Screaming for the State: The Work of a Rape Documentary

At this juncture, images from Gaza have interrupted the Israeli state’s denial of genocide. There are ruins and rubble and people searching for loved ones, injured and dead bodies, people clamoring for food as they are being starved deliberately, and families crying out in pain at the loss of their loved ones, their children, and babies. Many of these images are marked by their cinema verité mode of capture; their images are interrupted, and fragmentary, often shaky, and made by handheld videos captured by cellphones (mostly), characterized by poor lighting, and the soundtrack of voices of people injured and frantic, the sirens of ambulances often heard above the sound of bombs or gunfire. Yet more than cinema verité, these images are better understood through the aesthetic of what the visual theorist Hito Steyerl calls “poor” images: those made by citizen-journalists with cellphones and without the framing of an authoritative voice, making globally dispersed connections across a multiplicity of screens and without the equipment available to professionals (Steyerl, 2011). It is not surprising, then, as Basim Twessi points out, despite Isreal state control preventing journalists from freely reporting on Gaza, and the deliberate targeting and killing of journalists by the IDF, the Israeli propaganda war has not prevailed (Twessi, 2024). With increasing global condemnation of Israel, the strangulation of Gaza coverage has become much more severe. 

There has also emerged a veritable industry of photographs, video clips on various social media, and documentaries designed to support the Israeli government. Quite a few of them are focused on the topic of October 7, and specifically on the allegations of rapes of Israeli women, and these are crucial for the Israeli state to present itself –via “its women” – as a victim. These include documentary films such as We Will Dance Again (Mozer, 2024), Beyond October 7 (Kainy, 2024), Supernova; the Music Festival Massacre (Bloch, 2023), Nova (Pe’er, 2023), The Killing Roads (Hecht, 2024), After October 7: A Personal Journey to Kfar (Silvers, 2024), One Day in October (Reed, 2024) , and Screams Before Silence(Stalinsky 2024)– among many others. Given the nature of the photographic image and documentary cinema that offers highly constructed views and an unstable claim to photographic “truth,” combined with the sensational use of rape in histories of war and propaganda, this genre of documentary films remains important to analyze for the work it does in ventriloquizing the Israeli state. SBS evidences the argument by Jacques Rancière that the “intolerable images” (2021) in which witnesses are compelled to speak of their trauma or what they have seen are themselves “intolerable” because they reveal not the voice of the victims but the command of a higher authority. In these documentaries, the voice of authority that speaks is the Israeli state. 

Even though reports by the UN and by other Human Rights organizations, including Amnesty, have not found evidence to support the claims by the Israeli and US governments that Hamas had planned and perpetrated systematic mass rapes,[1] these films create a visual spectacle for the Israeli state attempting to generate global sympathy, speaking for national masculinity and patriarchy, and for justifying the genocide of Palestinians. However, these films, as I show by my analysis of one of them, Screams Before Silence (hereafter SBS), even though they try to offer evidence to support the narrative of the Israeli state, ultimately emerge as propagandistic in trying to generate affect rather than as either convincing of the “truth,” or powerful as examples of excellence in documentary filmmaking (Smaill 2010). SBS, for instance, shows no acknowledgement of the reflexivity and the impact of documentary cinema’s power, nor does it reveal its own process and production. It remains unconvincing, however, for several reasons, despite the sensational testimony from some survivors of the attack: it provides second-hand evidence from photographic images, it has a narrator with her own complex history of leading a media platform infamous for circulating violent content, and it reiterates a populist feminism that ignores a plethora of feminist research on the topic of wartime or conflict rape and documentary cinema. This film and its marketing argue that a feminist position on sexual assault is that all women must be believed, and all women are silenced, but it does so in the face of a large body of feminist research that shows how charges of rape can be weaponized for racial and nationalist goals. Infamous examples remain the false charges of rape of white women in both the context of European colonization and American enslavement.[2] What Razack calls a “racial politics” has shown that silence and speaking are highly variable and contextual, and who can be believed and by whom varies by race and power (Razack 2024). Whose testimonies are circulated and believed has been as much about racial and national power as about the power of powerful people to escape culpability.[3] As Rupal Oza tells us in her study of rape cases in India, rape scripts are often not a tool of empowerment for women because they can be deployed for a denial of women’s subjectivity and agency by the very state and society that claims to bring them justice (Oza 2023). As Nada Elia has argued, there is a weaponization of both antisemitism and feminism to exempt and exceptionalize Israel from the sexual violence that it has carried out against Palestinians (Elia 2025).

It is not surprising, then, that SBS is a not an example of a “poor” image but an elite, wealthy, white production. It was directed by Anat Stalinsky (who has made other films and reality tv) and was produced under the banner of Kastina Communications, a large Israeli media and film company known for making numerous documentaries and tv shows, including the first season of  Fauda – a very popular Netflix series in which Palestinians were depicted as terrorists to be destroyed by the Israeli heroes. Kastina calls itself a “leading creator of cinematic content related to October 7”. [4]

The film opens with a message: “Trigger Warning Viewer Discretion is Advised,” alerting viewers to the difficult emotions that they might feel as they view the film. Following this alert, the camera, with ominous music as background, takes us to the ruined houses of the settlers. We hear the voice over by survivors and responders, and fragments of conversations in both English and Hebrew, mentioning the use of rape as a “tool of war.” The film then opens with Sheryl Sandberg arriving in the area, heading to Kibbutz Kfar Aza. As the music continues, the camera moves through the settler colony and places Sandberg in what is seen as the appropriate setting for the interviews: a concrete bunker-like, basement parking lot space akin to that in a horror movie.  She meets with mother and daughter, Chen and Agam Goldstein-Almog, both of whom were taken hostage by Hamas as their family members were killed in the attack. The film shows that they find it difficult to speak, as Sandberg prods them to do so. Since the women have suffered in the attack, going to the spaces where it took place might have been traumatizing, but the film takes them to their destroyed house and kibbutz even though there is no reason why the interviews could not have taken place anywhere else. During the interview, Agam Goldstein-Almog recounts that she told her mother, as she was being kidnapped by Hamas, “Mom, they’re going to rape me now.”[5] That such does not happen during the 51 days they were held hostage is not mentioned in the film; nor does the film mention that the Hamas captors at one point shielded the Goldstein hostages from shrapnel by their own bodies (Sinmaz, 2024). 

As they relate their experiences, Sandberg says to them “I am so sorry, no one has to live through this,” establishing the belief that no Israeli, even though living close to the border with Gaza as was this settlement, should suffer any violence despite being in a settler colonial state. To add to this narrative of exceptionalism and Israel as a space purportedly free of any other sexual assault, and to erase any sign of its settler colonial context, we hear later the mother of one young woman who was tragically killed, saying “We’d like to think this couldn’t be possible, that nobody would harm a young girl.” That the film includes these words, spoken no doubt out of anguish, suggest that what it wants us to forget is the violence of the Israeli state that continually harms women, including Palestinian young girls and children with boys and young women and children killed or displaced in the decades of the occupation (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019).[6] As Palestinians have suffered all sorts of harms, including sexual assaults under the Occupation,[7] the Israeli security forces have had impunity for inflicting such harms. Members of the Knesset are on record for saying that rape by Israeli soldiers is allowed; one member, Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Knesset and Netanyahu’s Likud party, who was appointed to the finance committee within the Likud party despite been dogged with allegations of rape, saying that it was “legitimate” to rape Palestinians (Verter, 2025; Amran, 2024; Cordall 2024; Doyle 2024; Lidor 2024; Peled and Abdel-Baqui, 2024; Sokol 2025). Israel has voted to change rape laws in 2023 to enable additional penalties for rape with “racist” or “nationalist” motives, in effect ensuring that  Palestinians charged with rape would be more harshly dealt with compared to Jewish Israelis (PPI, 2023). Additionally, the rapes and sexual assaults on Israeli women and soldiers within the IDF are often met with inaction by the government.[8]

After visiting Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Sandberg goes to Nova music festival site, near Kibbutz Re’im, close to the Gaza border, where the attack also took place and where over 300 people were killed and a number of people taken hostage. Sandberg speaks to survivors, two women and two men who tell Sandberg that they saw and heard women being raped. She then speaks to Amit Sussana, taken from the music festival, who was held hostage for 55 days, and who is the only person in the film testifying as a rape survivor. Since the genre of the wartime rape documentary has often relied on survivor testimony, the film spends a great deal of time with her account. The camera stays over Susanna’s face as she offers her account of the sexual act that she related she had to perform on her captor. Yet Susanna’s account does not align with the narrative the film wants to produce, since she does not tell us the story of barbaric Hamas fighters assaulting her in the heat of war, but of one captor using his power over her over the 55 days of her captivity. – heinous though this power would have been. Importantly, and revealing how the documentary erases Israeli state involvement, in none of these interviews does Sandberg bring up the thorny question of how and why the IDF, often claimed as powerful in security and surveillance, was unable to protect these women. None of the witnesses from the Nova music festival site, who testify that they heard Hamas raping women, have any questions or critiques of the IDF or Israeli police for their belated arrival at the site or for not offering the protection of the Israeli security state (Enloe 2016; Al Bulushi et al, 2023; Young 2003).

 In addition to the survivors, the film relies on men, including some former IDF, offering testimony regarding what they saw when they arrived to help at the site, since the IDF did not arrive until many hours after the attack. These responders include Eran Masas, a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the IDF, and Rami Davidian, also former IDF. Merit Ben Mayer, Chief Superintendent of police in Israel also offers her analysis. These responders give us their verbal and virtual testimony, offering accounts and the images they say they have collected on their cellphones. The men narrate that women’s bodies were sexually assaulted and their bodies mutilated and that they have the photographs of the bodies to prove it. These images are deemed so graphic that they can only be seen by Sandberg as our visual proxy –supposedly protecting us from these images. Because the images are not visible to the viewers or the camera (the only images we are shown are of bodies on the ground), it is through Sandberg’s reaction that the viewers must rely upon as evidence. Later on, another speaker, Shari Mendes (from the IDF Military Rabbinate) describes what she sees as examples of “genital mutilation” -a phrase that links, in the white feminist transnational, these women as victims of brown and black men (Zakaria; Grewal and Kaplan). The visual evidence of widespread rape thus comes from the images that are not shown to viewers of the film; rather viewers must believe Sandberg, and the responders. The documentary, consequently, offers a narrative that relies on multiple screens and image-makers, the camera of the documentarian and the cell-phone cameras of the men, and on Sandberg as our viewing proxy, distancing viewers even more from the evidence that the film wishes to provide and relying on photographic evidence, albeit second-hand, as the truth.

Two other women experts are included to make the case, though neither seem to have direct evidence of the violence. Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, former VP of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women provides her assurances that the sexual assaults did take place, adding that such violence is powerful because she says, “when a woman is violated, it symbolizes the body of the whole nation.” Given her former work in the UN, one would assume some sort of knowledge about the complex relation between nationalism and rape narratives – but Halperin-Kaddari does not present such knowledge or context that would enlighten viewers.[9] Rather, both Halperin-Kaddari and another expert, Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, reveal very little knowledge about the global extent and history of wartime rape because they focus on exceptionalizing the Israeli context. Elkayam-Levy, the Head of an organization entitled “The Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children,” states that Hamas has “redefined evil” in ways that should compel “international law to be redefined.”  She seems to be unaware of atrocities committed by the Israeli state against Palestinian people in the century of its Occupation, or that women are assaulted in numerous wars and conflicts around the world, and that brutal acts of sexual violence have happened in many places and in many conflicts (Henry 2015).[10] Once again, an entire history and corpus of writing and research on women and rape are erased in such claims of exceptionalism, all in the attempt to produce Isreael as the “moral” army and its nation and its women as victims.

The accounts of the survivors are interspersed with footage of men (presumably Hamas members) shouting “Allahu Akbar” as they, we are made to assume from the film’s context, take away hostages, one of them a young woman with bloodied clothing. These selected fragments of video – we are told at one point in the film that these were uploaded by Hamas members – are used to establish the premise of the film of Hamas as terrorists that attacked with a plan that included sexual assaults. Given that in the western contexts of the Global War on Terror, the stereotypical Muslim “terrorist” is often caught saying “Allahu Akbar,” we are meant to believe that it is Islam that is animating the terrorism. Survivors, police and responders in the film tell us that they know that Hamas had planned the attack to include the rapes as “premeditated and preconceived”, and thus as a war crime; some claim that Hamas was sexually torturing and “branding” bodies, describing the attackers as savages.  The film also shows us a couple of men who are allegedly a Hamas member in Israeli custody who tells us that they did rape Israeli women. Yet the film does not tell us where or who provided the video of these men and under what circumstances. Consequently, this snippet is missing any context and remains unclear since it is often the case that testimony of prisoners in custody is coerced; even the presence of the interrogator of this prisoner (probably an IDF member?) is heard but not seen even as the scene is shot with the background of an Isreali flag. As with the videos of this prisoner, the documentary tries to erase the Israeli state’s presence from its framing. There is no IDF spokesperson who speaks on camera, for instance.  None of the survivors, who seem traumatized by the attack, seem able to say anything about the responsibility of the state, or are at all angered by its failures on October 7. The film ends at the Nova festival site which has now become a memorial space. The camera pans over the photographs of many young women that have been added to the site, as the voice over suggests that they might all have been the victims of sexual assault by Hamas during the attack.

What emerges from this film, then, is the desire for Israel’s supporters to offer testimony of a Hamas plan, as Sandberg and some witnesses state that they feel it is their mission to speak. Its marketing and circulation among politicians and media in the US and Israel suggest that it is addressed not just to those sympathetic to Israel but also to powerful leaders, American, European, and Israeli. The film has been made available on YouTube and has been screened in both the US Congress (supported by a bipartisan groups of lawmakers) and the Knesset, hosted by numerous Israeli embassies across the world, universities in the US and Europe, synagogues, and Zionist NGOs (“StandWithUs” for instance), and many public theatres. It has been reviewed widely and often favorably in the US. Sheryl Sandberg attended several screenings and spoke on TV and in a variety of venues, including an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN. It was favorably reviewed by The New York Times’s conservative columnist, Bret Stephens (no friend of feminists), who told his readers that sexual violence is a tool of war while complaining about “rape denialism.” 

The marketing of the film, following the words of witnesses in the film, uses the Israeli state narrative that the rapes have been doubted or ignored, and the raped women silenced. Sandberg has said that “the atrocities have received little scrutiny or attention from human rights and feminist groups, international organizations, and others” (Parker 2024). In numerous interviews during the publicity for the film, Sandberg repeats this claim, even though it has been the case that no American or Israeli leader can mention October 7 without mentioning rape, and they mention it frequently. Any quick reference to American, European, or Israeli politicians from President Biden to Benjamin Netanyahu speaking about October 7 will always include mention of the phrase “rape and murder”, revealing how the rape narrative has become a political tool to corroborate the ideology of Israeli victimization and its “moral” war.  The charge of silencing then works to claim something as truth with the assumption that it is a feminist axiom that women are unable to talk about such violence and must be supported and encouraged to do so in the face of patriarchal silencing. Yet no feminist who has knowledge of the racial and colonial history of rape would believe all women, since they understand how context shapes who is silenced and when (Jaleel 2024; Sokolowska-Parz 2016; Baxi 2014; Armstrong et al. 2018).

An important aspect of research on rape in conflict – and the reason that documentary filmmakers focus on the topic-- has been to understand what contexts enable or disable women from testifying and how to prevent such violence from taking place. They know the question of rape must be understood from within the social and political context in which it occurs. Giles and Hyndman, for instance, suggest, “Knowledge of the ways in which violence occurs provides crucial clues to its antecedents and consequences and ultimately may serve to prevent its repetition, particularly in the context of war” (Giles and Hyndman, 4).  SBS does not delve into such feminist concerns. While it concerns itself about speaking and witnessing, there is a silence about the political, historical, and geopolitical context of this conflict. We don’t know where and how and why of the history of Palestine and Gaza, of the making of Israel, of the emergence of Hamas, of the history of the locations of the attack, of the spaces and places where the attack took place and the political context in which, as the film claims, women’s bodies become symbols of the Israeli state. The narrative is framed only around the October 7 events, and only on mentioning Hamas, and only on gender as unmarked by history or context. It makes no mention why the rape narrative is being questioned or asking how and why forensic evidence came to be missing; nor does it openly acknowledge that its agenda is to counter the debate about whether these rapes took place (Mhajne, 2024; Razack 2024). It is incurious about the relation between rape and war in anything other than in simplistic ways, leading to what Razack calls the “weaponization of rape” as a “racial” narrative (Razack 2024). Nor does it concern itself with the ramifications on all Isreali women of using the rape narrative in a conflict context.

The film’s attempt to provide “truth” however, is also undercut by its choice of narrator in Sheryl Sandberg. Given her professional history working in Facebook from its early years, a platform that began by a man making a website to rank women, and one that is infamous for enabling misinformation, Sandberg’s desire to be seen as a feminist has had a chequered history.[11] If Sandberg’s elitism and whiteness enable her to access the state and media—to present the documentary through the Israeli embassies or in front of the US Congress – her history also leads viewers to be critical of her as either the voice of truth or one who could reflect or translate for viewers the emotions expressed by her interviewees. Sandberg did not join with any feminist campaigns such as #Metoo, on other matters of sexual assault when that campaign was ongoing. During her time as Facebook as Chief Operating officer from 2008-2022, Sandberg, much like her boss, Mark Zuckerberg, ignored how Facebook and its platform were used for propaganda, toxic speech, hate and violence all over the world. [12] Reportedly, the platform has allowed context that explicitly shows sexual violence in all its horrific manifestations, content related to war crimes, “pro-rape” jokes and discussion (which became a scandal in 2011), incitement of ethnic massacres in Ethiopia and Sri Lanka,[13] and according to the US’s National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 20 million instances of child abuse. This list does not include spreading false news, COVID misinformation (that took many peoples’ lives), and of course the pro-Brexit and Cambridge Analytica scandal in which Facebook was sharing private information on users for the election of Trump and Ted Cruz. If this is not enough, the company outsources a great deal of its monitoring to companies like Accenture, which hires and contracts with thousands of workers to monitor content, some of which, The New York Times reported, includes suicides, beheadings, and sexual acts, leading to these workers experiencing trauma and mental health problems. When workers mounted a class action suit against their working conditions, Facebook argued (and Sandberg was Chief Operating Officer at the time) that it was Accenture should take the blame because it, and not Facebook, was their employer (Satariano and Isaac, 2021). 

Despite Sandberg’s implicit claim as feminist and truthteller, SBS does not engage with the long history of rape and its spectacle in cinema that has been well examined in film and feminist studies (Haskell, 2016; Young, 2009; Mazumdar 2017). Racial-imperialist ways of seeing, especially within documentaries concerning the global south, enable the racial-colonial distinctions between the white makers of the documentary and the brown and black subjects being filmed (Kapur, 2002).[14] In particular, documentaries on wartime rape have animated international feminism since the emergence of the language of women’s human rights and after the Balkan conflicts in in the last decades of the twentieth century (Zarkov 2007; Harper 2017). Given the nature of wartime rape, often taking place where cameras are absent, except in cases where the perpetrators film themselves doing such acts, documentary filmmakers have used different techniques to make their argument, from interviews of survivors and family and forensic experts, revealing court documents and showing the trials of the rapists, and any other information that establishes contexts in which such rapes could occur. In the case of SBS, what is absent is not just the context of the events and the testimony of non-Israeli forensic experts, but even its own context, which is the debate about whether the rapes took place. And perhaps it cannot speak about such matters because the long history of the IDF and its treatment of Palestinians might open a pandora’s box undercutting any attempt to show Israel as a victim.[15]

Feminist documentarians of wartime sexual violence must deal not just with the representational and constructed nature of the film text but also with the problem of the gendered binaries produced by such narratives and the inordinately spectacular nature of sexual harms over other sorts of harm that affect women’s lives (Basu 2000; Nesiah 2006). They recognize how these binaries are weaponized by authorities and patriarchies. This is because rape has been a weapon of war and nationalism, and when such a narrative is used it can often hurt women (or any other genders) who might be victims; for instance, they might be ostracized in their communities (when rape becomes a “fate worse than death” ), or that it might exacerbate war and political narratives of a militant masculinity and a female body deemed both pure or a symbolic victim of the nation. Wartime rape can be a weapon of war in two ways: one, to make the raped female body into the symbol of a subjugated nation, and two, to use the raped female body to animate and exhort the production of a violent masculinity that is needed as protector, thus again, subjugating the female body.  While the rape and sodomizing of male bodies is also frequent, it is not weaponized in the same way (Enloe 1989; Sivakumaran 2007; Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992; Sen 1993), since the binarism of narratives of conflict rapes are central to nationalisms. 

If there is anything we learn from feminist histories, it is that the narratives and spectacle of violence against women are central to the making of the modern state, of settler colonialism, of empires and colonial rule. Kamari Clarke has shown in her study of the ICC that censure of such violence is most often used against African states and persons, revealing the racial logic at the heart of the weaponization of wartime rape (Clarke, 2019). Rana Jaleel argues that “the work of rape,” after changes international law in the 1980s and 1990 s that came to recognize mass rape in war, enables the disavowal of histories of imperial and colonial violence and the mobilization of “gender and sexual norms in the service of statecraft, war, capital, and ultimately heteropatriarchal and neocolonial visions of gender freedom” (Jaleel, p. 140)  

In the case of this October 7 debate, feminism has been weaponized to argue that the Israeli government story must be believed since all good feminists would know that all women must be believed and would know that Israeli women were the victims of Hamas “savages” – leaving, as Sherene Razack has pointed out, a feminist politics “mired in racial politics” (Razack).  But it is a particular kind of feminism that is used in these films that is worth examining, since it constructs gender, and its state-sponsored binarism –and the beliefs of the good feminist – as decontextualized and solely about white women as victims of brown men, without attention to the histories of race, empire and colonialism that have shaped modernity, gender, sexual violence and the modern nation-state. 

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