Telling Your Side of the Story: A Critical Discourse Analysis of News Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Israel-(non) Normalising Middle East Countries

Raith Zeher Abid, Thulfiqar Hussein Altahmazi, Zuhair Abdulameer Abdulrahman

Abstract


This study used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine how Israeli and Palestinian social actors were represented in news coverage during the May 2021 Gaza war, focusing on newspapers from countries with and without diplomatic relations with Israel. van Leeuwen's (2008) Framework directed the examination of role allocation, subjection, assimilation, and identification to analyse discursive practices influencing these representations. Utilising corpus linguistics methods, the study examined 40 news reports totalling 159,282 words drawn from four English-language newspapers, which are Daily Sabah, The Tehran Times, The Khaleej Times, and The Gulf Daily News. Fisher's exact test uncovered significant differences in the representation of social actors between countries with and without diplomatic ties to Israel, with non-diplomatic ties countries often depicting Palestinians as victims and Israelis as aggressors, contrasting with more nuanced or positive portrayals of Israelis in countries that have diplomatic ties with Israel. These different media representations seem to advance different narratives of the conflict that support the sponsoring states’ agenda. This research enhances understanding of how linguistic and sociological factors shape public perceptions of the conflict, providing insights into media strategies in reporting contentious geopolitical events.

 

Keywords: Media Discourse; Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA); Diplomatic Relations; Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; Middle East


Full Text:

PDF

References


Abid, R. Z. (2020). South Korean Media Representation of Yemeni Refugees. KEMANUSIAAN: The Asian Journal of Humanities, 27(1), 89–114.

Baker, P. (2014). Using corpora to analyze gender. USA: Bloomsbury Academics.

Baroni, M., & Bernardini, S. (2004). BootCaT: Bootstrapping corpora and terms from the web. In LREC 2004 fourth international conference on language resources and evaluation, eds. M.T. Lino, M.F. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa and R. Silva, 1313–1316. Paris: Evaluations and Language Resources

Distribution Agency (ELDA). Retrieved June 30, 2018 http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2004/pdf/509.pdf

Don, Z. H., & Lee, C. (2014). Representing immigrants as illegals, threats and victims in Malaysia: Elite voices in the media. Discourse & Society, 25(6), 687–705.

Fowler, R. (1991). Language in the news: Discourse and ideology in the press. London: Routledge.

Fulton, H. (2005). Print News as Narrative. In Fulton, H., Huisman, R., Murphet, J. & Dunn, A. (Eds.), Narrative and Media (pp. 218–244). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Halliday, M., & Matthiessen, C. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar. UK: Arnold.

Jenset, G. B. (2008). Basic statistics for corpus linguistics. Presented at the methods in linguistics workshop, August 19, 2008. Retrieved January 13, 2015 http://folk.uib.no/gje037/ statTutorialR.pdf.

Kandil, M. A. (2009). The Israeli-Palestinian conflict in American, Arab, and British media: Corpus-based critical discourse analysis [Doctoral dissertation, Georgia State University]. Scientific Research Publishing. https://www.scirp.org/reference/referencespapers?referenceid=3189161

Kareem, A. H., & Najm, Y. M. (2024). Critical discourse analysis of the biased role of Western media in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Journal of Language Studies, 8(6), 200–215.

KhosraviNik, M. (2008). British Newspapers and the Representation of Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Immigrants between 1996 and 2006 (Working Paper No. 128). Retrieved from http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/groups/clsl/docs/clsl128.pdf

KhosraviNik, M. (2009). The representation of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in British newspapers during the Balkan conflict (1999) and the British general election (2005). Discourse & Society, 20(4), 477–498.

Paquot, M., & Bestgen, Y. (2009). Distinctive words in academic writing: A comparison of three statistical tests for keyword and extraction. In A.H. Jucker, D. Schreier & M. Hundt (Eds.), Corpora: Pragmatics and discourse (pp. 247–270). USA: Rodopi.

Ramanathan, R., & Hoon, T. B. (2015). Application of Critical Discourse Analysis in Media Discourse Studies. 3L: Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 21(3), 57-68.

Rönnback, R., Emmery, C. & Brighton, H. (2025). Automatic large-scale political bias detection of news outlets. PloS one, 20(5), e0321418.

Sharaf Eldin, H. M. A. (2019). The discursive representation of social groups through lexical choices in headlines: A critical discourse analysis of Western and Arab online reporting on Gaza War. Occasional Papers, 66, 95–128.

Simpson, P. & Mayr, A. (2009). Language and power: A resource book for students. UK: Routledge.

Sloan, W. D. (2007). The bias debate. In W.D. Sloan & L.M. Parcell (Eds.), Media bias: Finding it, fixing it (pp. 1–10). USA: McFarland & Company, Inc.

van Leeuwen, T. (1995). The Grammar of Legitimation. London: School of Printing, School of Media.

van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and Practice. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wang, C. (2017). Victimhood in the face of media ideological battle: A critical discourse analysis on the British media's coverage of stabbing incidents in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 16(1), 79–98.

Wodak, R. & Meyer, M. (2009). The Discourse-Historical Approach. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (pp. 1-33). London: Sage Publications.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/3L-2025-3103-01

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


 

 

 

eISSN : 2550-2247

ISSN : 0128-5157