Everyone in the occupied West Bank knows about the Duvdevan unit. They are mista’aravim—a Hebraised Arabic word loosely meaning “those who masquerade as Arabs”—members of the Israeli army who are not Palestinians, but who speak the local dialect fluently and can pass as Arabs. Long before the Al-Aqsa Flood, they would infiltrate the streets and alleyways on special missions in search of high-value targets, for the purposes of abduction or execution. According to Israeli folklore, the unit is a stranger to failure and its members are impossible to kill or capture. Its fame has reached global attention thanks to the Netflix series Fauda, written by one of its former members, but how close is the fiction to reality?
Duvdevan’s specialities are assassination, abduction and recruiting agents. The unit was reportedly founded before the outbreak of the first Palestinian Intifada in 1986 by Ehud Barak, who went on to become Israeli defence minister and prime minister, while he was serving in the Central Command. However, the idea is as old as the conflict itself. Precedents date back to the 1930s, when the Zionist military/terrorist forces formed special groups whose mission was to infiltrate Arab society to carry out assassinations.
In our era, the Duvdevan unit uses subterfuge to enter deeply into Palestinian cities without attracting attention. Members disguise themselves as religious Palestinians, with a beard and a skullcap, or a keffiyeh and agal. Sometimes they use carts commonly pushed by Palestinian fruit and vegetable sellers, or even ambulances with Palestinian licence plates.
Because Ashkenazi Jews (those of European origin) often struggle to pronounce Arabic in a natural way, Duvdevan mainly recruits from among Mizrahi Jews (of Arab origin) who speak their mother tongue and are familiar with the particularities of the local culture. Lior Raz, the star of Fauda and one of its writers, belongs to a Mizrahi family and according to his biography published on several websites, he has spoken accented Arabic since childhood because his mother is of Algerian origin and his father is Iraqi. Perhaps for this reason he was a member of Duvdevan for years.
Israeli intelligence personnel are keen to get close to the social and cultural particulars of Palestinian society by studying the local environment, picking up the local patois and nomenclature. When a Palestinian is summoned for investigation, they surprise him by calling him by his nickname, “the Crooked One” or “the Cook” instead of his given name. Unless he already knows the ruse, he might assume the Israelis are all-knowing and there is no point hiding any information from them.
Netflix began broadcasting Fauda in 2016 and the series continued until 2022. The series follows the adventures of Doron Kabilio (played by Raz) and his unit as they pursue Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists, from the West Bank to Gaza, and they even infiltrate Lebanese and Syrian territory. It is immediately evident to any Palestinian viewer or any Arab familiar with the Palestinian dialect that there is an insuperable technical problem with the series—the difficulty of finding Jewish Israeli actors that were fluent in Arabic. Authentic Palestinian actors do appear in a few marginal roles, but the Israeli actors' linguistic performances are unconvincing. Arab viewers will struggle to buy the idea that Doron—with his strong accent and poor pronunciation--can persuade a Palestinian girl that he was a Palestinian working with the Preventive Security Service, let alone make her fall in love with him!
As for the depiction of the Duvdevan unit members and the extent to which they differ from the reality, it seems the creators do draw their characters in a subtly politicised way. For example, we do hear one unit member describing how the training programme stripped recruits of any human feelings when dealing with “targets” (that is, the Palestinians they kill or torture). This moment of honesty, however, contradicts the depiction of characters’ behaviour elsewhere in the series.
The series also serves to build up the mythical image of the unit’s members, who appear as heroes with superhuman talents and capabilities. Doron is a Don Juan, charming Palestinian girls with ease, and even getting them to bed, as though it were a common and usual thing in Palestinian society.
Ayyoub, the unit leader, is another superhero with a remarkable talent to withstand all forms of torture. When he is captured by Hizbullah members who lured him to Brussels and transported him to Syria, we see him with bloodied face and broken limbs. But he remains defiant and unyielding until his comrades posing as members of the Lebanese resistance rescue him. The “humanity” of the unit’s members is also played up. Doron, the Don Juan, always remains loyal to the Palestinian girls he ensnares and whose bodies he takes control of, even when the unit decides either to kill them or abandon them. He rushes to his lovers’ defence, even after deceiving them and using them.
The reality is that Israeli security services treat their Palestinian collaborators with contempt. They deceive them or blackmail them to bend them to their will and then they discard them after they have served their purpose. Most end up as outcasts in Israeli cities, abandoned to their fates. Even when the Israeli state wants to reward them, it pays them with money extorted from the Palestinian Authority budget, using the customs duties collected by Israel on the PA’s behalf.
Another striking feature of Fauda is how the series portrays the relationship between the unit and the Palestinian security apparatus. Palestinian security officials are depicted as having amicable relations with their Israeli counterparts, at least on the Palestinian side. Sometimes PA security officials are off-hand in their dealings with Israeli security officials, while the latter treat them with contempt, especially the female elements. Several times we see a Palestinian security official addressing his Israeli female counterpart as “darling,” until she rebukes him with “I’m not your darling!”
Nor does the series dwell on the unit’s crushing failures over the years, such as in 2000 when Mahmoud Abu al-Hanoud, a Hamas leader in the village of Asira al-Shamaliya, opened fire on an advancing Duvdevan unit whom he detected coming after him. In the ensuing gun battle, three members of the unit were killed by “friendly fire” with others wounded, forcing Israel to suspend the unit's operations.
In contrast to this real incident, the series emphasizes the ease with which members of the Israeli unit enter Palestinian communities in cities and villages. There is a scene in one episode apparently depicting the funeral of a Hamas activist, with mask-wearing militants carrying the coffin and chanting slogans in Arabic, only for the viewer to discover that the dozens of mourners are in fact all members of the Israeli unit. The ruse is discovered only when Doron takes it upon himself to tip off a young Palestinian woman whom he had tricked to extract information. He actually risked the whole operation to warn the woman to leave the area.
Palestinians do not see such humanitarian gestures when they encounter the Israeli security services, whether they are suspects, or tricked by them, or collaborators.
What caught my attention most in the series was the ease with which the undercover elements could penetrate gatherings of political activists, whether in the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, or even Syria. No doubt they do penetrate, as the recent series of assassinations of Hizbullah and Hamas leaders has revealed, but it is done with remotely guided missiles and shells. More often what happens is that they succeed in recruiting local elements without getting close to the target themselves; unlike in the series, where we see Duvdevan unit members roaming the streets of Arab cities, including Gaza before the war, with their cars and their communication devices, carrying out missions and exiting the scene with the same ease.
One can usually notice the political orientation of an Israeli drama, but it is often done in a clever, disguised way that does not make it obvious to the viewer. This is the secret to not harming the drama or affecting dramatic credibility.
