The Gaza war is not Netflix

“I’m a little tired, but I’m fine, working for everyone’s safety,” he said, smiling and wearing a field uniform, speaking to the Israeli Channel 12 television reporter who was interviewing him Monday in the Gaza Strip. Shortly afterward, reservist Idan Amedi, 35, was airlifted with serious shrapnel wounds after a clash with Hamas militiamen to Tel Aviv’s Sheba hospital, Israel’s largest and best-equipped medical center. A celebrated singer in his homeland, Amedi is also a globally recognized actor as a cast member of the Netflix-distributed series Fauda. Intubated and anesthetized, Amedi’s condition was considered stable Tuesday by doctors — who do not fear for his life according to his relatives — after hours of surgery to remove pieces of shrapnel from various parts of his body.

Fauda, which has run for four seasons from 2015, narrates the trials and tribulations of a mista’arvim (“those who live among the Arabs,” in Hebrew) counter-terrorism unit operating undercover in the Palestinian territories. Amedi plays a soldier called Sagi Tzur, by far the tallest member of the unit, which is headed by the impulsive commander Doron Kabilio, played by Lior Raz, the star and co-author of the series. When Amedi was mobilized after the Hamas attacks on October 7, he was quick to warn via social media: “This is not a scene from Fauda; this is real life.”

Married with two children, and despite his celebrity status, Amedi joined the 300,000 Israeli reservists between the ages of 21 and 45 called up to fight in the Gaza war, Israel’s largest recorded conflict in half a century. Thousands of reservists have been demobilized since the beginning of this year, after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) declared Hamas’ military structure in the north of the Gaza Strip “dismantled.” But Amedi still had a mission to fulfill. He belongs to an engineering unit that specializes in demolishing and destroying tunnels. “We have located miles of tunnels, it’s crazy,” he told the journalist from Israel’s main private television network, who interviewed him before he was wounded.

In the report of casualties that the IDF distributes every day — and that the press covers in detail — nine names appeared on Tuesday, an above-average figure. Eight of them were personnel aged between 23 and 35. The other, who did not belong to the Combat Engineering Corps, was 19 and performing compulsory military service. The conflict is leaving a deep scar on younger generations of Israelis, who had barely experienced hostilities apart from the 2006 Lebanon war, which lasted barely a month and left 119 Israeli soldiers dead, or the 2014 Gaza war, which lasted two months and in which the IDF lost 67 personnel. In the three months of the current conflict, 519 Israeli soldiers have been killed, mostly in the large-scale Hamas offensive on October 7. Since the start of the invasion of Gaza weeks later, the IDF has reported 185 losses and 2,438 soldiers with medium to serious wounds. Minor injuries are not recorded.

Amedi used his popularity to share his combat experiences on social media. Earlier this week, he posted a message claiming that his unit was destroying Hamas tunnels on a daily basis. In December, he shared images of the demolition of a school in Gaza, which had allegedly served as a military outpost for the Palestinian militia. Three weeks ago, he announced the demolition of a building in the Gaza Strip by his engineering unit, in memory of the Israeli victims of the October 7 attacks.

‘Pain of Warriors’

As a singer who became a household name in Israel after participating in a contest for young performers, Amedi climbed the local charts with the song Pain of Warriors, which describes the experience of a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder upon his return from the front lines. Born and raised in Jerusalem to a Kurdish-Jewish family of Iraqi origin, Amedi announced last November that he would be taking a year off from acting and singing to fulfill his mission as a reservist.

The plot of the third season of Fauda strayed into the Gaza Strip, along the path of unbridled action in which any resemblance to reality was pure coincidence. Jewish soldiers and settlers left the Palestinian coastal enclave almost 20 years ago, which was subsequently subjected to a land and sea blockade. Troops only returned in the course of sporadic wars.

On its premiere, Fauda broke through the wall of ignorance about daily life in Palestine erected in Israeli society itself over a conflict that is more than seven decades old. But the lack of knowledge of the Hebrew scriptwriters about the reality in Gaza in 2020 after the “disengagement” of 2005 — the withdrawal of settlers and troops — the subsequent blockade, and the wars that broke out after 2007 when the Islamist movement Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip, was evident.

Raz, the lead actor in the series, is a veteran of Shin Bet (Israel’s internal intelligence services) and army covert security operations in the West Bank. He co-wrote Fauda with journalist Avi Issacharoff, a former Palestinian affairs correspondent for the daily Haaretz and a former comrade of Raz in the mista’arvim. The two of them raced together from their homes in Tel Aviv on October 7 to help the victims of the Hamas offensive with their own means. Raz wished Amedi a speedy recovery in a video distributed through his social networks.

Since it soared to 35% of gross domestic product after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israel’s Defense budget has steadily shrunk to 3.3% today. Over the past two decades, the IDF has cut the length of military service — compulsory for both men and women — and the annual service time of reservists. Israel is now considering a return to the model of three years of service for men and around two years for women aged between 18 and 21. Reservists in combat units will also be required to mobilize for up to 40 days per year starting in 2025. Amid the hostilities in Gaza, the younger generation of Israelis are learning — like their fathers in the trenches of the Yom Kippur War and their grandfathers in the Six-Day War in 1967 — that war is not a Netflix series.

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