When rape becomes a punchline 

There is a particular kind of joke that doesn’t just offend — it reveals. Last week at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, American actor Elon Gold and influencer Lizzy Savetsky offered one such moment of revelation. Promoting a film made in Israel, Gold quipped on the red carpet that he had been “raped by two Israeli dogs” while filming there. Savetsky’s response: “I thought they only raped Palestinians.” Gold’s rejoinder: “No, I got also a dog.”

Cue the laughter, somewhere.

Tribeca has since condemned the remarks as “offensive and unacceptable.” But the film screened anyway.

There is a fundamental difference between laughing at your own pain and laughing at someone else’s.

- Muna Khan

What exactly was the joke? Not an invented absurdity, not a satirical provocation. The punchline was borrowed directly from documented reality — from the reported systemic rape and bestiality inflicted on Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons, investigated by human rights organizations and reported widely. The humor required the audience to know this was happening. And to find it funny regardless.

That is not a comedian pushing boundaries. That is a room full of people laughing at someone else’s rape.

Savetsky has since defended herself. In a video posted to social media, she dismissed the remarks as a response to a “ridiculous claim” in the New York Times that Israeli officials had trained dogs to rape Palestinians. The paper, she said, had “published this piece with zero evidence” and expected everyone to accept it as truth. She also invoked Jewish comedic tradition arguing that Jewish comedians throughout history have used dark humor as a way to cope with anti-Semitism.

She may not be wrong about that history. Jewish humor has long been a way of metabolizing persecution. It is a tradition born inside the experience of being the target. That is precisely what makes her invocation of it here so revealing.

Because there is a fundamental difference between laughing at your own pain and laughing at someone else’s. Between a people using dark humor to survive what is being done to them, and a room full of people laughing at what is being done to others. The Holocaust produced profound, devastating art and dark comedy from within. Nobody was making Auschwitz jokes at film festival red carpets while the camps were still running. 

The camps, in a manner of speaking, are still running.

The article Savetsky dismissed as “ridiculous” was written by the twice Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist Nicholas Kristof. It drew on testimony from 14 Palestinians as well as a 2025 United Nations report describing sexual violence as one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures.” A separate April 2026 report by the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor concluded it was “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.” These are not fringe claims. They are documented, investigated, and ongoing.

This is what she found funny. 

She is not alone. Social media has been flooded since October 2023 with videos of Israelis mocking Palestinian suffering — prank call trends in which family members cheerfully wish Gazan children “death in agony” and declare there is “no such thing” as an innocent Palestinian child. When Israeli soldiers were caught on video sodomizing a Palestinian prisoner, protests broke out — in their defense. 

Find me the equivalent videos mocking Auschwitz victims. I’ll wait.

Contempt, when it becomes entertainment, doesn’t stay still.

A 2016 study published in Violence Against Women found that exposure to sexist humor correlates with higher rape proclivity, not because jokes cause assault directly, but because they move the boundaries of what a culture decides to tolerate. Jokes about rape don’t exist in a vacuum. They do work.

Savetsky did not find the plight of Palestinians funny enough to acknowledge. She knows what deserves dignity. She chose who gets it.

Over 75,000 Palestinians are dead in Gaza. In detention facilities, human rights organizations have documented torture, rape, and bestiality against Palestinian prisoners. These are not ancient wounds. This is not history. This is the present tense.

That is what passes for humor now.
-
The writer is a journalist and writing instructor