Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the rhetoric of the Prime Minister of Israel on security issues and attempts to illustrate how B.Netanyahu contributed to the discursive distinction between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ and legitimized the political agenda on Gaza conflicts through extreme speech on social media

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the rhetoric of the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, regarding security issues and the threat of 'Islamist enemy' as manifested in the recent election campaign (March 2015), his statements on 'Operation Protective Edge' and his reaction to the stabbing attacks on Israelis (October 2015). By focusing on national security, repeating his opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state and underlying the threat of 'Islamist enemy' against Israel, Netanyahu contributed to the discursive distinction between 'Us' and 'Them' and legitimized his government's political decisions on Gaza conflicts. Our aim is to introduce an interdisciplinary approach in the analysis of the exclusionary rhetoric of the Israeli Prime Minister who proceeded, "in the name of the people", to the discursive construction of in-groups and out-groups.

By synthesizing online ethnographic approaches and the discursive strategies of the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) of Critical Discourse Studies and drawing upon the concept of securitization and the representation of the 'Other', we intend to analyze the Facebook and Twitter accounts of the Prime Minister of Israel and discussions on Facebook groups that focus on Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We assume that the of political statements on social media and the analysis of non-elite social media discourse could reveal silent strategies that are employed to support a discriminatory political agenda that stigmatizes the 'Other' as a national threat. Volatile speech and discriminatory messages are embedded in political discourses and social media genres that we aim to highlight through our multimodal, multi-methodical analysis.