‘Fauda’ co-creator: Museums and media have ‘sacred mission’ to preserve truth of Oct. 7

Avi Issacharoff, co-creator of the hit Israeli TV series “Fauda,” said on Wednesday that museums and the media have a “sacred mission” to preserve the truth of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre as efforts grow around the world to deny or rewrite what happened.

Issacharoff delivered the remarks at the end of “Lessons Learned from October 7 in Forensic Medicine,” an international conference held at the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem (MOTJ). The two-day gathering brought together forensic experts, physicians, police and others involved in identifying victims and documenting evidence from the Hamas attack.

“There’s a war today in the world and also in the State of Israel,” Issacharoff said in an interview with MOTJ’s Noa Amouyal. “There’s a war over the truth, over what happened in reality.”

In addition to the media, he said, “Museums, documentation projects and even TV shows have a sacred mission: to keep the truth alive, to keep people’s minds in the light and not in the darkness.”

Their role, he continued, is not to allow the historical record to be “stolen” by false narratives that erase Oct. 7 or portray Hamas as a movement for liberation.

‘We didn’t listen’

Issacharoff said Israelis, himself included, had failed before Oct. 7 to take seriously what Hamas leaders were openly saying about their intentions. They repeatedly called on Palestinians and Muslims to join the war to eliminate the “Zionist entity,” he recalled.

“We didn’t listen,” he said.

For Issacharoff, who had reported on Hamas for more than two decades, Oct. 7 also forced a painful reassessment of how well he had understood the terrorist organization.

“I reported about Hamas since 2000,” he said. “I thought I understood Hamas. I thought that I knew what Hamas is looking for, what Hamas wants.”

Despite interviewing Hamas leaders, studying the organization and reporting on it for decades, he said he had failed to anticipate what it had become.

“I was shocked to understand how much I don’t know,” he said.

The scale of what happened on Oct. 7 took hours to comprehend, he said.

“It took me a while, of course, to understand how big the event was because we didn’t understand anything. None of us really understood what was happening in the first few hours,” he said.

Only after videos began arriving from Sderot and the kibbutzim near the Gaza border showing Hamas terrorists inside Israeli communities did the magnitude of the disaster become apparent.

“Only then we understood how bad the situation is, how big the catastrophe is,” Issacharoff said. “At the end of that day, we understood that we’re facing the biggest catastrophe in the history of the State of Israel.”

Israel did not yet know that some 1,200 people had been killed and 251 taken hostage, he said.

‘We’re all responsible’

Issacharoff, 53, a Jerusalem native and veteran Arab affairs correspondent who served in the IDF’s elite Duvdevan undercover unit, described how his response to the massacre took him from reporting to joining civilian rescue efforts.

Two days after the attack, frustrated that he had not been called up for reserve duty, he joined volunteers evacuating residents from communities near Gaza.

At Kibbutz Beit Kama, he encountered hundreds of Israelis waiting for assignments.

“I was shocked because I saw hundreds of people, let’s say around my age, women and men, standing in line and waiting to get their missions,” he said.

Volunteers were given the name and telephone number of someone trapped in the danger zone and sent south to bring them to safety.

It was there, Issacharoff said, that he became convinced Israel would ultimately prevail.

“What you see over there at that point is that hundreds of people are ready to sacrifice or to put their lives in danger in order to rescue people that they don’t know,” he said. “They just know that they’re Israelis.”

For him, it demonstrated a sense of collective responsibility: “We’re all responsible.”

Issacharoff later called his “Fauda” co-creator, actor Lior Raz, who joined the rescue effort. They drove into and out of Sderot as rockets fell and terrorists were still roaming the area.

On Issacharoff’s final trip into the city, a woman they had been sent to rescue emerged from a darkened house with her daughter, recognized Raz and exclaimed, “Oh my God, it’s the one from ‘Fauda.’” In the middle of the war zone, she asked for a selfie.

The scale of the national trauma took longer to absorb, Issacharoff said, as Israelis attended funerals and learned the fate of those killed and kidnapped.

“You need to understand that 251 families are missing their relatives—the sons, the daughters, fathers, the wives, whatever,” he said. “It’s something that the human mind cannot really absorb.”

Issacharoff compared the scale of Oct. 7 with Pearl Harbor, where 2,403 Americans were killed in 1941. Adjusted for population, he said, the approximately 1,200 people killed in Israel would be equivalent to 42,000 Americans being killed in a single day, with thousands more kidnapped.

“What would the U.S. do?” he asked. “Would anyone ask them about proportional retaliation?”

He described the Hamas massacre as “the most brutal thing that one can imagine.”

Reflecting on the terrorists’ intentions, Issacharoff said he had reached an unequivocal conclusion.

“They meant to commit genocide,” he said. “They wanted to eliminate Jews.”

‘A war over the truth’

The challenge of conveying what happened shaped the fifth season of “Fauda,” he said.

Issacharoff said extensive research went into the new season, particularly episodes seven and eight, and that many scenes were inspired by actual events from Oct. 7, including the Nova music festival massacre and the Hamas attacks in southern Israel.

Some people in the United States and Europe, he said, are attempting to create a new narrative about Oct. 7 despite evidence produced by Hamas terrorists themselves.

“Even when Hamas are getting into a kibbutz and taking clips with their phones and airing it live … so the whole world can see what they are doing,” he said, people still deny what happened.

He compared attempts to deny the Oct. 7 massacre with Holocaust denial.

“Even after all the evidence and the testimonies that we hear and we see, still people are trying to deny Oct. 7, just like some people are trying to deny the Holocaust,” he said.

Issacharoff also assailed anti-Israel protesters on American university campuses who chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

“I swear to God, they don’t know which river and which sea,” he said.

Many, he said, also know little about Hamas’s violent history, including its bloody 2007 takeover of the Gaza Strip from Fatah and the 30 Muslim and Arab Israelis murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7.

‘It’s a marathon’

Issacharoff, who recently returned from speaking tours in the United Kingdom and the United States to promote “Fauda,” said accusations that Israel committed genocide in Gaza have contributed to the country’s growing international isolation, including in the entertainment industry.

At an event in London last month, Issacharoff slammed American actor Mark Ruffalo for repeatedly accusing Israel of genocide, pointing to the humanitarian aid Israel allowed into Gaza during the war.

“Do you understand what it means, ‘genocide’?” he said. “Do you, as a lead actor in Hollywood, understand that when Israel allows every day 600 trucks of food and supplies to go into Gaza, they are not intending or planning to kill the people of Palestine?”

Issacharoff also argued that population growth in Gaza during the war contradicted claims that Israel intended to destroy the Palestinian population, saying that “the only ones who were trying to commit genocide were Hamas people.”

Projects connected to Israel have been canceled in Hollywood, he noted, sometimes by Jews who are not hostile to Israel but are afraid to associate themselves with it.

“People are looking at the State of Israel as a state that commits genocide and people basically don’t want any kind of connection to the State of Israel or to Israelis in general,” he said. “That’s the sad reality.”

Despite concerns that the fifth season of “Fauda” would face international boycotts, Issacharoff said it became the show’s most-watched season, including in countries hostile to Israel, such as Lebanon and Syria.

“We are storytellers,” he said. “We truly believe that at the end of the day, if you bring a good story, if you create a good drama, people will bite.”

Issacharoff said the harm to Israel’s standing, particularly in American public opinion, could take years to repair.

“We are here to fix it. We are here to change it. It’s a struggle. It’s a marathon,” he concluded. “But I guess that this is the reason why I run marathons. I like long runs.”