1. These principles were first consolidated in the poetry of Bialik and the national theory of Jabotinsky, and exemplified in the figure of Yoni Netanyahu and Operation Entebbe.

2. A small minority have some reading skills, as the school system and the army allow, but do not obligate. See Mendel, Yonatan, The Creation of Israeli-Arabic: Security and Politics in Arabic Studies in Israel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Dor, Zvi Ben (Benit), “’Eib, ḥshuma, infajarat, kunbula: Likrat historiyah shel ha-mizraḥim ve-ha-ʿaravit,” in Ḥazut mizraḥit: Hoveh ha-naʿ be-svakh ‘avaro ha-‘aravi, ed. Nizri, Yigal (Tel Aviv: Bavel, 2004), 29–44Google Scholar.

3. This article focuses on the first season of the series and treats it as a unified whole; in the second season a symmetry is established with regard to that kind of mimicry, as the Palestinian side learns Hebrew and imitates the gestures and performances of Israelis.

4. Ella Shohat has discussed the negative reaction of Muslims to the affects and mores adopted by upper-middle-class Jews influenced by colonial rule or by the Zionist movement that strove to create a new and nondiasporic (that is, nontraditional) Jew. To their fellow Muslims, the Jews’ gesture of shaving their beards and earlocks seemed to be an abandonment of their religion. In contrast to many depictions of the Arab world as antisemitic, this is an example of Muslims’ investment in maintaining traditional Jewish practices as part of a larger view of Jewish-Muslim civilization. Shohat, Ella, Forbidden Reminiscences: A Collection of Essays [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Bimat Kedem, 2001), 343Google Scholar.

5. On that issue see, for example, Pedahzur, Ami, ed., Root Causes of Suicide Terrorism: The Globalization of Martyrdom (London: Routledge, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. See Daniel Boyarin's thesis, which I shall return to at the end of this essay. Boyarin, Daniel, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

7. Riaz Hassan, “What Motivates the Suicide Bombers?,” YaleGlobal, September 3, 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20131004215906/http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/what-motivates-suicide-bombers-0.

8. I use the terms “Jew” and “Muslim” because of their implications for religion and culture, which is appropriate when dealing with the history of colonialism, that evolves so hermetically with the formation of identity.

9. The link between body and identity was also reflected historically in the way the Jew was signified as the Other of the national and secular state. The literature on this is vast, especially in the field of Jewish studies. Gil Anidjar has pointed to the lack of work that illuminates European history with Jewish and Muslim perspectives that mark relations to nationalism. See Anidjar, Gil, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 53Google Scholar. See also an up-to-date survey of modern Hebrew literature's approach to European nationalism through a comparative study with Islam in Ben-Yehuda, Omri, “Kafka's Muslim: Politics of Semitism,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch fuer deutsche Geschichte 45 (2017): 211–33Google Scholar.

10. Asad, Talal, Formation of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 171Google Scholar.

11. This was especially evident in the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange agreement between Israel and Hamas, where in return for a single Israeli soldier, the Israeli government handed over 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. See Omri Ben-Yehuda, “Ḥiver, meʾod ḥiver, lavan ʾafilu,” ʾEreẓ ha-ʾemori, October 19, 2011, https://haemori.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/shalit/; Deborah Orr, “Is an Israeli Life More Important Than a Palestinian's?,” The Guardian, October 19, 2011; Alon Idan, “Shalit Deal Reveals Israel's Superiority Complex,” Haaretz, October 28, 2011. In this hierarchy of currency of lives, it is important to also refer to the work of Smadar Lavie, who showed that Hamas is very aware of the inferior value of Mizraḥi soldiers, and therefore focuses primarily on the typically European looks of their objects for kidnapping and negotiation with the Israeli regime. See Lavie, Smadar, “Gaza 2014 and Mizraḥi Feminism,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 42, no. 1 (2019): 93–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Power, in the form of access to ammunition, is only addressed sporadically, when a representative of Hamas from Jordan sneaks into the West Bank to bring money and sarin gas to Abu Ahmad; this representative is captured and interrogated by the Israelis.

13. During the 2018 protests (as part of what Palestinian organizations call “The Great March of Return”), Israeli media also referred to “the terror of kites” to describe incendiary kite attacks.

14. Omri Ben-Yehuda, “The Trauma of Oslo” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, April 30, 2015.

15. See, for example, a collection of papers that were given at the conference “The Palestinian Nakba in Israeli Literature and Cinema,” organized by Zochrot in Tel Aviv in 2012. See also Hever, Hannan, We Are Broken Rhymes: The Politics of Trauma in Hebrew Literature [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2017)Google Scholar.

16. LaCapra, Dominique, Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 148Google Scholar.

17. David Remnick, “How Do You Make a TV Show Set in the West Bank?,” The New Yorker, September 4, 2017.

18. Ibid.

19. Gertz, Nurit and Yosef, Raz, “Enemies: A Love Story: Trauma, Time and the ‘Singular Plural’ in the Israeli Television Series Fauda,” Israel Studies Review 32, no. 2 (2017): 6Google Scholar.

20. A startling example of my thesis following Morag is Maktub (2017), one of the most popular feature films in Israel's history, a comedy that has nothing to do with time, politics, and terror, but opens with a suicide bomb attack in a coffee house that takes place more than fifteen years after the second intifada. To that one can also add the posttraumatic TV series ʾEkron ha-haḥlafah from 2016.

21. Morag, Raya, Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 150CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Brown, Wendy, “Injury, Identity, Politics,” in Mapping Multi-Culturalism, ed. Gordon, Avery F. and Newfield, Christopher (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 73Google Scholar.

23. Morag, Waltzing with Bashir, 148.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., 149.

26. On that issue see Hannan Hever's discussion of Zionism's justification for its constant violence from a Schmittian perspective (which I will address in what follows) that one can trace back to Leo Pinsker's founding essay Auto-Emancipation (1882) that uses Hillel the Elder's phrase: “If not now, when?”: Hever, Hannan, Hebrew Literature and the 1948 War: Essays on Philology and Responsibility (Brill: Leiden, 2019), 14Google Scholar.

27. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Zur Genealogie der Morals, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch, 1999), 5:374Google Scholar.

28. Hochberg, Gil, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 127Google Scholar.

29. This is of course a point to reflect on; one direction could be that of a very interesting term used sometimes among Jewish academic circles but mostly in public debates, “self-hatred,” coined as “Jewish Self Hatred” already by Theodor Lessing in 1930.

30. I follow here Judith Butler's discussion in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 39–40Google Scholar.

31. See Benjamin, Walter, Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsaetze (Frankfurt: Suhrkampf, 1965)Google Scholar.

32. Butler, Parting Ways, 93.

33. Ibid., 91.

34. There were voices that accepted the view of the State of Israel as a clan as a legitimate justification for its state violence. See for example Nathan Alterman's poetic cycle “Milḥemet he-ʿarim” (cities’ war) from 1957. See Hannan Hever's discussion in We Are Broken Rhymes, 82. It is worth mentioning Ami Pedahzur's argument about Israel's policy in fighting terrorism, which normally follows the Israeli public's urge for retribution, although that approach fails repeatedly. See Pedahzur, , The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle against Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

35. Quoted in Remnick, “How Do You Make?”

36. This has important implications for every critique of Israel that is based only on its breaking the law, which many Israelis dismiss (in a way, justifiably) as hypocrisy, because the state itself—any state—does not always adhere to its laws.

37. It leads also to repress the Palestinians victims in 1948 when focusing on the imperialistic British Mandate: Cohen, Uri S., Security Style and the Hebrew Culture of War [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2016), 45, 61–62Google Scholar. This is also very evident in the work of Yizhar, which makes Hever's analysis somewhat partial: see Cohen's reading of “The Prisoner” (1948) and Days of Ziklag (1958) on pages 109 and 270 respectively.

38. Hannah Szenesh is perhaps the most symbolic figure related to this ethos, but Cohen's focus is Uri Illan, whose suicide in captivity and Moshe Dayan's eulogy for him formulated many of Cohen's observations on the “security style.” See ibid., 99, 332–50.

39. Ibid., 251, 254, 291.

40. Lucas, Sarah Drews, “War on Terror: The Escalation to Extremes,” in Violence, Desire and the Sacred, ed. Cowdell, Scott, Fleming, Chris, and Hodge, Joel,  vol. 2 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 57–67Google Scholar.

41. Girard, René, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre (2007), trans. Baker, Mary, Studies in Violence, Mimesis and Culture (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 67Google Scholar.

42. Boyarin, Daniel, “The Colonial Drag: Zionism, Gender and Mimicry,” in The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Afzl-Khan, Fawzia and Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 253Google Scholar.

43. Ibid., 241.

44. This thesis is based on Yehouda Shenhav's criticism of the Israeli Left's belief in a divide between proper Israel, which is enlightened and liberal, and its margins beyond the 1967 borders. I have extended that line of argument and accentuated its implications for Mizraḥi identity. See Shenhav, Yehouda, Beyond the Two-State Solution: A Jewish Political Essay (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Ben-Yehuda, Omri, “As Thyself: The 67 War and the Mizrahim,” Jadmag 6, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 18–21Google Scholar.

45. The literature on this is vast, but one of the most compelling theorizations is Edward Said's classic readings of Freud's Egyptian Moses in his Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2004)Google Scholar. See also the abovementioned Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab.

46. Nizri, Yigal Shalom, “Die Stimme Jaakobs Stimme, die Haende Essaws Haende,” in Frequency-Modulated Scenario, ed. Schaerf, Eran (Berlin: Archiv Books, 2015), 332–42Google Scholar. The theatre of mistaʿaravi soldiers in recent years has evolved to the point where soldiers with white European looks are usually disguised as Arab women whose faces are covered by the hijab.  See Mista'aravim: On Life and Death (television documentary), directed by Or Heller, aired on channel 10, Israel, 42 min.

47. This performativity has a history of its own in Israeli cinema, where Arab characters have been played by Mizraḥim, but also, to a lesser degree, characters of Mizraḥim were played by Palestinian Israeli actors. See Shohat, Ella, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (1989; London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 260–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The border wars of the 1950s sealed the process of abolishing Arab-Jewish communities while implementing the unholy alliance between Mizraḥim, the security forces, and the Israeli Right (of which the figure of Azaria is a late representation). The Jewish community of Egypt, for example, was dissolved completely only after the 1956 war (the Suez Canal War that was the clear manifestation of Israeli collaboration with European imperialism). See Cohen, Security Style, 299.

48. Shenhav, Yehouda, Dallashi, Maisalon, Avnimelech, Rami, Mizrachi, Nissim, Mendel, Yonatan, Command of Arabic among Israeli Jews (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute, 2015)Google Scholar.

49. This is true for the first season of the series.  In the second season, Palestinian fighters penetrate Israel while performing as Jewish Israelis.

50. This is true only in the first season, as in the second season we become acquainted with Doron's father, who has Iraqi ancestry and speaks Arabic at the same native level of his son, also because he served in the military.

51. Remnick, “How Do You Make?”

52. I thank Shoshana Gabbai for her help in finding these biographical details. It is important to add that whereas in the diegetic realm within the representational world of the series, the mistaʿaravim enact a flawless performance and perfectly pass as Arabs, Palestinians watching the series do immediately notice the actors’ Israeli accent. See for example Sayed Kashua's critique of the second season: Kahsua, “Fauda Creators Think Arabs Are Stupid,” Haaretz, January 12, 2018.

53. This is another important trait that disappears in the second season, where the Palestinian side is drawn by the almost irrational violence of its leader Al Makdasi, who follows ISIS. I thank Itay Harlap of Tel Aviv University for noting that. Kashua's argument is in fact based on that season, but his critique entirely misses the complicated, and indeed, much more symmetrical and intricate representation of Jewish-Muslim relations in the first season. See Kashua, “Fauda Creator.”

54. Darwish, Mahmoud, Al-ʿamal al-Jadida al-Kamila [the Complete Works], vol. 1, trans. Antoon, Sinai (Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes, 2009), 186Google Scholar.

55. Mladek, Klaus, “Radical Play: Gesture, Performance, and the Theatrical Logic of the Law in Kafka,” The Germanic Review 78, no. 3 (2003): 228CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56. Said, Edward, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), 39Google Scholar. Like Mladek, in his understanding of identity Stuart Hall uses what can be summarized in the famous words of Pascal: “kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe,” meaning that identity is an act of suturing between the subject and what calls him from the outside by politics. Hall bases his understanding on Jaqueline Rose's assertion that identity is the way psychoanalysis enters the political, thereby closely following Louis Althusser's theory of interpellation, which uses this famous example from Pascal in order to show how the subject is created from the outside by discourse. See Hall, Stuart, “Who Needs ‘Identity’?,” in Identity: A Reader, ed. du Gay, Paul, Evans, Jessica, and Redman, Peter (London: Sage, 2000), 15–30Google Scholar.

57. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Exil und Beinationalismus: Von Gerschom Scholem und Hannah Arendt bis zu Edward Said und Mahmoud Darwish” (Carl Heinrich Becker lecture at the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, 2011, Berlin), 126.

58. The Jew found himself on the borderline of both European and Muslim societies, and therefore was a signifier synonymous with “Levantinism” and even with “Muslims” (or “Saracens”). The abovementioned works by Anidjar and Hochberg relate extensively to this notion; for an account of the contiguity of today's “Jew” with other identities see Baker, Cynthia M., Jew (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017), 97–148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59. The question of whether the verb “wish” should be in quotation marks is in many ways the question of this whole article. By deciding not to add quotation marks, I underscore the genuine desire of mimicry in the escalation of identity, which is based on the cycle of revenge, as discussed earlier with respect to Girard.

60. Ran Boker, “I Dedicate the Fauda Scene to Madḥat Yousouf,” Yediʿot ʾAḥronot, April 30, 2015. My translation.

61. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition, 1–19.

62. This aspect has a long history in the Zionist project, which has viewed, formulated, and arranged space from the air. See Ezrahi, Yaron, Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 47–57Google Scholar.

63. Boyarin, Dying for God, 121.

64. Ibid., 45–50.