Metaphors in the Palestinian and Israeli Discourses on Palestinian Statehood at the UN

Abstract

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict reached a dead end after the collapse of the American mediation in 2010. This marked a critical point in the history of negotiations. As a result, in 2011, the Palestinians took a unilateral step to obtain recognized statehood from the United Nations (UN).

Within this context and by drawing upon these approaches and methods, namely Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), more specifically, Wodak's Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) and Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), this research examines the source, type, target, and frequency of metaphors employed in the Palestinian and Israeli political discourses in order to understand the conflict linguistically and conceptually. The data used is the Palestinian and Israeli political speeches (Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu) on the Palestinian application for UN membership in 2011 and 2012.

The analysis shows that the main domains reflected in metaphorical constructions are peace, Israeli practices, Palestinian society, dream, region, time, conflict resolution, Hamas, Israel, conflict morality, and the UN. Both political leaders use shared metaphors and sources, or personification, journey and movement, plant, natural disaster and water, animal, and hostility. While Abbas resorts to fire, sport, object, building, economics, rock, road, and book metaphors, Netanyahu uses light and darkness and drama metaphors. It can be said that the most common metaphorical source the Palestinian actor uses is personification metaphors which are ontologically stimulated, whereas the most prevalent metaphors the Israeli actor employs are journey and movement metaphors which are structurally stimulated. The orientational metaphors, or light and darkness metaphors are used solely by the Israeli actor. The analysis also reveals a dominant duality in the speeches of both leaders, that is, the revelation of our good attributes and their bad characteristics, or the concealment of our bad aspects and their good points.