The Israel-Palestine conflict online: a critical discourse analysis of Israeli and international news

Abstract

Critical Discourse Analysis has been used frequently in order to examine the language of news media but has been less frequently applied to reports relating to the Israel-Palestine conflict, despite its protracted and evocative status. This paper takes a CDA approach to the examination of the language of online news articles regarding violent attacks against Israeli civilians and members of the military. These incidents, representing new forms of attacks, include stabbings, car rammings and shootings that took place within Israel and the Palestinian Territories between January 2019 and February 2020. The data set consists of 208 articles collected from Western and Middle Eastern news sources in English or Hebrew and representing a range of political ideologies concerning the conflict. MAXQDA software was used to analyse the data in order to address the following research questions: (1) How is ideology reflected in the language of news articles? (2) Which linguistic techniques are the most open to manipulation by pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian ideologies and how? (3) How can the language of news articles influence and reproduce ideology in media consumers? Several linguistic techniques were identified including foregrounding, transitivity, nominalisation and selective use of lexis which allow news producers to inspire sympathy, portray victimhood and attribute agency or blame. Combinations of these techniques were used in ways favourable to and consistent with the ideology of the news producer allowing for the same events and sequences of events to be conveyed as greatly differing stories depending on that ideology.