Language in the News: Constructing the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict through Use of Language

Abstract

The current study provides a critical discourse analysis of 18 news reports taken from the Hamodia English newspaper and the Aljazeera English website covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict between the years 2015 and 2017. Having selected 9 news reports from each news outlet, the study looks at how these two news outlets construct the events of the same conflict differently, motivated by their ideologies and respective points of views regarding the conflict. The study analyzes the selected news reports on two linguistic levels: the lexical level and the grammatical level. The study investigates, lexically, how the social actors of the conflict are constructed and referred to, and then compares the findings between the two news outlets. As for the grammatical level, the study investigates and compares the grammatical structures used to frame the social actions of the Palestinian and Israeli social actors. The study attempts to understand whether or not the selected news reports show any linguistic patterns, whether lexical or grammatical, that are governed by factors other than those of English linguistics and journalistic style. By so doing, the study is therefore able to link these patterns to the broader socio-ideological context of the news reports, and interpret the patterns accordingly. In interpreting the data, the study relies on the fundamental hypotheses of critical discourse analysis, mainly the idea that language is a social practice, which means that the critical analyst must take the social dimension of language as an integral factor that determines the shape and form of language.