Elie Friedman & Dalia Gavriely-Nuri examine Israeli discourses around the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territory of the West Bank. They identify the ‘deeply constitutive relations between self and other’ in two competing discourses that portray Israeli reality from opposing perspectives. OND (Occupation Normalisation Discourse) portrays the occupation as a normal aspect of reality; while OED (Occupation Estrangement Discourse) distances it from Israeli reality in terms of culture, ideology, and geography. The authors explore the dialectic between these perspectives, illustrating the complex identity issues involved, together with long-term implications for Israel's reputation on the world stage.
Dialectic Discourse Analysis—their approach developed to address self-other relations in conflict situations—uses the tools of Critical Discourse analysis (CDA) while also drawing on Hegel's dialectic approach. Analysis focuses on political discourse strategies of the 2014–2015 Israeli election campaign, as politicians avoided taking ‘a clear and precise stand on the future of the West Bank’ (20). Data from three corpuses are analysed: (i) the Hebrew mainstream media—a collection of news websites reaching wide audiences as well as those targeting sector specific audiences; (ii) social media—public Facebook pages so as to include citizens' discourse; and (iii) public diplomacy of political actors.
Within mainstream media, OND discourse strategies construct the occupation as not only normal, but essential to the preservation of Israeli societal values including social justice, liberalism, historical determinism, and security, while OED discourse strategies distance the occupation from such values and position Israel within a cultural identity of ethnocentrism and religious nationalism. Although each of these perspectives relates dialectically to the other, ‘the Palestinians as an active subject are virtually erased’ (83). Both perspectives deny ‘othering’ and neither discourse takes account of Palestinian claims.
Social-media discourse, although more dialectic than mainstream-media discourse, showed that users adopted many of the same patterns, such as erasure of some populations from the discourse. However, it differed in exhibiting ‘a kind of “ping pong” between oppositions' (111). Although sometimes exploiting internal tensions and occasionally descending into hate speech, the inherently inclusive nature of Facebook enabled voice for both perspectives. Here a new kind of ‘subversive’ discourse emerged that ‘attempts to reach beyond the divide of occupation normalisation and occupation estrangement. A humanistic ecological discourse that suggests revising several basic values of Israeli society’ (111).
Analysis of the public-diplomacy discourse found that in communicating with foreign audiences, efforts were also made to satisfy demands of internal audiences. Negotiating this tension involved vague and convoluted strategies. OED strategies include temporal distancing of the occupation from current reality, while OND strategies attempt to divert responsibility with the rationale that any ‘vacated territory’ is taken over by Islamist forces. This discourse is characterised by demonization and dehumanisation of Palestinians as ‘radical Islamists’, the ‘radical Islamist beast’, and something that ‘we cannot be expected to swallow’ (115).
The authors demonstrate that OND and OED discourses enable and sustain each other, and they identify the emergence of a third ‘static discourse’ with far reaching cultural and political implications for Israeli identity.
