by Apostolos Kotsabasis
On the iPad screen, the fifth season of “Fauda” is already streaming, offering yet another dose of that dead-end, blood-soaked spectacle that the West consumes with the fervour of a fashion trend. In Paris, Berlin, in London’s cosy lofts, the Middle East is a notification, an Instagram story accompanied by pre-packaged outrage, an aesthetic choice that offers an easy sense of moral righteousness. You scroll, tap the angry-face reaction, order sushi.
Yet the reality in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon does not fit into the convenient, emotionally naive narratives of Western Europeans. The fifth season of the Netflix series is set chronologically two years after the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023. It offers no catharsis — only the raw, illusion-free geometry of violence. An endless cycle in which Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a zero-sum drama. There are no good guys and bad guys in the Hollywood sense, nor solutions that can be reduced to a catchy protest slogan. There is only the almost mechanical reproduction of hatred.
The Western European approach — that “well-meaning”, aristocratic naivety that assumes everything can be solved with a little more empathy and a few resolutions — proves tragically inadequate and reductive. It is the attitude of someone watching a massacre through the bulletproof glass of a luxury lounge, feeling a superficial sadness, but above all the need to reaffirm the superiority of their own values.
“Fauda” exposes precisely this divide: between the genuine, dark abyss of a war that consumes generations and the glossy, digital detachment of a Europe that comments on everything but feels absolutely nothing.
