Why You Should Watch Fauda ’s October 7 Episodes

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.