Department of English
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Item Apartheid in the Holy Land: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Israel's Treatment of Palestinians(Library Information Services, COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus, 2025) Aasma Younas; FA23-REL-001; Dr. Umara Shaheen; LHR TP 9732The Israel-Palestine war is one of the bloodiest or longest-running conflicts in modern history. Scholars and political commentators had often critiqued the language used in the media to portray this conflict (Ackerman, 2001; Mearsheimer & Walt, 2006). The research objective was to examine recurrent linguistic patterns of representation and bias in the online news media coverage of Muslim-majority and non-Muslim-majority media outlets concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict. Existing studies in applied linguistics had thoroughly investigated the recurrent linguistic patterns used to depict conflict in the media through critical discourse analysis (CDA) and comparative corpus-assisted discourse studies. This research bridged the gap by applying Van Dijk’s Ideological Square model (2017) as a systematic and theoretical framework in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict in selected media outlets from Muslim-majority and non-Muslim-majority countries. The study focused on Dawn, Al-Jazeera, CNN, and BBC news media outlets from 2023 to 2025. CDA emphasizes how ideology and power are expressed and contested through dialect in political and social contexts. This research signified lay in its promise to expand the reader’s interpretations of how media narratives influenced public perceptions of Israel as an out-group and Palestine as an in-group. These tactics included polarization, concretization, compassion moves, lexicalization, victimization, and metaphor. Depicting Israel as a victim strengthened positive sense of ‘self’ and constructed a negative image of the Palestinian’s. The media’s relentless portrayal Israeli victimized, which focuses on the mental states of Israel, created a common perception and shared understanding of the state as harass. Media portrayal played a significant role in de-legitimating and legitimating social movements and their adherents. Advocates suggested that "appropriate techniques from CL could help strengthen the rigor of the analysis and then use computational approaches for both qualitative and quantitative analyses of natural text patterns" (Stubbs, 1997, p. 12). Two corpora, totaling 1 million words, were analyzed using the Sketch Engine tool. The Sketch Engine identified corpus-based keyword techniques and corpus tools, such as frequency, concordance, and collocation. This study focused on the Israel-Palestine conflict by compiling two corpora from online news media and interpreting them through Van Dijk’s (1998b) lens.