Memes of war: TikTok in the 2021 and 2023 Israel-Hamas wars

When arms speak, the muses of popular global culture are far from silent. Popular songs, movies, images, memes, and other media animate colloquial discourse about war through intertextuality, the practice of a text referencing, quoting, or invoking a previous text.

Intertextuality is a ubiquitous attribute of contemporary culture, especially on platforms like TikTok, which boast a design, algorithm, and user culture that encourage viral and mimetic content circulation. In times of war, users employ intertextuality to persuade, demonstrate their experiences and feeling, create affinity, and showcase creativity )to name just a few motivations). In aggregate, popular expressions of intertextuality shape political discourse and collective memory of conflict. Focusing on TikTok activity surrounding the 2021 and 2023 Israel–Hamas wars, this talk examines how Israelis, Palestinians, and global observers used intertextual references in their communications. Drawing from a dataset of 600 posts in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, the analysis identifies which cultural texts – songs, memes, symbols, and other media fragments – were most frequently reused and reinterpreted across opposing narratives. By combining quantitative coding of intertextual frequency with qualitative semiotic analysis, the talk traces how meaning is negotiated and transformed through repetition and remix. It highlights how certain images and sounds “stick” in public memory, becoming symbolic anchors of national identity, grief, and resistance. Ultimately, this talk situates TikTok as a contemporary “memory machine,” revealing how digital intertextuality mediates the experience of conflict and contributes to broader patterns of polarization, activism, and cultural resonance in the global media landscape.

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About Dr. Lilly Boxman

Lilly Boxman is a senior lecturer at the Department of Communication and Journalism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Currently, she leads a project funded by the German-Israeli Science Foundation (2025-6 Nexus-Solo track) on TikTok use during the Israel–Hamas wars, examining intertextuality and polysemy in wartime communication through a multilingual team of Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking coders.