Written by Keren Greenberg

For my recently completed PhD research at the Swinburne Institute of Technology, I used corpus based critical discourse analysis to explore how ‘Israel’ was represented in the Israeli media during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict – a 50-day round of violence that took place between Israel and the Palestinian movement Hamas in 2014. Having no experience with corpus linguistics, I reached out to Monika Bednarek who kindly recommended I take the Lancaster University MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) in Corpus Linguistics. This was the beginning of my corpus linguistics journey…

I used a collocational analysis to explore the discourses around the term ‘Israel’ in three English-language Israeli news websites. These are Ynetnews, Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post (JP), broadly representing a centrist, a left-leaning and a right-leaning orientation on Israeli politics, respectively. (I also conducted discourse-based interviews with news producers to explore the factors and motivations underlying some of the lexical and content patterns that were identified in the reporting, but that’s for a different blog…)

To do so, I compiled three specialised corpora (one for each news website) and compared each against the other two, the rationale being that this has the potential to ‘bring out the flavour’ of the reporting in each of the publications. The collocational analysis produced three long lists of collocates. On their own, however, lists of top collocates are not very telling unless they are closely read in context. Collocates were thus subjected to a concordance analysis. A close reading of the 50 top collocates of ‘Israel’ enabled me to examine when it was being talked about as an active ‘actor’ (Israel launched an air campaign) and when it was being referred to as a passive ‘recipient’ of the actions of others (more than 225 rockets were fired at Israel). By the end of the concordance analysis, collocates were put into thematic categories.

By focusing on exclusive collocates (i.e., words that emerged as collocates of ‘Israel’ in only one of the three corpora) I was able to uncover how the reporting differed among the three news outlets. Many of the differences were to be expected given the different political affiliations and readerships of each publication. For example, one important difference that emerged across the news outlets related to the labelling of the non-Israeli side in the conflict. More specifically, a notable designation of Israel’s adversary which appeared only in the Jerusalem Post reporting (but is also often found in the official discourse of the Israeli government and the Israel Defense Force) was as terrorists. This is demonstrated in the Jerusalem Post concordances in Figure 1 below:

This finding is congruent with the outlet’s right-leaning orientation on Israeli politics and its reputation for largely echoing the perspectives of the Israeli political and military establishment.

The focus on shared collocates (i.e., words that emerged as top collocates of ‘Israel’ in all three corpora) revealed something less expected – that is, the surprising degree of convergence in the ways ‘Israel’ was portrayed across all the news outlets. Specifically, four key themes emerged as common or at least very similar in the overall reporting. These were the portrayal of Israel: (i) as a victim in the conflict; (ii) as a participant that has the backing of the US; (iii) as a combatant that acts in self-defence; and (iv) as a conciliatory protagonist.

The representation of Israel as a participant who acts in self-defence, for example, was evident in the context of the shared collocates right and defend, which co-occurred in all three publications to form the clusters ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’ and ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’. This is illustrated in the Ynetnews concordances in Figure 2 below:

Interestingly, a close reading of the clusters’ concordances provided the lens to another discourse around ‘Israel’, the one depicting it as a participant who has the backing of the US. Specifically, it revealed a large number of references to US leaders supporting/reiterating/underscoring ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’.

Drawing on Bar-Tal’s (2007, 2013) socio-psychological theory of intractable conflicts, I argue that the Israeli media’s portrayal of ‘Israel’ in the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict served to legitimise Israel’s actions in Gaza, thereby perpetuating conflict-supporting beliefs about self-victimhood, the justness of one’s goals and a positive self-image, and fuelling the perceived intractability of the conflict.

You can read more about my analysis and findings in my PhD thesis The 2014 Israel–Gaza Conflict: Exploring the representation of ‘Israel’ in the Israeli media using a triangulation of corpus-based critical discourse analysis and discourse-based interviews, which is freely available here.

References

Bar-Tal, D. (2007). Sociopsychological foundations of intractable conflicts. American Behavioral Scientist, 50(11), 1430–1453.

Bar-Tal, D. (2013). Intractable conflicts: Socio-psychological foundations and dynamics. Cambridge University Press.