Orange Memory: Memorialization as Cultural Discourse in an Ongoing Conflict. Case of Israel

Abstract (English)

This paper examines how collective memory narratives function as mechanisms of transitional justice during ongoing conflict, challenging the assumption that such processes require post-conflict conditions. Drawing on ethnographic analysis of the Bibas family case following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack in Israel, the study explores how spontaneous memorialization practices produce what I term a “real-time memory fabric”—symbolic, material, dynamic social construct, and digital forms that emerge concurrently with trauma.
The study documents how the transformation of private tragedy into public memory narrative occurred through multiple modalities: the adoption of orange (representing the Bibas children's hair color) as a symbolic color of mourning, creating improvised memorial sites across urban landscapes, and digital remembrance campaigns. These practices operate not merely as expressions of grief but as instruments of transitional justice: they acknowledge victims, foster solidarity, and articulate moral claims for accountability.
The paper extends anthropological understandings of collective memory by demonstrating that memory is constructed not only retrospectively but also simultaneously with traumatic experience. It challenges the prevailing epistemological division between “during” and “after” phases of conflict, revealing how societies mobilize memory narratives in real time as ethical and cultural tools for interpreting violence and demanding justice.
Drawing on theories of collective memory (Halbwachs), informal memorialization (Doss), and transitional justice during ongoing conflict (Teitel, Budak, Rybak), I argue that even in the absence of a post-conflict setting, shared memory functions as a restorative process. The memory narrative fabric that forms in real time — created by civil society, media, and victims’ families — legitimizes suffering, reinforces collective identity, and exerts social pressure on both state and international actors to pursue accountability victims’ rights.
This interdisciplinary approach, drawing on anthropological observation, visual analysis, and memory studies, contributes to anthropology of transitional justice, as an integrating part of contemporary anthropological epistemologies by demonstrating how memory narrative formation operates not as a post-conflict phenomenon but as an active cultural process integral to how communities experience, interpret, and respond to violence contemporaneously, generate political meaning and mobilize calls for justice. It challenges the post-conflict bias of conventional transitional justice and foregrounds constructing a memory narratives as an active, ongoing, real-time cultural process.