Constructing Israeli apartheid discourse in Israeli English media

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.