Commentary Culture Investigations

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Public DomainBy Lars MøllerLawrence of Arabia and the imperative of courageous realism.

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AI for American ThinkerBy Jack HellnerUnfortunately, feckless Republicans made it possible for them to win.

Photo Credit:Image: Darkmoon_Art via Pixabay, Pixabay License.

Darkmoon_ArtBy MaryAnn DiorioAnd we’re going to pay the price.

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AI for American ThinkerBy Allan J. FeiferThe women’s rights movement moved from Constitutional ideas to an experiment in unintended consequences.

In December 1909, the president of the United States traveled to New York City to address a black-tie dinner promoting Christian missionary work. He was there in his official capacity, and not as his country’s most prominent Unitarian, a faith as controversial then as John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism was half a century later. From the elegant ballroom the president made his way through a driving rainstorm to a Bowery shelter for homeless men, “which I hope will always help you and others over the hard places,” William Howard Taft told its residents, “the times when the Lord and everybody seems to be against you—to help you at such times to believe that there are people in the world who sympathize with you.”
History hasn’t been nearly as generous toward Taft. Sandwiched between Progressive era icons Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, his single term in the White House (1909-1913) has been likened to the sleep apnea that made the plus-size president doze off with embarrassing frequency in public. “It is a very humdrum uninteresting administration, and does not attract the attention or enthusiasm of anybody,” Taft conceded to his wife Nellie in 1912.
Walter Stahr, biographer of Lincoln’s wartime associates Seward, Stanton, and Chase, thinks Taft unduly modest. Yet even he allocates barely a fifth of this hefty volume to Taft’s “good if not great” presidency. The rest details Taft’s careers as solicitor general, circuit judge, and America’s first viceroy in the Philippines; Theodore Roosevelt’s surrogate campaigner and deputy president; builder of the Panama Canal, not to mention the original Oval Office and Lincoln Memorial; the American Red Cross president who coordinated relief following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; a global troubleshooter conducting the most sophisticated shuttle diplomacy before Henry Kissinger; and, finally, as chief justice delivering black-robed conservatism with administrative reform in the 1920s.
Drawing on untapped sources and his own legal training, Stahr rescues Taft from historical caricature as the proverbially jolly fat man henpecked by his ambitious wife into abandoning the judicial cloister for the political arena he found so uncongenial. Born in Cincinnati in 1857, Will Taft was the kind of youngster older people dote on. His formidable New England-bred mother admitted having “more pride in Willie than all the rest” of her children. Unlike most child prodigies, however, Taft had a lifelong gift for inspiring and sustaining friendship. His amiability equaled his ambition.
For over 30 years Taft calculated his chances to sit on the United States Supreme Court. But he inherited a dutiful streak from his father, a lawyer-judge who served in Ulysses Grant’s cabinet and filled diplomatic postings in Vienna and St. Petersburg. Made civilian governor of the U.S.-occupied Philippines by William McKinley, the younger Taft twice turned down court appointments rather than abandon a native population drawn to the Tafts for their solicitude and lack of racial prejudice.
Everyone knows that Taft and Theodore Roosevelt were, for a while, best friends. Why this was so remains something of a mystery. TR was a classic jingo, perfectly willing in the 1890s to subject the American East Coast to shelling by British warships, since the United States would avenge any losses by conquering Canada. The judicious Taft preferred dispute arbitration, the cornerstone of his presidential diplomacy and, later, of his proposed League to Enforce Peace, precursor to Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations.
As Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Taft urged caution on his excitable boss after a group of black soldiers was accused, on flimsy evidence, of shooting up Brownsville, Texas, one Saturday night in 1906. Roosevelt was having none of it. Decrying “sentimentalists” braying for leniency, TR ordered Taft to discharge all those accused. Critics jested that TAFT stood for Take Advice From Theodore. His subsequent victory over William Jennings Bryan in November 1908 was widely seen as Roosevelt’s third term, much as the first George Bush, like Taft a well-connected Yalie who thrived in appointive positions, was elected as a kinder, gentler edition of his predecessor.
“I knew it would be a cold day when I was made president,” Taft quipped on March 4, 1909, after a blizzard forced the inauguration ceremony to be moved indoors. The new president wasted no time before wading into the quicksand of tariff reform. In the process, he alienated insurgent Republicans without endearing himself to the party’s Old Guard. As a judge, Stahr tells us, Taft loathed dissents. He brought this same prejudice to the Oval Office, sheathing his veto pen and, with it, the chance to mobilize public opinion around lower tariff rates as promised in his campaign. He made matters worse by labeling the resulting Payne-Aldrich Tariff “the best” ever passed by a Republican Congress. His credibility never recovered.
Adding to Taft’s burdens, Nellie suffered a stroke barely 10 weeks into their White House occupancy. Patiently, tenderly he nursed her back to health. Stahr dutifully catalogues Taft’s legislative achievements: statehood for Arizona and New Mexico, mandated disclosure of campaign contributions, a federal postal savings system, conservation measures building on Roosevelt’s public land withdrawals, and increased regulatory powers for the Interstate Commerce Commission. Taft promoted the 16th Amendment giving constitutional sanction to a federal income tax. Surpassing his predecessor where trustbusting was concerned, Taft and Attorney General George Wickersham dissolved John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company.
Taft’s foreign policy was distinctly his own. Sensitized by the bloody insurrection against American rule in the Philippines, he decried involvement in Mexico’s civil war without congressional approval. His pursuit of arbitration treaties with Britain and France angered TR, who had no intention of submitting his country’s vital interests to “foreigners.” Taft was disappointed, Stahr reveals, but hardly surprised. “The truth is that he believes in war and wishes to be Napoleon and to die on the battlefield,” the president concluded of his fiery predecessor.
A Taftian aversion to melodrama flattens Stahr’s account of the most famous broken friendship in American politics. As Taft and Roosevelt engaged in verbal fisticuffs over their party’s 1912 presidential nomination, the maladroit incumbent announced, “Even a rat in a corner will fight.” The author confirms both TR’s greater popular support and the legitimacy of Taft’s victory at the bitterly contested Republican convention. Resigned to defeat in the fall, Taft took solace in his faction’s control of the battered GOP organization. Gracious to the Democratic victor, Woodrow Wilson, Taft departed Washington for the life of a Yale professor, elder statesman, and newspaper sage.
If I have a criticism to make of this deeply researched, deftly written biography, it is structural. Roughly 40 percent of Stahr’s text is given over to his subject’s post-White House life. At times the narrative feels captive to Taft’s engagement calendar: Numberless train journeys lead to the next paid speaking date, honorary degree, or board meeting for such worthy causes as the HBCU Hampton Institute or National Geographic Society. Stahr quotes liberally from Taft’s post-presidential opinion pieces. Disputing Roosevelt’s “unsafe doctrine” under which a chief executive was free to take any action not explicitly prohibited by the Constitution, Taft warned readers that “ascribing an undefined residuum of power to the President” risked “results of an arbitrary character, doing irremediable injuries to private rights.”
Their shared enmity toward Wilson helped engineer a rapprochement between Taft and Roosevelt before the latter’s death in January 1919. Yet Taft strongly endorsed Wilson’s postwar diplomacy even while lamenting his stubborn refusal to consider senatorial reservations that might have secured American entry into the League of Nations. The jurist once criticized by organized labor for his strikebreaking injunctions, Taft endeared himself to the scrubwomen of Schenectady, New York, when, as co-chair of Wilson’s National War Labor Board, he demanded their wages be raised in keeping with the board’s insistence on “equal pay for equal work.”
Warren Harding’s 1920 election ushered in the final chapter of Taft’s “great American life.” As chief justice of the United States, Taft claimed to be well and truly out of politics. His assertion rang hollow with successive Republican presidents he lobbied for or against judicial candidates. On the bench Taft rethought his earlier hostility to Louis Brandeis, crediting him as “a very hard worker” who “pulls his weight in the boat.” He forced the intellectually diminished Joseph McKenna into retirement and appealed to Congress for a new Supreme Court building.
In 1925 Taft secured legislation allowing the Court to control its own docket through the certiorari process by which justices designate the cases they will consider. The Taft Court struck down an Oregon statute favored by the Ku Klux Klan that prohibited parents from sending their children to Catholic schools. On the other hand, it upheld racial segregation in public schools, unanimously extending the doctrine of separate but equal to include Chinese Americans. Most notoriously, it approved the forced sterilization of “feeble minded” patients in state institutions.
The Court’s ruling exempting professional baseball from antitrust laws still stands. So does Taft’s opinion in Myers v. United States (1926) that asserted a presidential right to fire any employee of the executive branch. Taft’s health began to fail long before his February 1930 resignation from the Court. He died a month later, popularly mourned for his integrity and self-effacing approach to public service. Yet great lawyering is not synonymous with great leadership. Those seeking Taft’s epitaph would do worse than to quote Vanity Fair’s assessment of William Gladstone. “Were he less admirable, he would be more admired; were he a worse man, he would be a better statesman.”
William Howard Taft: A Great American Life
by Walter Stahr
Simon & Schuster, 688 pp., $35
Richard Norton Smith is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author, most recently, of Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford (Harper).
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There’s an old story about the four generations of the American Jewish experience: The first generation was a peddler, the second generation was a successful businessman, the third generation was a doctor- or lawyer-style professional, and the fourth generation was an artist or activist, or both. A funnier, more biting summary of this has appeared on X as going from “garment factory worker” to “pharmacist” to “Chair of the Federal Reserve” to “feminist freelance journalist with hairy armpits.”
In earlier times, John Adams captured a similar dynamic in his own Massachusetts Puritan cohort with his famous quote, “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” These similar sentiments capture not just the Jewish experience but also the American experience.
In the new book, The American: The Hidden History of Daniel J. Boorstin and His Twentieth Century, Jon Boorstin describes this very American but also American Jewish evolution (devolution?) in the Boorstin family. The Boorstin family is notable largely because it included the famous historian Daniel Boorstin, who embodies the third generation in the Boorstins’ rise. As Jon describes it, Benjamin Boorstin came to America penniless. He did not speak English, but made his way as a peddler and then store owner in the South. Benjamin groomed his son Samuel to take over the family store but Samuel instead became a successful lawyer. Samuel’s son Daniel became the famed historian, and now Jon is a filmmaker and writer. (Jon’s children, not covered in the book, are a lawyer and a marketing executive, and his cousin Bob was chief speechwriter to President Clinton and head of public policy at Google, for those who are curious.)
The book jacket describes it as part biography, part family history. As such it is not a standard look into Daniel Boorstin’s illustrious career but more a picture of the American Jewish experience over the 20th century. The book is divided into set pieces that capture some of the family experiences, starting with the peddler Benjamin and a vivid if imagined description of how he must have made his way in the late 19th century South. Benjamin did not leave much of a written record behind, so Jon has clearly mined accounts of other Jewish peddlers to describe how they lived their lives and sold their wares.
Particularly interesting is Jon’s descriptions of the gentiles Benjamin must have met—friendly and not threatening, unlike those he encountered in Europe; the African Americans he sold to—wary but surprised to find a white man who treated them as equals; and the American view of law enforcement—the Jewish peddlers as a whole are surprised but pleased to see that a man who killed a peddler was pursued and hanged by the local gentile population. These experiences showed Benjamin that America was very different from the Europe he had left behind, in a good way, something that did not always need to be said but should be repeated now in these woke times.
Benjamin’s son Samuel was not very interested in running the family store. He wanted to be a lawyer, which was beyond the family’s budget at the time. The scrappy Samuel bought himself a camera and presented himself at the University of Georgia as staff photographer, a position that allowed him to pay for his legal education. Samuel finished law school at 19, young but wise beyond his years. When he presented his credentials to a Georgia Superior Court judge for swearing in, the judge told Samuel that lawyers had to be 21 in Georgia. In response, Sam recalled, he showed the judge “the 1843 session laws establishing the Franklin College of Law at the University. It said graduates of the law school would be admitted upon presentation of their certificates. So he swore me in.”
Sam moved to Atlanta, where he befriended a smart Cornell graduate named Leo Frank, who managed a pencil factory. Many readers will recognize the name of the man wrongly convicted in 1915 of killing Mary Phagan, a young girl from the factory. Sam worked desperately to save his friend, even being instrumental in the governor’s commutation of his death sentence, but he was ultimately unsuccessful: A mob lynched Frank after the commutation.
Shortly afterwards, Sam moved to Tulsa. This was a surprising transition as Tulsa was a smaller city with also a smaller Jewish community, but Tulsa was a boomtown around then. Unfortunately, it was also the home of the 1920 Tulsa race massacre. Sam and his young son Daniel recalled watching from their home the flames that destroyed the black neighborhood. Daniel begins to emerge in Tulsa, a top student who gets into Harvard during a period of anti-Jewish quotas because he did not appear Jewish from his application. The last name was nondescript, and Tulsa was not known for having a large Jewish community.
Daniel is largely unknown today, but he was a hugely successful historian in his time. His Pulitzer Prize-winning trilogy The Americans remains a brilliant cultural and political history of the United States; in The Image he created and popularized the term “pseudo-event” to characterize a staged rather than an actual event; and I still recommend his short book The Genius of American Politics as the best single volume to give someone if they want to understand what America is all about. He was named librarian of Congress in the Gerald Ford administration.
Of course, young Jon saw his father when Daniel was still striving for success and not the famous historian he later became. Jon tells readers the family knew that should there ever be a fire in the Boorstin house, the top priority was to “save the manuscript first,” before even the children or any other family possessions.
Jon also shares why Daniel fell out of favor. First, he testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee about his former time as a communist, earning him enmity on the Left. In addition, he was an advocate of merit and an opponent of racial quotas.
Boorstin also celebrated and advanced the career of the African-American historian John Hope Franklin. Franklin was also from Tulsa, where Sam and Franklin’s father were friends. When Franklin came north to Harvard, he was not surprised to experience some casual racism, but he was very surprised with the widespread antisemitism he found there. As Jon quotes Franklin, “Growing up, I had never heard any educated white person speak of another in such terms, and I lost respect not only for the individual who made the statement but for the entire group that tolerated such views.”
In The American, Jon Boorstin has helped re-create the world of American Jewish immigrants from Europe and the pathway to success they took to get here. He also provides insight into his father Daniel and the fact that Daniel’s good work is now sadly forgotten. This eminently readable book provides a window into the opportunities that America has given to both citizens and newcomers and why it remains a country that deserves more credit than it gets these days.
The American: The Hidden History of Daniel J. Boorstin and His Twentieth Century
by Jon Boorstin
University of Georgia Press, 384 pp., $34.95
Tevi Troy is a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute and a senior scholar at Yeshiva University’s Straus Center. He is the author of five books on the presidency.
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In Sinclair Lewis’s classic cautionary tale, It Can’t Happen Here, Secretary of State Lee Sarason tries to increase his clout by offering golden opportunities and rosy futures. “His office door,” we are told, “became the door of ambition.” There are no such doors in A.G. Doran’s debut, Pale Dread. The State Department here is where ambition goes to die. “The Building” is variously described as an asylum and “a prison whose inmates voluntarily commuted to it each day.” One of those inmates is Doran’s protagonist, J. Leo “Fitz” Fitzpatrick. His struggles to stay afloat amid intrigue, incompetence, bureaucratic wrangling, and deep-state shenanigans make for a novel that manages to be both an uproarious romp and a scalpel-sharp satire.
For a while, Fitz was heading onward and upward in his career trajectory. After leaving law school, he spent time in the military, then served in the intelligence community before taking up a position with the National Security Council. But then he moved to the State Department, and from that point on he has been going nowhere fast. Undervalued and overlooked, he spends soul-crushing working days writing memoranda on grand strategy that are seldom read, let alone acted on, and dreaming of escape from the Building. When he writes a memo arguing that underweight women are a national security risk, he hopes it will lead to his dismissal. Instead, it makes its way up to the seventh floor where it arouses the interest of several movers and shakers of U.S. foreign policy.
Fitz is summoned to “the floor of the gods” and grilled by Breton Haken, director of the Secretary’s Policy Advisors Section and his deputy, Bill Cortes. He accepts a senior role with SPAS, seeing it as a passport to a more rewarding line of work made up of interesting challenges rather than bureaucratic drudgery. He quickly learns the hard way that he has simply swapped one corner of the asylum for a bigger one. In these corridors of misplaced power he is privy to squabbling and scheming, backstabbing and fault-finding, chaos and confusion, plus all manner of day-to-day “dipshittery” involving pitch meetings, dissent cables, and “clearing paper.”
Mercifully, Fitz finds an ally in Piers Gaveston Buckburn—”Buck to friends.” This colorful Foreign Service officer tells Fitz he had to “rotate back early” to D.C. after suffering his unfair share of “misfortunes” during postings overseas, many as a result of illicit encounters with young men. Buck takes Fitz under his wing and helps keep him safe and sane while in the Building and in his favorite watering hole, the Red Hatter. Fitz also meets a captivating woman in Public Affairs. His “dark lady” remains an unknown entity and a beguiling mystery, one who dominates his thoughts and fills his dreams. When he speaks to her, he gets tongue-tied. And when he gets his desire under control and learns her name is Naomi, she joins Buck in looking out for him.
It turns out Fitz needs all the help he can get. Unbeknownst to him, his therapist’s office is bugged, and certain compromising confessions are reaching the ears of hostile parties. His wife, a short-tempered, foul-mouthed, two-timing FBI agent, despises him and is dead-set on tarnishing his reputation. His new boss, the redoubtable and maniacal Lamia, a professor from Evrie University, California, arrives to shake up and smooth down the State Department. Attended by her faithful personal deputy, referred to by staff as “the henchmaiden,” Lamia enforces tough crackdowns and instills an atmosphere of fear. When she discovers that Fitz has been contributing to memos on nuclear disarmament, she becomes hell-bent on stamping out the threat posed by him—which may well entail stamping him out.
Pale Dread is a supremely accomplished first novel. Doran, who in a past life worked in the State Department, gives the reader both an insider’s view and, we can only hope, a warped perspective of the inner workings of the Building. The book’s subtitle informs us this is “a novel about affairs of state,” but in places it is also about the state of affairs in Washington. The country’s new president, “a Jacksonian populist,” ruffles feathers. The secretary of state is fired “by means of novel ceremony: social media.” Every morning life goes on, the city’s streets filling with a steady stream of “managerial serfs and sociopaths: smartly attired, carelessly overmedicated, animated by their legion anxieties.” “Such were the times,” runs a recurring phrase.
When the focus is on the Building and its occupants, Doran serves up riotous episodes. Fitz encounters stupidity in a discussion about antisemitism with an ignorant minion. He grapples with absurdity when he is both questioned by Lamia and screened by the White House Liaison office (“So you support America’s president?” asks his interviewer. “Of course,” Fitz answers. “Whose president would I support?”). There is more drollery every time Fitz’s supervisor, Albus Palaver Proctor IV, pops up and riles his underling with his banal stock phrases (“Good diplomacy begins in this building”), misguided advocacy for conflict (“War is good for social cohesion and community and identity and purpose”), and smug boasting about recent successes. “It was a WASP habit to share good news with those whom they disliked,” Doran writes.
The humor keeps coming, often in the form of comparisons. Some are exaggerated: “Papists, like gout, were an ailment to be managed, not cured.” Others are audacious, such as Buck’s claim that Darcy in Pride and Prejudice “comes off like the Ted Bundy of Regency England.” Doran is also fond of this kind of witty pile-up: At one point, Fitz’s facial expression resembles that of “a boy who just learned about Hiroshima, sex, and the death of Santa Claus at a playground briefing”; elsewhere, Fitz won’t rule out God’s existence, “even when confronted with some serious argument for atheism—Boston City Hall, the art of Jackson Pollock, or the incessant cacophony of mechanistic noise.”
Doran also devotes a whole chapter to a comic set piece on an event called the Ministerial, attended by dignitaries from all over the world. Suffice to say, anything that could go wrong does go wrong. After farcical mishaps, misunderstandings, and miscommunications, Fitz and Buck resort to their routine of decompressing with drinks to blot out the madness that engulfs them.
The fun, mayhem, and acute observations work wonders, but only because Doran’s characterization is so strong. Buck is a compelling creation, a larger-than-life eccentric who, despite the odd overly florid utterance, entertains with anecdotes about his wild misadventures on the diplomatic circuit and his boozy exchanges with Fitz on life, love, literature, and the state of civilization. Man-hating Lamia steals scenes as an unhinged villainess who ruthlessly pursues an agenda of removing obelisks and all other “phallo-patriarchal symbols from Department of State facilities,” and who maintains that “There are two kinds of eunuchs: the kind nature makes and the kind that I make.” Best of all is hapless idealist Fitz, who rises above the ineptitude around him yet is too naïve to differentiate between casual threats and impending danger.
“Are we doomed?” he asks at one juncture. “Afraid so,” replies Buck. “This is the most duplicitous and dickless agency on the face of the earth. But do try to enjoy it.” Doran provides little enjoyment for his hero, but a huge amount for his reader.
Pale Dread: A Novel About Affairs of State
by A.G. Doran
Deoraí Publishing, 374 pp., $17.99
Malcolm Forbes is a writer whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and other publications.
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Man cannot bear too much reality television. Nor can television bear too much reality. This is why almost everything on television is unreal, and why almost everything there has ever been on television is unreal. We don’t like to admit it, because we watch so much of it. Television is a space-filler, a time-killer, a dumb-downer. If you are not stupefied to halfwittery when you sit down, you will be when you stand up. There can be no doubt about it. The results have been in for decades. We fell into our screens in the 1950s with the advent of commercial television. We have dived ever deeper into the postliterate Pool of Narcissus ever since. I watch something most nights.
Fauda, whose fifth season premiered on Netflix in September, is neither unreal nor dumb. It is as complex and realistic as a simple medium can be. Fauda is about a unit of Mista’aravim, Israel’s antiterrorist special forces, usually of Arabic-speaking background, who work undercover with Arab identities. There have been Israeli shows that American studios have adapted to domestic taste, notably Homeland (2011-2020), which was adapted from the two-season Israeli series Chatufim (“Prisoners of War”). But Fauda is a ratings rarity. It’s a foreign-language import that Americans watch in the original; outside the massive parallel market for Spanish-speaking series, this rarely happens. And not just Americans. Within days of its release in mid-September, the latest season topped Netflix’s chart in Lebanon and was in the top 10 in Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The fifth season is the first to appear since Oct. 7, 2023, and the regional war that ensued, and it interweaves the events of that day with the Mista’aravim’s attempts to track down Hamas agents in France.
Fauda is a procedural in which detective work is paced by the countdown of the timer on a bomb. The team leader, Doron Kavillio (Lior Raz), and his friends must track down and neutralize Islamist plotters before they kill Israelis; Raz and his co-creator of the series, the journalist Avi Issacharoff, both served in Arabic-speaking units of the Israel Defense Forces. Like all TV cops, Doron has a precinct captain who loves his charges to “Be careful out there” but must also compromise with his political bosses; he is the cajoling, bullying interrogator Captain Ayoub (Itzik Cohen). Like all TV cops, Doron has anger issues and a fractured marriage. Like many TV cops, Doron has family members on the force. Like Jason Bourne, he keeps trying to escape but keeps getting drawn back in.
“Men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them,” George Orwell wrote in 1942. Doron is a less civilized man leading a double existence as he moves between Hebrew-speaking Israel, where he makes wine and tends to his horses on a remote farm, and his undercover identity as Arabic-speaking Amir Mahajneh, who hunts killers in the crowded alleys, cafés, and homes of Palestinian Arabs. The distance is a matter of miles. A recurring set-up is the view from a drone as it zooms past an Israeli town, over a ridge and down to an Arab town. The base where the Mista’aravim smoke shisha and play the darbuka while waiting for the alert is minutes from enemy territory. Much of the dialogue is in Arabic. In the first two seasons, Doron’s pursuit of the terrorist Walid al-Abed leads him to fall in love with Walid’s cousin Shirin, a French-educated, unveiled doctor in Ramallah. The results are both efficient—Walid is killed—but personally catastrophic.
“Fauda” means “chaos” in Arabic. The chaos of Doron’s emotions and relationships is continuous with political and tribal conflict. As the firewall erodes, he becomes both a barricade against chaos and a vector for its spread. The partition collapsed on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas breached the Gaza fence and an untold number of ordinary Gazans joined their rampage of murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping. As in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Israel’s security failure was a failure of a conceptzia, the overarching assumptions that shape security policy and misread or ignore intelligence that contradicts it. In retrospect, the first two seasons show the conceptzia in operation, and the second two show why it broke down.
In the first two seasons, Captain Ayoub presses Abu Maher, his counterpart in the Palestinian Authority’s Preventive Security apparatus in Ramallah, to work with and for him against Hamas and Iranian infiltration. Abu Maher, who resembles the real-life Jibril Rajoub, serves coffee, and the two wrestle over who gets the better of their collaboration. Their common enemy in the West Bank, the Hamas leader Abu Ahmed, is shown as making the best of the situation, maintaining a luxurious home, riding in a Mercedes, and diverting funds from the struggle to his family. In the second season, ISIS infiltrators are a threat to Hamas as well as the Israelis. The implication is that Hamas can be contained and even bought off—sheket l’sheket (“quiet for quiet”). Similar assumptions drove the pre-October 7 policy of trying to dilute Hamas’s hostility by allowing Qatari cash into Gaza.
The next two seasons show the limits of the pre-October 7 conceptzia, and the limits of a one-man wrecking machine. In the third season, Doron must prevent weapons smuggling into Gaza and extract kidnapped Israeli hikers. In the fourth, he travels to Brussels and comes up against Hezbollah agents. In 2023, the producers turned down a proposal that the fifth season should be about Hamas terrorists taking over a kibbutz near the Gaza Strip; jumping the shark, they thought. Instead, the season begins in the aftermath of October 7. Doron and his last surviving colleagues Eli (Yaakov Zada-Daniel) and Steve (Doron Ben-David) are traumatized; in reality, their castmate Idan Amedi (who plays Sagi) was badly wounded by exploding munitions during an anti-tunnel operation in Gaza.
The events of the worst day in Israel’s history come back to Doron in flashbacks while he pursues a Hamas team in Marseille. Again, the plot tracks reality: In 2025, German, Austrian, and British intelligence, working on Mossad tip-offs, intercepted a Hamas plan to mark the second anniversary of October 7 by massacring Jews in Germany and Austria. If Fauda has retained its knack for trendspotting in terrorism, we should note that in season five, Hamas recruits and trains French leftists as terrorists, much as the PLO did with German leftists in the 1970s.
Fauda offers a real-time reflection of realities that are violently reshaping the Middle East. For Israelis, the fifth season attempts to incorporate a trauma that is still ongoing. The war with Iran is not over. The political reckoning has yet to come; Israel did not hold its first post-October 7 elections until Oct. 27, 2026. Fauda also opens a well-crafted window into the core of a society that Arabs widely despise, distrust, and fear, even as security collaboration is quietly maintained behind the scenes and public ties thaw at the state level. This is important for two reasons.
The Jews of the Mista’aravim can pretend to be Arabs because they are Arabs, culturally speaking, just as European Jews are culturally European and many American Jews, as Frederick Seidel wrote in Sunrise, can pass as “just another/Greek nose in street clothes in/Harvard Yard.” More than half of Israeli Jews are descended from Arabic-, Turkish-, Kurdish-, and Persian-speaking communities that never left the Middle East. The official discourse of Arab states denied this for decades and presented Zionism as a European invasion and Israelis as ginger interlopers. American universities, much of American media, and even some Democratic Party candidates still push this line even after the Abraham Accords.
Second, Fauda is candid in ways that Arab shows are not allowed to be candid. The heart of the Israeli state is its legendary security apparatus. Fauda shows a heart riven by human weakness and, especially in the fifth season, broken by strategic failure. It shows Jews as human beings. It shows the reality, obvious to anyone who visits, that the lives of Israelis and Palestinians are intertwined in a small and crowded space, and that they are closest to each other when it comes to the issues on which they are also furthest apart, religion and security.
The motor of the fifth season is the compatibility of the Arab tribal concept of tha’r, blood revenge, with the Jewish tribal concept of nekmat dam. One of the first scenes shows Eli, who has become a religious settler after losing his wife and children on October 7, and his Bedouin friend Salem (Bian Anteer), whose son died with Eli’s family, praying in parallel. This is presented in the matter-of-fact way that these things occur in Israel. We do not have to be either happy or clappy when we see them praying. The series is a hard watch, and there is no happy ending; every season of Fauda ends with a small victory that defers the tide of chaos at great personal cost. But it is good to see things as they are, and surprising that a TV series, of all things, should capture so much reality.
The episodes in which we see Hamas murdering Jewish civilians came with a trigger warning. In truth, the fictional representation pulls every punch; you can compare it with the real footage that circulates online. Raz and Issacharoff chose to lessen the impact of the atrocities and show only as much as was needed to justify the response. In this, and not for the first time, Fauda shows that the difference between civilization and barbarism is not a plotline or character conceit.
Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal and Washington Examiner columnist.
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