Mourning the old Israel: Fauda after 7 October

Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors.

The latest series of Fauda is driven by the theme of tha’r, the Arabic for ‘blood revenge’ – here, revenge for 7 October. The cast and crew of the hit Israeli drama, whose five series focus on the fates of a group of undercover counter-terror operatives, were directly involved – Lior Raz, who plays the main character, Doron, helped rescue families from Sderot in the days after the attack. Matan Meir, who worked on the show’s production team, was killed by a booby-trapped tunnel shaft in northern Gaza. Idan Amedi, who plays Sagi, was seriously injured by shrapnel while on a mission in the Strip. Sagi is absent for much of the new series, but when he returns, it is a moment of raw emotional power longtime fans will know well.

In social media posts, cast members have explicitly referenced the trauma of the Trojan War as a parallel to what the characters go through. The heroic code embraced by the unit startles and even disturbs other members of the Israeli military. ‘What is he doing?’ says one in disbelief about Doron. The answer? Tha’r : the rage of Achilles.

Then there is the tight-lipped, puritanical manner of the Hamas commanders – familiar to anyone who has seen interviews with unrepentant members of the IRA. These are disciplined men of ideology, untroubled by the costs of killing.

The show’s climax is a complex and beautifully constructed act of mourning for the old Israel in which revenge, and the will to carry it out, finally fades away. As you watch Fauda, think of the people massacred on that day – for the show allows us to feel, as the Jewish memorial prayer says, that they now rest in the ‘sphere of the holy and pure’, sheltered beneath God’s wings forever.

How do you solve a problem like Sense and Sensibility?

I have just read Sense and Sensibility for the first time and have never seen a dramatisation, but I am now intrigued by how earlier adaptations, and the new Georgia Oakley version, with Daisy Edgar-Jones as Elinor, deal with the novel’s problems. Beloved it may be, but the subtleties, so brilliant in the rest of Austen’s work, and celebrated by the book’s admirers, eluded me: character changes – Marianne’s turn from sensibility to sense, for example – are far too cleanly executed; Austen even loses narrative control at times in handling the ever-so-controlled Elinor, possibly because Elinor’s watchful, novelist’s temperament is so like Austen’s own. Maybe film, which can dwell on the outstanding scenes (Elinor learning of Edward Ferrars’ secret engagement to Lucy Steele and, later, Willoughby’s confession), suits it better.

Rostropovich, with Britten at the piano

And now to an album that has brought me more joy over the years than any other – Mstislav ‘Slava’ Rostropovich partnered by Benjamin Britten at the piano in 1960s recordings of some of the most treasured works in the cello repertoire: Schumann’s Fünf Stücke im Volkston Op. 102, Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata and Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano. It’s music that might have been written for Slava’s passionate, rangy playing and Britten’s precise, intelligent touch.