Critical Discourse Analysis of the Arab and Israeli Media Representation of Jenin’s 2023 Incursions

Abstract

This study primarily examines the media's coverage of the enigmatic incidents of Jenin intrusions that occurred in 2023. This methodology integrates Critical Linguistics (CL) with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), with a particular emphasis on the researcher's use of Fairclough's three-dimensional framework. The Jerusalem Post and the Jordan Times, Israeli and Arab news outlets, have comprehensively covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The corpus contains twenty English-language news articles, ten from each agency. The media is covering Israel's 2023 Jenin military operations. According to research, media and TV employ terms relating to war, casualties, and military activities. They also employ rhetoric, emotion, and quotations to discuss disagreements. The Jordan Times routinely covers Palestinian suffering and anti-occupation activists' rise. While humanizing Palestinians, the stories highlight their injustices. The Jerusalem Post calls Palestinians terrorists without violence using hyperbole, imagery, and personification.

Higlights

1-Framework Integration: The paper manages to combine Critical Linguistics (CL) with the three-dimensional model of Fairclough to examine the construction of the 2023 of Jenin incursions on discursive terms.

2-Comparative Media Analysis: It offers a unique comparative discussion of the way an Arab newspaper (The Jordan Times) and an Israeli newspaper (The Jerusalem Post) cover the same events of geopolitical interest through varying ideological prisms.

3-Victimization vs. Criminalization: The analysis shows that The Jordan Times uses a victim of aggression concerning Palestinians and that they prevail in the situation, whereas The Jerusalem Post presents Jenin as a terror capital, with the Palestinians being viewed as terrorists to justify military action.

4-Linguistic & Rhetorical Strategies: The paper can distinguish particular lexical use like adoption of military language (raids, assaults) in the Arab press and emotive metaphors and hyperboles in the Israeli press as they seek to shape the perceptions of the readers.

5-Contributing to the Body of Knowledge: The study helps the field by showing how the Arabic-language English news agencies can overcome the Western media bias by humanizing those typically marginalized in the global dialog.