Fake Chaos: “Fauda” - the so-called organization of Palestinian anarchists

Recently, an alleged Palestinian anarchist organization ““Fauda”” (“Chaos” – a name coinciding with Netflix’s popular series) has gained popularity among Western leftist activists. This happened thanks to “Fauda’s” intense activity on Internet. They have a telegram channel, they’re on Instagram etc.  After October 7th Palestinian attack on Israel, members of “Fauda” were interviewed by the US-based Anarchist Federation Black Rose. Excerpts from interviews with other members of “Fauda” were published by the site Anarchist Agency. 

We carefully examined the content of their media channels. Doubts were raised by the fact that we failed to find any actual proofs of the existence of “Fauda”. No photos of any actions in Palestine – even in masks or with blurred faces - no leaflets pasted on walls. 

There are only some videos featuring their speaker Abu al Roba. The last one - and the only in which the voice is not as heavily distorted – was published on October 26th. In that video he expressed his support of October 7th attack and stated that “Fauda”, alongside other Palestinian organizations is fighting against Israel.     

We asked our Arab comrades if it’s possible to verify the authenticity of the video based on “Abu al Roba’s” accent. 

And received the following answer: “This is a non-native speaker, who tries his best to imitate Levantine accent (Shami / شامي) while reciting written speech, as he wants people to believe that the person speaking is Palestinian. This is 10000% fake. Even the phonetics of non-complex words is mispronounced. It’s obvious that the speaker is not Palestinian. Apart from that, some letters during the speech sound terrible.”    

Israeli comrades said that they have seen “Faud’s” activity on the internet but they don’t trust it and came out with a number of versions – from the fact that video’s sound was produced with AI, that reads the text, to protect the identity of the guy who wrote it, to them being refugees living abroad who forgot the language. 

But native Arab speakers rejected those versions as well. As they informed us, in the video one can hear different intonations of the same words, as well as shortening/lengthening of syllables. Therefore, it’s definitely a real (live?) speaker. Meanwhile the Arabic language is so bad that it’s unlikely that he’s a refugee, even if he has left the country long ago: 

“If you are a Palestinian, you properly learn the vocabulary, what we can’t really see from the pronunciation. A more plausible explanation is that this is an attempt to portray a local person by a non-local person. This man can’t pronounce the sound ح [h], no matter where it’s located in each word.  And the fact that he always pronounces it softer/harsher, in reality is a good cue to suggest that he never spoke Arabic as a native speaker.”

A more plausible version of the Israeli comrades is that the label “Fauda” was coined by Israeli special services, in order to “catch on bait” - namely, to monitor the sentiments of trusting Western and Russian leftists who contact them (“Fauda” has recourses in Russian language) and surveil them. A possible motive is fraud - crowdfunding from western leftist – as in the picture of this post. 

In short, it looks like “Fauda” doesn’t really exist. We can only guess whether it was created by special services or it’s just some impostors of non-Palestinian background, playing this game for dubious purposes.  

Abu Ilyas al Bibi

From the editor: This text is published as a personal opinion, not a shared position of Autonomous Action. We want to emphasize we don't have direct proofs that Fauda is a project of state-run secret services. However, we have a wide network of anarchist contacts in various countries, but we were not able to find anyone who knows Fauda activists personally: it seems it's always limited to online communication only.