A Critical Discourse Analysis of Al Jazeera’s Reporting of the 2021 Israel-Palestine Crisis

Abstract

This study is a critical discourse analysis of news coverage of the 2021 Israel-Palestine crisis as reported by Al Jazeera English. In this corpus-based study, 50 news reports were analysed using Van Dijk’s ‘ideological square’ as the theoretical framework. The findings suggest that the Al Jazeera reporters reflected their personal ideology in their lexical choices, or lexicalisation, displaying either a positive or negative stance towards the crisis, with Palestinians being the ‘in-group’ and Israelis the ‘out-group’. The news reporters also framed the Palestinians—‘us’—as the innocent victims of colonisation, while the ‘other’ Israelis were negatively represented as victimisers, racists, and colonisers through an emphasis on syntactic agency. One key observation is that the Al Jazeera reporters emphasised the Palestinian narrative while also radiating personal feelings and attitudes towards the crisis. At the same time, the Israelis were silenced and derogatorily portrayed

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