The following article is based on a documentary first aired by France 24, which examined the transformation of women’s perceptions of self-defence in Israel following Hamas’s 7 October attacks.
Normality has a peculiar way of returning to Tel Aviv. Cafés reopen, beaches fill, traffic snarls resume. Yet beneath this carefully maintained surface, the city now hums with a quieter, more disturbing transformation. Guns have become accessories of daily life, visible on hips, tucked into handbags, slung casually over shoulders. The documentary traces this shift not as a sudden aberration but as a logical, if unsettling, conclusion to a trauma that shattered Israel’s faith in its own sense of security on 7 October. What it exposes is not merely the arming of women, but the remaking of womanhood itself into a militarised ideal, wrapped in the language of empowerment while bound tightly to fear.
At the centre of this transformation stand social media figures like Orin Julie Emanuel, a self-styled influencer whose carefully curated image merges femininity with firepower. She speaks of guns as liberation, as an extension of personal agency, as proof that one can be both “girly and badass”. Her millions of followers are invited to admire not only her marksmanship but the aesthetic of the weapon itself. The rifle becomes glamorous, the handgun seductive. This is not accidental. It is marketing, ideology and identity politics collapsing into a single Instagram reel. In a society where military service already blurs the boundary between civilian and soldier, the influencer economy pushes that blur into spectacle.
The language of empowerment is seductive, particularly in the aftermath of a massacre that included sexual violence and the brutal killing of women. The documentary makes clear that October 7 did not simply kill people; it killed assumptions. Chief among them was the belief that the state could guarantee safety. When that belief collapsed, the gun emerged as a substitute, a private insurance policy against chaos. Women, long framed as victims in need of protection, are now encouraged to become protectors themselves. The weapon is sold as dignity restored, honour reclaimed, vulnerability erased.
Yet this narrative rests on a contradiction that the film refuses to smooth over. Statistically, weapons in the home are more likely to harm their owners than save them, a reality acknowledged even by critics within Israeli society. The global evidence is unambiguous, yet largely ignored. Instead, the gun industry’s familiar logic takes hold: when one market saturates, open another. Women, previously marginal to civilian gun culture in Israel, represent untapped potential. October 7 did not create this impulse; it merely accelerated it, cloaking commercial expansion in the moral urgency of survival.
The state has played its part with enthusiasm. The rapid relaxation of gun permit regulations under National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir signals a political choice as much as a security response. Hundreds of thousands of additional weapons have flooded civilian spaces, with applications from women soaring. This is not neutral policy. It is a statement about how Israel now understands safety: decentralised, individualised, and heavily armed. Security is no longer a collective promise but a personal responsibility, and failure to arm oneself risks being framed as negligence.
For some women, this shift feels overdue. Lawyers and activists pushing for legislative change argue that existing criteria discriminate against women who did not serve in combat roles. They frame their cause in the language of equality, insisting that if danger is shared, so too must be the means of defence. Their rhetoric borrows from American gun culture, pointing to the United States as a benchmark of female armament rather than a cautionary tale. In this worldview, a gun becomes an accessory of citizenship, as essential as the right to vote.
But the documentary’s most unsettling moments unfold beyond Israel’s recognised borders, in the occupied West Bank, where the logic of armed empowerment curdles into something far darker. Among settlers, weapons are not merely defensive tools but symbols of entitlement and permanence. Here, the ease with which guns are obtained stands in stark contrast to the restrictions faced by Palestinians living under occupation. A pregnant settler trains with her weapon, convinced that her gun is a moral extension of her role as a mother and teacher. She speaks of terror attacks, of blocked roads, of imminent threat. Missing from her account is the asymmetry of power, the daily reality of Palestinians who experience these same weapons not as protection but as domination.
The documentary does not shy away from naming this disparity. The privatisation of security, it argues, is not universal. It is explicitly ethnic and national. Armed Jewish civilians are framed as guardians of order, while unarmed Palestinians are rendered perpetual suspects. Every gun on a civilian hip redraws the social map, marking who is entitled to feel safe and who must feel afraid. In this sense, the arming of women does not disrupt existing hierarchies; it reinforces them, extending the reach of state violence into private hands.
The invocation of sexual violence on October 7 adds another layer of complexity. For many Israeli women, the knowledge that rape was used as a weapon of war has lodged itself in the body, transforming fear into something visceral and constant. Carrying a gun becomes an act of defiance against that memory, a refusal to be rendered powerless again. Yet this response risks conflating empowerment with the capacity to kill, reducing safety to a question of who can pull a trigger faster. Trauma, when channelled into militarisation, does not heal; it hardens.
Opposition to this trajectory exists, but it is increasingly marginal. Pacifists and refuseniks like Sahar Vardi represent a dwindling minority, protesting not only the war in Gaza but the broader militarisation of Israeli society. Their demonstrations are met with hostility, arrests, and public disdain. In a climate where nationalism thrives on fear, dissent is recast as betrayal. The gun, once again, becomes a moral divider, separating patriots from enemies within.
What the documentary ultimately exposes is a society at a crossroads, choosing arms over introspection. The rise of armed women is presented as progress, yet it raises uncomfortable questions about what kind of progress this is. Does equality mean equal access to violence? Does empowerment require a holster? When the sound of gunfire becomes routine, when children are taught to accept weapons as household objects, something profound shifts in the moral fabric of daily life.
Israel’s fault lines, already deep, are widening. Gender equality is being pursued through the barrel of a gun, national trauma is being monetised, and civilian spaces are becoming extensions of the battlefield. The women featured in the documentary are not caricatures; they are products of their environment, responding rationally to an irrational reality. But rational responses can still lead to disastrous outcomes.
The question left hanging is not whether Israeli women have the right to defend themselves. It is whether a society that answers trauma with more weapons is capable of imagining any other future. As legislation advances and gun culture embeds itself ever deeper, the promise of security remains elusive. What grows instead is a permanent state of readiness, a nation braced for the next catastrophe, mistaking firepower for safety and calling it empowerment.
