(In)Security in social media: exploring Israeli and Palestinian narratives

ABSTRACT

The persistence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict profoundly influences the perceptions of both Israelis and Palestinians, shaping successive generations and posing a complex challenge for security scholarship. This article examines these contrasting socially constructed realities through the lens of Securitisation Theory, analysing public social media discourses on Facebook between 1 January 2021 and 29 April 2022 in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. By bridging high-level theorising with empirically driven methodology, the study enriches the understanding of securitisation processes using Balzacq’s framework and engaging with perspectives from Cote, Stritzel, and Vuori, including the active role of target audiences and the complexity of securitisation as a speech act. Through this approach, the research not only advances theoretical insights into Securitisation but also demonstrates that leveraging social media analysis provides both a valuable means of theory testing and a more comprehensive understanding of securitisation dynamics in the Israeli-Palestinian context.

KEYWORDS:

• Securitisation
• Israeli-Palestinian conflict
• societal security
• computational linguistics
• thematic analysis

SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION CODES:

• 91F99

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability

The data used in this study was collected via CrowdTangle and entrusted to the researcher with a prohibition towards publicly disseminating the raw data. In order to acquire the datasets, kindly contact http://[email protected]. The topic models resulted from this study, together with the database containing the social media post texts and dichotomic variables indicating their classification based on the identified themes are anonymised and available on demand.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported that there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Călin Ștefan Georgia

Calin Georgia’s research interests focus on societal security, having studied Discourse Analysis and online narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Relying on the framework of Securitisation Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis, he studies how securitising phenomena (narratives of crisis, security/insecurity, danger) are expressed through online discourses.