Socio-Political Aspects In Framing Narratives Of Conflict

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most controversial conflicts due to its historical complexities and in terms of its extensive power play reflected in the international media coverage. One of the most recent, large-scale Israeli military incursions into Gaza in the summer of 2014 was reported extensively by the Western news media outlets and translation played a key role in the process of news production about the events. This thesis investigates how the discursive strategies, ideological views, and narrative locations of the selected media organisations actively influence the construction and the translation of the narratives about the conflict by examining the translation-mediated English and Arabic news texts produced by the same media institutions. It uses narrative theory as the model of analysis to explore the various ways in which international news media outlets accentuate, undermine or modify the public and meta-narratives about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The analysis employs the notion of framing from social movement studies to investigate how selective appropriation, framing via labelling, temporal and spatial framing and other narrative strategies are used by trans-editors and editors to shape and circulate the public narratives of the attacks. This thesis uses a descriptive method and a case study approach to analyse bilingual data sets which comprise of 12 English and Arabic news texts produced by the BBC and CNN English and Arabic platforms. The selected texts narrate three separate Israeli attacks that took place in the summer of 2014 during the Israeli military incursion into Gaza, which are the attacks on the Beit Hanoun school, the Jabalia school and the Al Aqsa hospital. These texts demonstrate how the framing of the narratives enables different actors of the conflict to legitimise their own version of the events and sustains a narrative that accounts for certain political and ideological views while discrediting and challenging others. This thesis argues that the accrual of certain discursive patterns constructs the public narratives of self-defence and equal war and reinforces the meta-narrative of “War on Terror” which in turn contributes to constructing the socio-political reality of the conflict.