Constructing Israeli apartheid discourse in Israeli English media
Date
2018
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
The main research question of this master’s thesis is “How is the apartheid discourse
recontextualized in Israeli English media?” I analysed the corpora of Haaretz and The
Jerusalem Post of over 2,5 million words during the period 2000-2016 in the
collocational level of word use–a method used by linguists to write definitions of words
into dictionaries. The apartheid Israel discourse in Israeli English media is a
comparative one, drawing parallels with the original South African apartheid system. It
deals with naming a discourse–calling Israel an apartheid state like South Africa. The
main social actors of the discourse are the Palestinians and global civil society
organizations against the state of Israel, and comparatively the blacks against the white
racist policies of South Africa. This kind of naming the apartheid Israel discourse is an
antagonistic and counter-hegemonical ideological struggle against the hegemon in poststructuralist
political philosophy. Apartheid Israel discourse is also concerned with
Israel’s occupation of Palestine, racism, apartheid policies, colonialism, the security
fence, boycotts against Israel, Palestinians’ struggle, binationalism etc. Apartheid Israel
discourse is recontextualized in texts by drawing the chains of equivalences between
discourse objects and actions, actors and events, indicated by the most frequently used
verb and noun word classes. This interdisciplinary discourse linguistic analysis enables
to research the creation and development of political ideas quantitatively on the level of
their common definitional meaning–a very insightful research method to investigate the
creation and development of political and social ideas.