Pragmatic and value-based argumentation in the 2015 Israeli elections

Abstract

A discursive and argumentative analysis of the Israeli 2015 elections reveals how electoral strategies displayed unexpected similarities between rival parties such as the Likud and the Zionist Union, on the one hand, and the Jewish Home and Meretz, on the other hand, in their respective approaches to foreign policy and to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. While the mainstream Right and Left mainly emphasized security motives, used consequence-based arguments, and appealed to fear, the practical reasoning of the two smaller parties (Jewish Home and Meretz) competing with the Likud and the Zionist Union applied a value-based rather than a merely instrumental argumentation. This reconfiguration of the political map enlightens the peculiar dynamics of the 2015 elections.

Keywords:

• Israeli elections
• electoral strategies
• pragmatic arguments
• value-based arguments
• appeal to fear
• political argumentation

Notes

1. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, 75.

2. Guerrini, “Enjeux de valeurs.”

3. Walton, “A Dialectical Analysis.”

4. Ibid., 266.

5. Walton, Scare Tactics.

6. Ibid., 22.

7. Ibid., 162.

8. Amossy, L’Argumentation dans le discours.

9. Amossy, “Argumentation in Discourse.”

10. See Searle, Speech Acts, 7.

11. Amossy, La présentation de soi.

12. Plantin, Les bonnes raisons des émotions.

13. Micheli, “Emotions as Objects.”

14. Plantin, Essais sur l’argumentation, 217.

15. Kampf, “The Age of Apology.”

16. A Jewish spy during the First World War.

17. Combatants fallen in the Second Lebanon War.

18. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, 19–23.