Israeli Discourse and the West Bank : Dialectics of Normalization and Estrangement

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of contemporary Israeli political discourse dealing with the West Bank during the election campaign of 2015. It will lay theoretical and methodological foundations for a cross-cultural study of occupation and other forms of repressive discourses as an initial step in the promotion of a ''culture of peace''. Israeli political discourse about the West Bank plays a key role in the public perception of the occupation, as well as in any peace talks that would affect the future of the region. Significant effort will be invested in providing sufficient background information so that readers having little knowledge about Israel or its wars can readily place the analysis into perspective.

How can irregular political situations, which impact the lives of millions, become normalized? Specifically, within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how can 50 years of Israeli control over the Occupied Territories become accepted within Israeli society as a normal, possibly even banal phenomenon? Conversely, how can such a situation be estranged from daily reality, denied any relation to who "we" are? This volume explores these questions through the lens of two central discourses that dominate the Israeli debate regarding the future of the Occupied Territories: 1) Occupation Normalization Discourse, which portrays Israeli control of the territories as a "normal" part of life; 2) Occupation Estrangement Discourse, which portrays this situation as distant from Israeli reality. In addressing these discourses, the authors develop a new methodological tool, Dialectic Discourse Analysis, which examines discourse as a process of perpetual positing and synthesis of oppositions through the discursive construction, differentiation and mediation of self and other. Through this approach, the authors illustrate that these discourses are dialectically constituted in opposition to one another, feeding off one another, each enabling the other to exist. This dynamic has resulted in a fixed discourse, preventing any progress towards a synthesis of oppositions.