurred on October 7th.
[20:20] The major events, yes. You definitely can connect them to real events that happened on the ground. Okay. And did you...
[20:28] And this is a question for both of you, did you feel a different level of responsibility writing this season?
[20:33] I mean, you, you've written four seasons before, and did you just feel, like, a heavier sense of res- the, the stakes with this episode was gonna be-- I mean, I was just looking at when season four-- So season four, the season before this one, was released in Israel in July of 2022, and it was released globally on Netflix in January of 2023, so some nine months or something before October 7, 2023.
[20:57] So events in the region, in the Middle East, in Israel, among its immediate neighbors, things are always tense, and the stakes are always, you know, one could argue, are high.
[21:07] But when this season, when you got-- went to work on this season, you, you had to know the stakes were way higher. What kind of sense of responsibility did you feel when you were writing?
[21:17] I feel that, you know, for us it was the most important thing that we've done in our work, in our job, as, you know, scriptwriters, as creators, as, uh, as a journalist, as whatever.
[21:29] For me at least, and I think that Lior agrees with me about that, you understand that this is something way bigger than just another TV show. Okay? Uh, it's not like season one, two, three, four. It's something else.
[21:40] Now there's a real story, a real event that when you follow the real events, you gotta be very careful about what you do, and I felt like that you have a kind of a sacred mission in a way.
[21:51] Almost, you know, uh, the guy in the synagogue, the hazzan that reads the prayer.
[21:57] So w- It's called shaliach tzibbur, and I think that for me at least, I felt that there's a shlichut, that there's a mission here to tell a way bigger story than, you know, just another season of Fauda. Lior?
[22:11] It was bigger than us. The story tw- was bigger than us. This is something that we had to do. It wasn't even a question. It was a mission for us. We knew that it will affect people.
[22:23] We-- First of all, we thought about the people in Israel, and then we thought about people outside of Israel. This is why there was a disclaimer before episode seven and eight in Israel, "It could trigger you guys.
[22:34] You don't have to watch those two episodes if you feel that it will traumatize you, so you can skip it and go through the episode, uh, nine. Don't watch it."
[22:43] So for us, it was a huge responsibility we felt that we have and, and the atmosphere now in the world, much more.
[22:50] With this atmosphere, we knew that we had to tell our truth because you hear so many stories, people trying to say that October 7th wasn't real, that it was some army things, a war. No.
[23:03] We want to show to the world this is what happened. This is in your face.
[23:08] You will think whatever you wanna think about it, but this is what happened th- and we wanna put it in your face now, and then you decide if October 7 happened or not, or if it was the Hamas militant against Isr- uh, army, or it was terrorists against civilians.
[23:23] So it was a responsibility that we really felt that it's on our, our shoulders, and this is what we did.
[23:29] Fauda has a global audience, and I wanna talk to you about how you imagine this season being received when you're working on it around the world, and specifically the Arab world.
[23:38] And I want-- I just wanna quote here, so I mentioned it in the intro, it's popular around the world, extremely popular around the world, especially across a range of Arab countries.
[23:47] In the middle of September, it was the number one show in Lebanon. It was top five in Jordan and Qatar. It was number five in the UAE. It was top 10 in Kuwait. I, I can go on and on and on.
[23:57] And there's a writer for The Atlantic magazine who wrote a piece about season five. His name's Jon Aziz. Interestingly enough, he has, uh, roots in the West Bank. He's got Palestinian family.
[24:08] And he writes, "For any Israeli drama, much less one about undercover operatives apprehending and often killing Palestinian and Lebanese militants, to become a hit across the Arab world is remarkable.
[24:22] For it to happen in a season partially devoted to the events of October 7th 2023 and their aftermath is nothing short of astonishing."
[24:32] Did you imagine it would be received with these off-the-charts viewership numbers in the Arab world when you were working on it? Avi, I'll start with you. Short answer, no. I didn't see it coming.
[24:47] I thought that we'll have \[laughs\] -- and I shared my concerns with Lior many times. I thought that not too many people are going to watch it in the Middle East and all over the world. Why?
[24:58] Because, you know, we're very much not popular, meaning us Israelis. And a- again, it touches such a brutal wound, open, still open. So I thought that, you know, people wouldn't like to, to see a show like that.
[25:10] Lior, before you respond, I just wanna-- I'll quote one more time from this piece by Jon Aziz, which we'll link in the show notes, which is a really interesting piece.
[25:17] He writes, "This season will no doubt challenge some of the Arab viewership that the show has built up.
[25:22] Depicting these events in great detail is a challenge to those who falsely claim that the war in Gaza was unprovoked, as well as to those who do not believe that Hamas committed war crimes or that October 7th was an Israeli false flag."
[25:36] So what do you think, I mean, these audiences in the Arab world, Lior, are seeing when they see this season? Like, they're clearly being driven to watch this in big numbers.
[25:46] What do you think that they are wrestling with or they're encountering? I've asked a Lebanese friend of mine, and I asked him, "Why the hell people in Lebanon watching Fauda? What's the magic?" And he told me two things.
[26:00] First of all, the majority of the Lebanese want peace with Israel.
[26:04] The minority is very loud, the minority is very violent, but the majority of the Lebanese really want to have peace with Israel, like the Israelis want to have peace with Lebanese.
[26:16] I think we are much more connected than ever. This is one thing. The other thing he told me, that we are sharing the same enemy. Most of the Lebanese doesn't like Hezbollah.
[26:28] It doesn't like Iran, and it doesn't like the intervention that they have in their country.
[26:32] So they are related and-- listen, I'm getting hundred or thousands of messages from people in the Arab world through my social media. And you know what's crazy?
[26:43] I'm getting messages from people in Lebanon that's saying, "Why you didn't show how cruel they were in October 7? Why didn't you show how brutal they were, the terrorists?" Wow. In real life, they were much more brutal.
[26:56] So the Lebanese send me some messages. They said, "Why you didn't show that?" They were saying you held back? Yeah. That we were, we were too, how do you say, gentle. Yeah, yeah, sanitized. Too sanitized. Yeah.
[27:09] So for us, and I think it's bigger than that, Dan, I think the majority of the people in the world want to have peace. They want to live in quiet. They don't want to have wars. Like us, we don't want to have wars.
[27:22] But there is a mino-- loud minority on social media and loud minority all over the world who's taking control of the conversation, instead of the majority of the people of the world, that they are very silenced now, and they're not saying anything.
[27:36] I wanna add one more reason why is it so popular, and this is something very simple, and I might sound not modest enough, but it's a good show.
[27:45] It's a good TV show, and I think that at the end of the day, because the drama was built in a very specific way, especially about those two episodes, makes it even more interesting to watch, even if you live in Qatar or Lebanon or Jordan or wherever.
[28:01] We'll be back with Lior and Avi right after this message. \[gentle music\] Hi, it's Dan Senor. Israel is heading into one of its most consequential elections, and this time, the whole world is watching closely.
[28:17] Hot takes and daily noise are pretty much guaranteed to populate your media diet. But as with any election, there's a deeper story about identity, religion, democracy, and what kind of country Israelis wanna live in.
[28:31] That's why Arc Media launched Israel Votes, a special initiative across Call Me Back, For Heaven's Sake, and Arc News Daily.
[28:40] You'll hear from the leading candidates shaping the race, along with analysis and reporting from two of Israel's leading political analysts, Arc Media contributors Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal.
[28:51] Join us for Israel Votes, your front row seat to the election that could define Israel's future. Go to arcmedia.org/votes to watch and listen. See you there.
[29:07] And we're back with Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff. One aspect or one consistent approach of one of Fauda's signatures throughout the first four seasons has always been showing the humanity on both sides of the conflict.
[29:21] So even the antagonists in previous seasons who we learn to hate, there are certain moments where you kind of pull this trick on your audience, on your viewers, where you, you're forced to understand the human dilemmas, the personal relationships, the contradictions, if you will, in some of the most barbaric characters in the previous seasons on the Palestinian side.
[29:43] You don't do that so much in this season. Did October 7th make that instinct harder to maintain? I guess it did. I guess that for us it was challenging in, in other way, in a different way.
[29:55] Because again, this is one of the most significant things about Fauda, you know, showing the conflict mo- from both sides.
[30:02] At the end of the day after October 7th, we understood that you cannot go deep into the heart of a Nukhba murderer terrorist that was part of the, of this terrible massacre that took place on October 7th.
[30:14] And, you know, understanding his reasons and motivation, it's not about that.
[30:18] But what we did is a kind of another trick, meaning during the plot of, uh, all the other nine episodes, while we do follow the other side, which are Europeans, European-- white Europeans that are being kind of tricked or dragged by Hamas' people, by Hamas' propaganda, and are joining Hamas in their terrorist activities, and we were showing them, and we did deep dive into their hearts and their conflicts through the, of course, the character of Anne and Melanie Laurent, the French very famous actress from Inglorious Bastards.
[30:56] And over there we did show what they're facing and the dilemmas and all the questions, uh, that they're dealing with.
[31:04] I wanna ask you about that because I, I'm glad you brought it up, because th- this is a big theme of this season, which didn't exist in previous seasons, or at least not to the same extent certainly, which this chorus of sympathizers for Hamas and sympathizers for October 7th in some way, meaning for the massacre, that it was some kind of pursuit of Palestinian liberation, justified Palestinian response to Israel's aggression, quote unquote occupation, whatever, that there's this whole echo chamber throughout the West, largely in Europe, but not only Europe.
[31:40] We see these people on American college campuses. We see them protesting throughout capitals throughout Europe, and this is a big theme.
[31:47] And this Melanie Laurent, who plays Anne, as you said, and the people around her in France and Marseille are, are an important part of the story in season five.
[31:55] What I was most struck by, Avi, th- I am reminded of this as you bring it up, was I didn't see it coming to the extent that it became a big theme of our story after October 7th.
[32:07] Years later, we're sitting there scratching our heads, looking around, being like, "What is going on?"
[32:11] Like, how are these huge swaths of Western society that have no connection, are not from the Arab Muslim world, how are they so invested in the Hamas cause?
[32:22] And you guys wrote that in as a big part of the story, and as Lior said earlier, you started writing this soon after October 7th.
[32:29] Did you guys anticipate that this would be a big theme of our world, of our real world, not our fictionalized world, of our real world after October 7th? Like, how did that become part of the story for you guys?
[32:41] I will remind you that two days after October 7th, the demonstrations against Israel started. Yeah. Two days after October 7th, the demonstrations against Israel in the universities and the US started.
[32:52] It's pure antisemitism. Pure antisemitism. It's-- I cannot explain it in a different way because I heard someone who says that we are in a war for the last twenty years, but we didn't participate in this war.
[33:05] We didn't know that we are in a war, that in the last twenty years there are some movements, countries, governments who's paying to universities, buying properties, buying, uh, governments, buying people, buying politicians with their money, and they are trying to control the narrative, and they are controlling the narrative now in this war that we didn't know that happening in the last twenty years.
[33:29] And now we see the outcome of those twenty years of funding all those places that con-- now controlling the narrative, that the Hamas, the terrorists are the heroes.
[33:39] And for us it's-- I remember all of us, all the Israelis, two days after October 7th, we were grieving. We were counting the bodies.
[33:47] People start to demonstrate against Israel, saying that we are \[chuckles\] we are genociding. So for me, it's, it's pure antisemitism. I don't have any, any words.
[33:58] And it still continues, Dan, and you see that not only the colleges and campuses, you see it all over the place. You see it in Hollywood.
[34:04] I'm sorry to say that, I mean, but there are some, even Jewish actors that are joining the, the so-called party. Why?
[34:11] Maybe it's cool to be anti-Israel, maybe it's cool to be pro-Hamas and to call it pro-Palestine, but it's not pro-Palestine. It's pretty obvious that you support Hamas. So what's behind this I cannot really understand.
[34:24] Maybe this is a, a kind of an attempt to be popular, to get more, you know, people following you on, uh, the social networks. I don't know. Actually, I don't care anymore.
[34:34] I mean, we don't care anymore because we had enough of those sometimes young, sometimes less young people that are not really educated, do not really understand the picture. At the end of the day, that was our truth.
[34:45] And yes, we understood that in Europe there are some organizations that are trying to provoke young people to join them and to support their activities against Israel.
[34:55] So this is why we showed, you know, uh, those Europeans that have been recruited to Hamas, and we even had a, a special cameo guest on episode five, if I'm not wrong. Correct me if I'm wrong.
[35:09] But I don't know how many people here know that- He's talking about me. \[laughs\] That Dan Senor, the host of Call Me Back, did call us back and was a cameo as a Hamas supporter on episode five of, uh, season five.
[35:26] I hear that episode five is the highest downloaded episode of the season, so I, um, I'm not saying there's a connection. 'Cause Dan, you look like-- You, you really look like a European student in a way.
[35:36] \[laughs\] I know, I know, 'cause I'm clean shaven. You guys didn't give me enough notice to grow stubble for that filming. Uh, let me ask you about the cast. So when did you guys start shooting this season?
[35:48] Nine months ago? Ten months ago? Okay.
[35:51] So you're in the middle of still this, you know, where, where the issue of the war and Israel's response to the war is politically charged all over the place, and you bring in a lot of actors who are not from Israel.
[36:03] You mentioned Melanie Laurent, who's certainly not from Israel. This may have even been her first trip to Israel. I don't know, you guys can tell me. So you've- you're bringing in all these people.
[36:09] Obviously, you have a lot of Arab actors in this season. So you're filming this while Israel is in the middle...
[36:16] Again, it comes-- I keep coming back to this question about doing all this while events are unfolding in real time, while tensions are so charged, so high.
[36:25] I think Israelis feel like the whole world is against them, and here you are literally bringing non-Israelis into Israel for a long stretch of time to participate in this film while the war is going on.
[36:37] You're filming while the war is going on. What was the dynamic like with this cast, particularly with the non-Jews in the cast? So I'll talk about Melanie.
[36:47] Melanie, we played together in two different movies before, in 6 Underground and, and Operation Finale, and we became very good friends.
[36:55] And after I told her that we have a role for French character, she shouted at me why she's not doing it. Shouted you, meaning like, "Why aren't you thinking about me for this role?" Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[37:06] She was, "How crazy you are that you're not offering me this job, this character, that I wanna be part of Fauda." And I, and I talked to Avi, and immediately we said yes, and, and we got her.
[37:17] But while we were shooting, the war with Iran started, so Israel was bombed with heavy missiles while they were here, those actors. Hakim, he came from France, Algerian guy with a Muslim, uh, religion.
[37:32] And Melanie, who came to Israel, she was in Israel for, like once, I think, for one day or for 24 hours recording something, and she came here, and immediately she fell in love in Israel.
[37:44] She really felt in love in Israel. While the war started, she called me and she said, "I don't have shelter in my home," and I have a shelter in my home.
[37:52] You mean she didn't have a shelter in the home she was staying in while sh- when she was in Israel? Yeah, yeah, yeah, while we were filming. And I said, "Come over. Let's be our guest. Live with us."
[38:00] And she lived with us the whole time, with my family, with my kids, with my wife, with my dog, with my cat. \[chuckles\] We were all together like hap- \[chuckles\] big happy family.
[38:09] And after the war ended, she didn't want to leave- \[chuckles\]... the house. She wanted to stay with us, and she stayed. And after we finished shooting, she came back to Israel again and again. She wanted to be part...
[38:20] She felt in love in Israel. Also Hakim.
[38:23] Hakim was-- I remember every Friday night, he was sh- show-- He was sending me pictures, all of us, sending pictures to all of us that he's doing a Kiddush with different families in Israel, happy.
[38:34] \[chuckles\] He wanted to, to buy a house here.
[38:36] It was really the-- When, when you feel it, when you know Israelis, and when you know what's happening here, and you, when you feel the atmosphere, the real atmosphere, not the thing that you're telling, that people see from outside or think about, about us out from the outside, you understand that Israel, it's an amazing place to live.
[38:52] And both of them, and all of them actually, felt the same way.
[38:56] We're constantly hearing stories about how Israel, Israeli creative artists, Israeli storytellers are being, you know, Israeli academics, Israeli scientists are being isolated, they're being canceled, they're being boycotted.
[39:13] Obviously, again, we see a lot of this in the Hollywood scene, as you alluded to before, Avi.
[39:17] Were you worried when you were making this that there's no way this season, particularly the way you portray episode seven and eight, will survive efforts to cancel it once it goes on the global stage?
[39:33] You know, pretty soon we got the call from Netflix that they were saying, "We're going to air it. We're going to show it." Meaning pretty soon after you had created it for the Israeli audience, for Yes.
[39:47] So after we finished the writing and then we were about to start shooting, it was pretty clear to us that Netflix is behind us and are supporting Fauda fifth season.
[39:57] So I think that there was no real question mark about is the international audience going to watch it or not? For us, it was known, it was clear, yes, Netflix is going to air it, and it, it's great.
[40:11] And, uh, since then, it's all over the world. It's 192 countries, if I'm not wrong. Reached the top 10 in the US, including all the other streamers, according to one of the websites, according to Variety, actually.
[40:27] So having everything that you said, Fauda fifth season enjoying lots of audience, many people watching it, it's a kind of a miracle because this is the thing that we didn't see.
[40:38] We knew that it's going to be aired, but we didn't know how popular is it going to be. I mean, all the time that you know that it's about to be aired on Netflix, you don't know how many people are going to watch it.
[40:51] With everything that happened in Gaza and all the criticism against Israel, against the Israeli government. And at the end of the day, this is a huge surprise for us, and it's a great surprise. But you call it a miracle.
[41:04] It was also a big risk.
[41:06] Like did you guys ever have a conversation saying, "We're producing something here that could provoke huge backlash and completely undermine the story we're trying to tell, and maybe we should rein it in, or maybe we should tone it down, or may-" I, I, I will stop you.
[41:20] I will stop you for a second. All right. Listen, we're not scared, Avi and I. We're not scared. We don't play these games of canceling, not canceling. It's ridiculous. You know, we're doing our things. We are artists.
[41:35] We're doing our shows. We're doing our art. We, we bring it to the world. We're bringing stories. We want people to feel. We want people to get emotions from what we're writing and what we're doing. That's it.
[41:46] And the boycotting thing that you're talking about, it's ridiculous because how art people, artistic society want to boycott other artists because of their religion or the, the place that they are coming.
[41:59] So you are not an artist if you boycott different artists because of their, uh, uh, religion. This is art.
[42:05] Art is about to be open, to be democratic, to understand many other-- This is why we, we, we see other different shows, different movies from all over the world. I'm not judging anyone by his opinions, by his religion.
[42:20] I'm judging them by their good story, good actors or not, and that's it. By the way, I think that we expected even more of the calls for boycotting Fauda.
[42:31] I mean, we had it on the second season from the BDS movement, that call to boycott Fauda and not to air it and not to watch it, and of course, it helped us in the Arab world.
[42:40] I think this is one of the reasons it became so popular.
[42:43] We expected some voices saying bad stuff about Fauda, calling to stop airing, calling to stop watch it, and in a way, it was kind of surprising that we didn't hear many voices like that.
[42:56] So we have a kind of a, a small, uh, WhatsApp group for Fauda, and then at some point I noticed that Al Akhbar, uh, it's a kind of a website that is affiliated with Hezbollah,
[43:09] called on its website to boycott, uh, Fauda because it serves the, the Zionist entity and the Zionist enemy, and I sent it to everyone on the team, and I said, "Thank God we have someone calling to boycott us."
[43:23] Lior and I truly believe that in good content, you'll have good results, meaning that if you bring on even a topic that is controversial or under discussion or not politically correct to follow, if it's good, then people would follow, then people would watch it.
[43:43] And I think that this is what stands in our belief and in even our in, in our business model. This is what we do.
[43:50] We bring stories that for some clients, let's call them that way, are not that convenient with those, uh, kinds of materials.
[43:58] But at the end of the day, we think that they're great stories, and we believe in good stories.
[44:04] There will be eventually dozens, perhaps hundreds of films and television shows about October 7th in the years to come, decades to come.
[44:13] Lior, what do you worry future dramatizations might actually get wrong about how the story of October 7th is told? Listen, there are so many angles to this story.
[44:25] So many people, so many heroes, so many victims, so many great stories, so many bad stories, so many-- Probably we're gonna hear or, or we will see different perspective of the, the same day for so many-- from so many angles.
[44:42] I don't worry about anything. I just want people to see those stories because in every one of us, every one of us know someone who had this crazy story that day. And for us to see it, if it's a good one, we watch it.
[44:59] And as Avi said, if it's a good story, it's a good movie, everybody in the world will watch it as well. I believe in art. I believe in good faith. I believe in artists.
[45:10] And I believe that if someone wants to, to tell a story and is doing it in a good way, in a professional way, in a emotional way, we all gonna watch it. And if it's a bad one, nobody will watch it.
[45:22] I want to say here something. At the beginning of this conversation, I mentioned, you know, that almost everything that you see on episodes seven and eight is based on true events, okay?
[45:31] So even when you show a team of soldiers, of special forces from the Shin Bet and from the YAMAM fighting over there on the fence, it's based on a real event that happened there.
[45:41] But at six twenty-nine, there were around thirty special forces people that were sent by the Shin Bet and the YAMAM in order to look what is happening on the ground.
[45:49] It wasn't that they were sent in order to block Hamas invasion with, you know, thousands of terrorists. No, they were just trying to understand what the hell was going on over there in the south.
[46:00] But the bottom line is, guys, look, I think that there's a consensus in Israel about the results, about the catastrophic results of this day, with twelve hundred people that were murdered and two hundred and fifty-one people that were taken as hostages.
[46:15] Just think for one second, what would have happened if it took place in the US?
[46:21] What would happen to the US if forty-two thousand people would have been murdered in one single day and eight thousand would have been taken as, uh, hostages to, uh, an enemy state?
[46:34] So in Pearl Harbor, two thousand four hundred and three people were killed during the Japanese attack over Pearl Harbor, and the US started a world war because of that and bombed Japan with two nuclear weapon, two nuclear bombs.
[46:49] So at the end of the day, when you remember that, maybe then you will start to understand Israel's mentality and what happened to Israel following October 7th. Okay.
[46:59] Gentlemen, before we wrap, is there anything else you w- would hope that our audience would have in mind as they watch season five of Fauda? Lior, I'll start with you.
[47:10] Yeah, just for them to start ask questions and not be determined in their point of view. I'm talking about the people who hate us with no reason. So please just ask questions. Ask what happened there.
[47:24] Why did they do that? Why they act in the way they acted? And why Israel retaliated after October 7th? Just ask those questions. For us, this is the best thing if it will happen, that people will ask questions.
[47:38] Rather than coming to sweeping conclusions. \[chuckles\] Yeah. Uh, Avi? You can say that I was-- it was right, and that's it. You don't have anything to say, Avi. It's okay. Well, I guess that Lior was wrong.
[47:50] Uh, no, I'm kidding.
[47:52] \[laughs\] My hope is that other than following the, the show and understanding better what Israel went through, people would like the show because of, uh, the TV quality, because of the drama that we created.
[48:04] And at the end of the day, it's a drama, it's fiction, and I'm sorry to say that, but in reality, it was way, way worse. Wow. Okay.
[48:15] Lior, Avi, thank you for doing this, and, um, we hope our listeners and viewers who haven't watched Season 5 yet of Fauda will watch it. And for those who have watched it, just watch Episode 5 again.
[48:27] You don't have to watch the whole season again. \[laughs\] Uh, I've got a complaint to make to the creators, which I won't do now, which I had one or two lines that were cut out. I don't know why that happened.
[48:36] I practiced, I studied, I rehearsed. But, um- Your Arabic accent was amazing. \[laughs\] Yeah. Li- Lior, did we kill his character at the end of fifth s- f- No. No? No, no, no, my character wasn't killed. Oh, okay.
[48:50] No, no, no, I have hope for, uh, Season 6. We killed him. No, no, no, no. Let's see how this podcast will end, and then we'll decide if you're dead or not. \[laughs\] We'll make a decision.
[48:59] This is how decisions in the writers' room are, are, are made. It's all based on, on personal vendetta. Uh, all right, gentlemen, thank you. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Take care. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.
[49:10] \[upbeat music\] \[gentle music\] I'm Deborah Pardes, the host of Arc News Daily.
[49:31] What's happening in Israel and the Jewish world right now matters, but it can be hard to keep up, let alone make sense of it all. That's why we started Arc News Daily.
[49:41] Every weekday morning, I walk you through the most important news, give you the context you need, and let you know what to look out for next. I don't try to convince you of anything, and I don't waste your time.
[49:53] On most days, I'll be in your ears for about 10 minutes or less. Then you can move on with your day, hopefully a little bit smarter than before.
[50:02] Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or follow the link in the show notes. I hope to see you tomorrow. \[upbeat music\]

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