While female Israelis make up more than one-third of the Israel Defense Forces, on screen female soldiers have mostly been relegated to the roles of sex objects, supportive girlfriends, secretaries, or victims, to be lusted over and made fun of – until now.
Female fighters are finally front and center in two recent television series and two upcoming movies about October 7, a conflict where women’s stories, for better or worse, were as critical and as compelling as men’s.
Two television series about women who fought bravely as the war broke out have already been released. The second season of One Day in October, showing on Yes in Israel and HBO Max abroad, had an episode about Inbal Rabin-Lieberman (Neta Roth), a young tattoo artist who headed the Kibbutz Nir Am defense squad and achieved a victory of sorts on that very dark day, directing the men under her command and fighting alongside them to keep the terrorists from harming the kibbutz residents.
Some major characters on the new Keshet series, Red Alert, which is available around the world on Paramount+, are women in uniform. Chen Amsalem Zaguri and Rotem Abuhab portrayed border police officers stationed at the Nova Music Festival who evacuated festival goers and fought the terrorists as best they could, although they were greatly outnumbered and one of them was critically injured.
Women in tanks
One of two upcoming films about women soldiers on October 7, tentatively titled Tankistas, will tell the true story of the first all-female tank unit, which fought Hamas terrorists on October 7 for 17 hours, killing 50 terrorists. The unit, from the Caracal (Wild Cat) Battalion, was composed of seven female warriors.
The movie, which will begin filming soon, will be directed by Ayelet Menahemi, who made the film Seven Blessings, about conflicts among generations of Moroccan women, and will be written by Eleanor Sela, who appeared in and co-wrote that film.
Menahemi and Sela said in a statement: “Amidst the inconceivable stories of bravery since October 7, this is one of the exceptional and heroic ones. It shows what happens when women take matters into their own hands after men cast doubt on their right and ability to fight.”
In December 2023, Sela said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post: “It’s a story that, relative to the pain of the war, has a happy ending. They saved many lives. And it’s a story with a beginning and an end, unlike the story of the hostages, which continues, unfortunately, and not like the fighting in Gaza, which continues.
“It’s a story people will want to see at the movies, which is important... And it’s also our connection to a female-centric story, of women who made history twice. First by overcoming the opposition of people who didn’t think that women should be combat soldiers. And it’s also the first time that a tank unit of women’s soldiers has fought in a war, in Israel and worldwide, and they fought bravely and effectively,” she said. “It’s a story that needs to be told”
Based on real life
These soldiers were stationed along the Egyptian border at Nitzana that morning. When they learned of the attack, they drove the tank to Kibbutz Sufa, where they began fighting.
The soldiers, all in their teens and early 20s, had not yet received training on how to operate the Katlanit remote weapons system that aimed the .50-caliber machine gun, but they improvised. They were able to help evacuate civilians from Sufa, fighting hundreds of terrorists. They also fought in and around Kibbutz Holit.
The stars of the film will be Swell Ariel Or, best known for her role as Luna in the television series The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem. She also appeared in an episode of the miniseries One Day in October, playing a young woman who survived the massacre at the Supernova music festival. Yarden Toussia-Cohen also stars in Tankistas. In the past, she portrayed the wife of a controversial ultra-Orthodox entrepreneur in the 2023 movie Home, and a Mossad officer in the TV series Tehran. Tankistas is being produced by Ehud Bleiberg, who produced the 2007 film The Band’s Visit; and Ronen Ben-Tal, who collaborated with Menahemi and Sela on Seven Blessings.
“It won’t be a documentary; we want to give ourselves the artistic freedom to highlight the personal drama, as well as the battlefield action,” said Sela.
Working with the soldiers was complicated by the fact that they were still fighting the war, but the creators took the time they needed and were able to speak to them.
“This drama will be created out of the greatest respect for the truth,” said Menahemi: “And with great sensitivity.”
Past motivation
It’s fitting that Talya Lavie, who wrote and directed the best-known movie of all time about female IDF soldiers, Zero Motivation (more on that later), is now working on a film about the border observers in the Nahal Oz outpost in the Gaza border region.
The shocking truth of what happened to those observers is one of the most horrific stories from October 7: The outpost was overrun by terrorists, and among the dead were 16 female border observers. Seven were taken captive. One of them, Noa Marciano, was killed in captivity; Ori Megidish was rescued by the IDF; and five – Naama Levy, Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Agam Berger, and Daniella Gilboa – were returned in a hostage deal in 2025.
The observers had been warning their superiors for months about an imminent Hamas attack, but their words went unheeded. A moving documentary about the Nahal Oz border observers, Eyes Wide Open by Noa Aharoni, was released in 2024.
“It is a narrative film,” Lavie told Ynet in 2023. “We are currently in the stage of investigation and gathering material for screenplay writing.”
It’s clear why these stories of tragedy and triumph would make for compelling drama. But in the past, women soldiers were nearly always relegated to the sidelines in movies about the military, either serving coffee or having sex, sometimes both, and generally in that order.
Lavie’s 2014 film, Zero Motivation, a black comedy about Dafi (Nelly Tagar) and Zohar (Dana Ivgy), two extremely bored soldiers in a base in the Negev, was something of a game changer in the portrayal of female soldiers on screen.
The movie was a huge success both in Israel and abroad, and it showed the world of the IDF from the perspective of female soldiers confined to offices, which had never been done before.
Dafi is in charge of shredding documents, while Zohar mostly sorts mail, and much of the film is the comically epic tale of Dafi’s quest for reassignment to a base in Tel Aviv, which she thinks will be heaven because she will be able to get iced coffee at lunchtime.
Their commander, played by Shani Klein, fights for a seat at the table with the men but is dismissed by them. It’s a uniquely Israeli story in many ways, but it connected with audiences around the world, winning the International Narrative Feature competition at the Tribeca Film Festival, a stunning achievement for a comedy, since festival movies are usually extremely serious. Lavie won the Best Director and Best Screenplay Ophir Awards for the movie, and it out-earned all foreign movies that year in Israel – another rare feat.
Lavie’s achievement was that she made international audiences forget the military setting and relate to it purely as a workplace comedy. She has said that she was influenced by Robert Altman’s iconic black comedy M*A*S*H, and Zero Motivation is genuinely funny. One highlight that people tend to remember is a scene where Dafi threatens to end it all by placing a staple gun to her head.
But there were two sequences that were darker, which spoke to truths about the military that are rarely discussed. One is an early plot turn where a new soldier, Tehila (Yonit Tobi), appears on the base. Dafi thinks Tehila is to be her replacement and is overjoyed, but it turns out that she has sneaked in to stalk a male soldier she is in love with, who has rejected her.
When he rejects her again, she commits suicide, and her ghost seems to inhabit one of the other soldiers. This segment can be seen as a comment on the worship of male combat soldiers in Israel, and how women often devalue themselves in comparison to these warrior princes.
In another part of the movie, Zohar goes on a date with a male soldier, who tries to rape her as soon as they are alone. One of the other female soldiers grabs his gun, which he has left unattended, and rescues Zohar, humiliating the would-be rapist who is literally caught with his pants down.
This scene tended to elicit cheers at screenings in Israel from women, some of whom had dealt with sexual harassment in the army and had never seen any story resembling their experiences on screen before.
A new chapter
More recently, Dismissed – the irreverent series from KAN that is available on Netflix, starring Alona Saar – told the story of a nerdy commander who is put through the wringer by her soldiers and her commanders.
Two other movies worth noting, both by Avi Nesher, gave female soldiers a central role. His 1978 film, The Troupe, about an army entertainment troupe, had women characters who were assertive and ambitious, and his 2021 movie, Image of Victory, featured Joy Rieger as the real-life heroine of the Independence War, Mira Ben-Ari, who fought alongside men in the Battle of Nitzanim.
One question that arises when looking at this rather short list of movies about female soldiers on screen is why there are so few such films, especially now that there are so many Israeli female directors, virtually all of whom served in the army.
Shmulik Duvdevani, a movie critic and lecturer on film and television studies at Tel Aviv University, told The Jerusalem Report that, “Going back to the early days of Israeli cinema, movies focused on the image of the tsabar [native-born Israeli], who is a man; it celebrated this image, it revered it. The tsabar is Ashkenazi, he’s macho, he’s brave.
“Other kinds of people, like Mizrahim, recent immigrants, and women, were left out of the whole story,” he said. “These men went off and fought the enemy, and then came home – and the women soldiers and other women characters were waiting for them.”
He noted that Guy Nattiv’s 2023 film Golda placed former prime minister Golda Meir (played by Helen Mirren) front and center in the Yom Kippur War room – although obviously she was not a soldier – in a movie that was timed to roughly coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. While different male army officials gave her information, in the end she had to approve their decisions and decide when to make political compromises.
While there have always been movies made after each war in Israel – and three major films were made about 15 years ago about the first Lebanon War: Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort, Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, and Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon – there have been few movies about the military since then, with Zero Motivation being a notable exception.
But Duvdevani pointed out that following the October 7 attack, the role of women – both as warriors and war victims – would open a new chapter on female soldiers in Israeli cinema.
Citing the story of the ignored border observers that Lavie is dramatizing, he said: “This story – and all the stories of women in this war – needs to be told.”■