“Trauma Objects” and Buildings as War Museums: From the Personal and the Critical to the National and the Heroic Memory

This paper examines the interplay between war museums and history from below by analysing initiatives that deal with the civilian communities attacked on October 7 in Israel. The initiatives are based on “trauma objects” and buildings that were damaged in the battles and belonged to members of the community. As leftwing communities that were labelled as “traitors”, the preservation initiatives make use of practices from below that could be assumed to take on a sectorial character that challenges the national–heroic discourse and accuses it of abandonment. Analysing the transgressive crossing from above to below reveals that it does not create a crossing from the national to the personal or from the heroic to the critical. On the contrary, it is precisely the curatorial practices from below that have helped nationalise the narrative, deny rifts and rebuild the consensus. The findings ask about the possibility of avoiding a curation of effacement through actions from below in the representation of war.