The color orange: From Gush Katif’s defiance to a Nation’s requiem

In the summer of 2005, orange streaked across Israel like a defiant sunrise that refused to set. It was the color of Gush Katif, the bloc of settlements in Gaza where Jewish families had sunk roots into sandy soil, coaxing life from citrus groves and building a stubborn dream of permanence.

When Ariel Sharon’s government moved to uproot them—8,600 souls forced from their homes in a unilateral disengagement—orange became their banner, their cry, their refusal to go quietly. Ribbons fluttered from car antennas, T-shirts blazed on teenagers chaining themselves to bulldozers, and flags waved in the hands of tens of thousands who marched from Gaza to Jerusalem, a human thread 90 kilometers long, pleading for the land they loved. Orange was hope then, fierce and unyielding, borrowed from Ukraine’s revolution but rooted in the Negev’s fruit, a symbol that Israel’s frontier spirit wouldn’t be extinguished.

Two decades later, that same hue has returned—not as a shout of resistance, but as a whisper of unbearable grief. Earlier today, orange balloons drifted above Tzohar Cemetery, marking the burial of Shiri Bibas and her sons, Ariel, 4, and Kfir, just 9 months old, their red hair a beacon that once lit up Israel’s desperate prayers during the hostage crisis of October 7, 2023.

Abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz by Hamas terrorists, they became the faces of a nation’s anguish—Shiri cradling her boys in a grainy video that haunted us for 500 days, until hope curdled into certainty of their murder in captivity. Now, orange ties them to Gush Katif’s ghost, a bitter irony threading through posts on X and murmurs in the streets: the color of a lost fight for land has become the shroud for lives lost in its wake.

The symmetry is a knife to the heart. In 2005, we argued over territory—whether abandoning Gaza would bring peace or peril. The orange-clad protesters warned of rockets and ruin, a prophecy dismissed by a government betting on withdrawal as salvation. They lost the battle, their homes razed, their groves left to wither. And yet, their fears bloomed into truth: Gaza, unmoored, became a launchpad for terror, its border a scar that bled again on that black October day. Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir lived just beyond where Gush Katif once stood, in Nir Oz, a kibbutz that embodied the resilience the settlers championed. Their deaths—confirmed after Yarden Bibas, husband and father, returned alone from captivity—feel like the final verse of a song we refused to hear, sung in the muted tones of orange balloons against a gray sky.

This isn’t just coincidence; it’s a reckoning. Orange once marked a people who believed they could hold the line, who tied their fate to a strip of earth they called sacred. Now, it drapes a mother and her babies, stolen from a safe room ten minutes from where those settlers once prayed. The thread between them is woven from choices—disengagement’s promise of security unraveling into a nightmare of loss. We gave up Gush Katif, we said, to spare our children; instead, we buried them, their red curls a cruel echo of the citrus that once defined that land. On X, voices cry that 2005’s surrender led us here, that the orange of protest should have prevailed. Others mourn silently, seeing in those balloons not blame, but a lineage of sorrow too heavy to lift.

I see a mother’s face, a boy’s shy smile, an infant’s trusting eyes, and I wonder what we’ve become. Orange was our defiance, our dream of a Jewish homeland unbroken by exile or enemy. Now, it’s our elegy, floating above graves we never imagined we’d dig. The irony stings, yes—but the beauty of those who wore it, fought with it, and now mourn beneath it cuts deeper still. Gush Katif’s fall was a wound; the Bibas family’s loss is its echo, a requiem in a color that once promised life, now staining a nation’s soul with the permanence of goodbye.