Citation

Ben-Yehuda O. AJS Review 2020; 44(1): 1-21.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020)

DOI

10.1017/S0364009419000862

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In its first season, Israeli television thriller Fauda proclaimed an utter symmetry between Israel proper and its Occupied Territories, by humanizing Hamas militants and treating them as equals to the Israeli characters. Throughout the story the Jewish warrior's body becomes a site for the detonation of explosives and a potential vehicle for suicide bombings, in a false but intriguing reenactment of the trauma of the second intifada, which has been repressed in Israeli consciousness. In this unwitting manifestation of Jewish martyrdom, the façade of the rule of law in the State of Israel is dismantled in what seems like a religious battle between clans. The discourse of pain in the series suggests a stream of constant retribution in a vicious circle that can never historicize the allegedly eternal conflict and work through its traumatic residues. Nonetheless, this dynamic of retribution and martyrdom also informs a multilayered structure whereby the secular, modern Jew returns to his roots by engaging with Arabness in the theatre of mistaaravim: in becoming Arab he also becomes, finally, a Jew. © Association for Jewish Studies 2020.

Language: en