When Yesterday’s Enemy Becomes Today’s Friend: A Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of the Representation of Arabs in the Israeli ‘Jerusalem Post’

Abstract

Media is considered a reflection of society and at the same time, it uses language as a power. The present study investigates the representation of Arabs in the Israeli newspaper, ‘The Jerusalem Post’, which is published in English. In other words, this study seeks to show how the Israeli press represents Arabs to the world, especially the West. Accordingly, we chose the Jerusalem Post since it is one of the most popular Israeli newspapers. Moreover, this study focuses on the articles that contain the word ‘Arab*’ and its variants from January 2017 to December 2021; this period represents the time span before and after the recent official normalization of relations between some Arab governments and Israel in order to shed light on the change of Israeli representation of Arabs during this period, if any. We draw upon a corpus of over 22 million words to conduct this study. Both corpus linguistic and critical discourse analysis are used to achieve the study goal. The analysis has shown that Arabs are negatively represented in pre-normalization period, and although the second period (2020-2021) witnessed the official normalization of relations between some Arab governments and Israel, Arabs are still represented negatively in the newspaper.