Hope and dread in representing Palestine-Israel: a case study of editorials in the British broadsheets

ABSTRACT

Part of a comprehensive study to analyse British broadsheets’ coverage of the First Gaza War, this paper examines the moral arguments presented in editorials. Doing so, it showcases a non-dualist, relational inquiry of the representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead of focusing on what is empirically ‘true’, morally ‘right’, and ethnically ‘Israeli/Jewish’ or ‘Palestinian/Arab’ as extra-discursive categories, it approaches them as discursive constructions and asks what relations, what forms of lives the editorials cultivate in representing them. The analysis demonstrates that whilst newspapers overwhelmingly imagine isolated and ahistorical essences to clash in Palestine-Israel, they do not exclusively do so. Traces of a discourse of relations, where ‘I’ (Palestinian or Israeli) is partly constituted by the ‘Other’ (Israeli or Palestinian) can also be found in the editorials. It is with the vicissitudes of such relational accounts that the article concludes.

KEYWORDS:

• First Gaza war
• ‘Operation Cast Lead’
• discourse analysis
• British newspapers
• Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr David Kaposi is Lecturer in Psychology at The Open University and psychotherapist in private practice. He did his PhD at Loughborough University on the Arendt-Scholem exchange of letters in the wake of Adolf Eichmann’s trial. Since then, his publications include the book Violence and understanding in Gaza: The British broadsheets’ coverage of the war (2014, Palgrave). Kaposi’s current projects concern the examination of archival records of the infamous Milgram experiments and the empirical analysis of psychotherapeutic concepts. School of Psychology, The Open University, MK7 6AA, UK

Editorial sources:

Daily Telegraph.

Hamas and Iran pose a threat to the world. 29 December, p. 17.

Guardian.

Killing a two-state solution: Gaza air strikes. 29 December, p. 26.

Gaza: Israel and the family of nations. 14 January, p. 32.

Gaza: More, but worse. 10 January, p. 34.

The Times.

In defense of Israel. 10 January, p. 2.

Israel’s cause is just but some of its tactics are self defeating. 16 January, p. 2.

Financial Times.

Bombing Gaza is not a solution. 29 December, p. 8.

The ruins of Gaza. 22 January, p. 10.

Notes

1 In March 2016 the Independent became an online only publication.

2 Despite its absence from the present analysis, this statement encompasses the Independent too. For the analysis of the Independent, see Kaposi, 2014, pp. 61–66, 74–79, 142–147.

3 30 percent of the Financial Times’ editorial paragraphs featured the phrase ‘occupation’ as opposed to, for instance, 4.3 percent in the Guardian or 0 percent in the Daily Telegraph (Kaposi, 2014, p. 69).

4 See fn 3.