SCREAMS BEFORE SILENCE

“Redefining evil”: Documentary forces us to face the nature of the Palestinian enemy – and our own society’s corrupt reactions to October 7. We must not look away.

Sheryl Sandberg at the Nova music festival site. From the documentary Screams Before Silence.

WARNING: Graphic discussion of extreme sexual violence.

We may no longer have the capacity to be shocked by the human capability for inhuman behavior.

Sheryl Sandberg, former head of Meta and author of Lean In, has made a film, with director Anat Stalinsky, about the systematic sexualized violence perpetrated against Israeli women on October 7. The documentary, Screams Before Silence, has the capacity to break down the most world-weary viewer. (It is available to stream for free.)

Out of respect for the families of the victims, Sandberg, Stalinsky and their team have minimized the graphic imagery. The hour-long doc is primarily interviews with survivors, first responders and experts on violence. Though there is enough blurred imagery to haunt. And the testimonies are searing.

The title of the documentary is a reference to some of the testimony of survivors. But it could also be considered a statement on our society’s reaction to the events of October 7.

If that was their intention, “silence” tells only half the story.

Unlike so many atrocities in the world today, people around the world who were not directly affected by October 7 have not only been silent. On the contrary. There has been a horrifying level of outright celebration of the violence and calls for more.

After reading about (or seeing and hearing, if you watch the video) these barbarisms, you will be forced to question how a society can produce individuals who perpetrate such acts. If you are like me, you will question whether your visceral reaction is a symptom of racism – the old trope of “savages” and “subhumans.” If you are like me, this will also force you to confront your own capability for dehumanization – seeing the perpetrators not as humans but as something else.

But this is the scarier notion: These are humans. And it is not racism to acknowledge that there is something in Palestinian society that makes these sort of atrocities possible in that place when this level of inhumanity is unknown almost anywhere else on earth. Those who committed these acts did not do so because of their inherent identity. They did them because they have been indoctrinated their entire lives to see Jews as bestial and worthy of not only death but the most grotesque torture in life and desecration in death.

Our responses to these actions lead us closer to home. There is a parallel, almost unimaginable reaction taking place in our own society: denial. There is an orchestrated campaign to refute that this sexualized violence even took place. These topics – and what they say about Palestinian society and about our society – are the subjects of my next posts.

But first, the film. These are difficult topics. Thank you for persevering. Extremely graphic descriptions follow.

The unimaginable acts of sadism – not *“just”* rape [imagine a scenario where one has to use this qualifier], but acts of inconceivably merciless violations and desecrations of the living and dead were so widespread on October 7 – remarkably similar atrocities taking place many times across geographic distances – that they were plainly not random acts of uniquely disturbed individuals. They were premeditated and most likely imparted to perpetrators in the training for the attack. To understand what took place that day and realize that these were not mindboggling acts of random disturbed individuals in the moment but calculated actions planned and inculcated into the individual terrorists places them in a completely different category of human capability for evil.

Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, former vice-president of the UN Commission on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, tells Sandberg that the same scenarios, the same desecration of bodies found in multiple locations, indicates that these acts were neither random nor lacking in forethought and planning.

"It depicts a pattern that could not have been unless it was premeditated and preconceived by Hamas themselves,” she says.