This film presents a searing portrait of six young women whose lives have been forever altered by their compulsory two-year stint in the Israeli Defence Forces. Director Tamar Yarom herself served her time in the 1980s, and one experience in particular – witnessing the torture of a Palestinian man and being unable to do anything to help him – made her decide to seek out others with similar stories in the hope that bringing the subject into the public eye might inspire debate and, perhaps, change. The six women in the film, all of whom served in Gaza or the West Bank where the conflict is at its most intense, speak with honesty and courage about the horrors they witnessed, the events they were forced to ignore and deny, and the difficulties they faced as women in an extremely male environment.

They also talk about some of the things they themselves did. One, after hearing about the death of a friend, forced dozens of Palestinians trying to get through a checkpoint to stand and wait for hours, and do strenuous exercises in the blazing heat. Another stripped a man to his underwear and beat him. And another, the woman whose story gives the film its title, posed for a photograph beside the corpse of a Palestinian which she’d just scrubbed to remove the signs of the violence inflicted by her colleagues.

In the same way that the behaviour of US soldiers Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman at Abu Ghraib (see Standard Operating Behaviour, p 21) attracted more outrage than that of their male colleagues, it is shocking to hear women, supposedly more caring and compassionate than men, confess to these acts. But through this devastating film it is possible to gain an insight into the terrible power that conflict has to corrupt all touched by it, and to render obsolete supposedly deeply-held beliefs about right and wrong.