When protests over the cost of living in France descended into rioting and looting near the Champs-Élysées on October 17, actress Virginie Khalifa Hag watched the scenes unfolding in Paris with growing alarm. But for the 40-year-old star of the Israeli hit series Fauda, the violence was more than disturbing footage from the city where she was born and raised. Her mother was caught in the middle of it.
"My mother manages a shop on a small street near the Champs-Élysées," Khalifa Hag told ynet. "The shop owner insisted on opening as usual. Fairly early on, it became clear that things were getting bad, with rioting and violence. Suddenly, Free Palestine flags appeared as well." Her mother, she said, hid inside the shop until she could leave safely.
"She practically hid in the store, quietly closed up and walked to a Metro station farther away, just to avoid all the chaos, with people destroying, burning and smashing everything."
For Khalifa Hag, who immigrated to Israel roughly 13 years ago, the events reinforced a feeling she says has been growing for years: The Paris she remembers from childhood no longer exists.
"What's happening in France is insane, but the writing was on the wall," she said. "This is not the country I grew up in. My late father always told me, 'We grew up in Algeria. We're not afraid.' But today, Jews are afraid. Paris is burning. It's really an intifada."
She described another frightening experience involving a friend of her mother's, who owns a shop near Place de la République.
"Rioters dressed in black suits and masks actually looted her shop, and she couldn't stop them," Khalifa Hag said. "There was a lot of smoke in the area. Everyone watching television is asking themselves where the government is and why it isn't dealing with this more effectively."
From Paris to a village near Lebanon
Khalifa Hag, 40, is familiar to viewers of Fauda from the show's fifth season, in which she plays a French terrorist who joins a terror cell. Beyond acting, she is a director, presenter and owner of the content agency Delicate Genius Digital.
She was born and raised in Paris to a father of Algerian descent and a mother of Polish descent. For many years, her parents owned clothing stores in the French capital, a profession shared by numerous Jewish families in the city.
Destruction in Paris following the riots. 'The writing was on the wall,' says Khalifa Hag
Her career in entertainment began unusually early. She started modeling at just four years old and later appeared in short films, commercials and magazine covers. One advertisement for the French stationery brand Clairefontaine aired for three consecutive years, prompting classmates to nickname her after the brand.
She subsequently worked as a commentator for the French television channel Direct 8, presenting an entertainment and culture segment, covering the Cannes Film Festival and interviewing celebrities.
But despite her professional success, she increasingly felt that her future lay elsewhere.
"My childhood memories are of weekends in the Marais district. Everyone was out on the streets, having meals at friends' homes," she recalled.
"Antisemitism was always there, and from a young age I felt this wasn't necessarily the best place for us. In the family clothing business, Chinese traders gradually entered the market, Jewish-owned shops closed and people left for America and Israel."
Israel, meanwhile, had been a familiar destination throughout her childhood.
"Every summer I came to Israel for at least a month and a half to visit my cousins, who had immigrated when they were young and grew up in Herzliya Pituach. I learned Hebrew mainly on the street," she said.
"Here, I felt that everything was open, that people helped one another and that I was never alone. In France, people don't help so easily. They don't readily introduce you to their contacts. In Israel, it's the exact opposite. So many times I met someone who said, 'If you need anything, just let me know.'"
Virginie Khalifa Hag in Fauda. 'When the series came out, I was flooded with messages from around the world'
Although her career in France appeared to be flourishing, Khalifa Hag says she found it increasingly difficult to return to Paris after her visits to Israel.
"From the outside, it looked like my career was only going up, but every time I returned from Israel to France, I became depressed," she said. "I wanted to stay in Israel. One summer I told my friends here that I'd had enough and that I would move as soon as I found a job."
That opportunity arrived in October 2012, when a friend told her about a new French-language international news channel being established in Jaffa, i24NEWS, which would begin broadcasting in the summer of 2013.
"I auditioned, got accepted as a journalist and presenter, and moved to Israel within a month," she recalled. "I was 26, single, and figured that if it didn't work out, I could always go back."
Her first years in Israel were demanding. She regularly woke at 4 a.m. for work and became involved with actors working on productions filmed in the country.
She did return to France temporarily to care for her father, who was suffering from depression and moving in and out of hospitals. But she stayed in Paris for less than a year.
"I knew that once I returned to Israel, I wouldn't go back to France again," she said.
Today, she is married to attorney Oren Hag, 49, who grew up in Tiberias and Kiryat Shmona. The couple live in Moshav Beit Hillel, in the Galilee Panhandle near the Lebanese border, and also maintain an apartment in Tel Aviv.
"We don't have children yet, but God willing, that will happen soon," she said.
Their life in northern Israel is far removed from the Parisian entertainment scene in which she grew up. The couple produce wine, harvest pecans and are beginning to organize tours of the area.
‘I chased the terrorist role for months’
Khalifa Hag's connection to France eventually became central to one of her most prominent acting opportunities.
The fifth season of Fauda, which aired on Israel's yes television platform between May and July 2026 before arriving on Netflix in September, features a storyline set in France. The season reached Netflix's top 10 in 43 countries and topped the viewing chart in Lebanon.
Khalifa Hag appears alongside French actress Mélanie Laurent, known internationally for her role in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.
"When I heard from friends in the industry that the fifth season would focus on France and that the story took place in Marseille, two years after October 7, I literally chased the role for months," she said.
"I kept calling the Fauda casting directors. I really wanted to be part of a season set in France, even though it was filmed in Budapest and Israel, because I knew that what they were writing about was exactly what was happening there today."
Her persistence eventually paid off, although the offer came at the last minute.
"Just two weeks before filming, they called to tell me I'd been cast as a terrorist. I said, 'Okay, that'll be challenging, but the main thing is that I'm in.' When the series came out, I was flooded with messages from around the world."
Has her appearance on the show made her recognizable in public?
"Sometimes, a little, in restaurants," she said. "I look very different without makeup, and I'm also tall, 1.80 meters [5 feet 11 inches]. But people look at me with that expression of, 'I know you from somewhere.'"
While the series brought her international recognition, the war that began with the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack on Israel also reshaped her personal relationships with friends in France.
For years after immigrating, Khalifa Hag remained close to friends from various backgrounds, including Lebanese, Turkish and Greek acquaintances. That changed after October 7, she said.
"There was a period after I moved to Israel when we were still in close contact. When they visited Beirut, they sent me videos and we spoke on FaceTime," she recalled.
"But they stopped talking to me when the war broke out on October 7. Only a handful sent me messages saying, 'We're with you.' With many friends from Turkey and Greece, you can't talk about anything because, as far as they're concerned, 'we committed genocide.'"
Those broken friendships have deepened her sense of distance from the country she once called home.
‘Be prepared to leave’
Asked what advice she would give Jews still living in France, Khalifa Hag did not hesitate.
"Be prepared to leave, because you won't be safe in France anymore," she said. "A lot of people are already buying apartments here, just in case."
Still, she stopped short of urging every French Jew to move to Israel immediately, acknowledging the challenges involved in starting over in another country.
"Would I tell everyone to come here? I don't know," she said. "I'm lucky. I have a job and I have my husband. But for someone arriving with a family and without work, it's difficult."
Her own decision to build a life in an agricultural village near Lebanon's border sometimes amuses friends who remember her years in Paris.
"Some of my friends laugh about it a little," she said. "Virginie from Paris came to live in an Israeli moshav to pick pecans and make wine."
But for Khalifa Hag, it is a life she has no intention of giving up.
"The truth? I enjoy it. Life in the north is starting to return to normal."