“Fauda” means “chaos,” and, amid the twisting plots and bloody carnage, the writers also created uncertainty in the minds of viewers.

Hit and Run

When writers on the TV series Fauda pitched a storyline eerily similar to the recent terrorist invasion of Israel, the show’s creators dismissed it as unrealistic. Now the unthinkable has become a reality

By Damian Whitworth

When Avi Issacharoff, the co-creator of Fauda, was plotting the next series of the hit Israeli thriller, the scriptwriting team came to him with an idea so outlandish that he rejected it.

“One of the ideas they brought was of tens of militants storming the border, taking a kibbutz or a village by surprise and controlling it,” Issacharoff recalls. “I was like: ‘Guys, come on, what is this? This is a show that is trying to be authentic and realistic. This thing that tens of armed people would get to the border without anyone seeing them, without anyone knowing about that before? With no intelligence indication? At the end of the day, they will come to the border and a few planes or choppers will kill them all. So don’t go there. It’s too stupid.’ And that was it. After 10 or 15 minutes of discussing it, we left it and we went to another scenario.”