We have never had this much "access to war". We see the bodies, the videos, the maps, the testimonies, we watch events unfold in real time...
Yet seeing more does not mean understanding more.
The more saturated an information environment becomes, the faster we learn where everything belongs. Which image confirms what we already think. Which fact requires context, which one apparently does not.
Narratives NEVER arrive on neutral ground. They enter minds that have already sorted the world into categories, loyalties, suspicions and expectations.
This is where much of what is written about "narrative warfare" is shallow. A narrative can fail to change your opinion and still fundamentally change what you are able to picture and what feels real.
And that is why Fauda interests me.
I have watched the series since it first aired in 2015.
I never thought it was an accurate representation of Israeli intelligence operations. Doron, the main character, has spent five seasons making decisions that would get a real operator removed from the field in less than an hour.
What kept me watching was the psychology. Fauda has captured one of the most uncomfortable realities of an intimate conflict: the enemy is rarely as foreign as we would like him to be.
He speaks your language. You speak his. You understand his insults, his jokes, his codes, his family structures, his religious references, his fears. You eat the same food. Sometimes you understand him so well that the boundary becomes uncomfortable.
Fauda emerged from a society in which the enemy, the neighbor, the informant, the colleague and the stranger inhabit overlapping worlds. That proximity produces familiarity, and that makes caricature harder to sustain.
A man can do something monstrous and later be tender with his wife. An operative can understand the people he is fighting so intimately that understanding and identification begin to touch.
That ambiguity makes reality hard to keep clean.
I want to use Fauda, and its fifth season in particular, to look at three things we miss when discussing narrative warfare:
- the difference between information and representation;
- the difference between penetration of a narrative and persuasion;
- and the fact that in this case, both the storyteller AND the audience are already inside the conflict they are trying to interpret.
Information is not representation
Israel-Palestine may be the worst possible place to confuse information with understanding.
The information environment is saturated with videos, casualty figures, photographs, Telegram channels, government statements, NGO reports, influencers, journalists, experts, fact-checkers checking other fact-checkers.
And the problem with saturation is that after a while, very little arrives as genuinely new.
You see an image from Gaza and before you have really looked at it, you already know what it means to you. The information is new but the interpretation you make of it is not.
This is how people consume enormous amounts of material about the same conflict and still remain trapped inside radically different versions of it.
You can know the casualty figures, the timeline, the names, the arguments around them... And still have no real sense of how that event was experienced by the people inside it.
That gap becomes very visible in the last episodes of Season 5.
Episodes 7 and 8 reconstruct October 7 attack directly.
The producers issued warnings because of how closely the episodes draw on the events of that day.
Personally, I did not need that reconstruction. Like many Israelis, journalists, researchers and people professionally exposed to the conflict, I had watched the real material. That was enough.
But who might need to see it?
Maybe the people who never saw the images? Or those who read that an attack happened but never formed any mental representation of what that meant? Or those who chose not to watch, or who encountered every image through an ideological filter telling them how to interpret it?
Or those who believe they already know everything about October 7 because they have spent three years talking about it.
That last category may be the most interesting because this is where fiction can do something another video, statistic or government statement cannot.