Terror- ‘East’: Benjamin Netanyahu’s Speeches at the UN and the Construction of the Self, the Other, and the Seeds of Humiliation
(2022) BRISMES Annual Conference — Location: University of Saint-Andrews (4.July.2022)
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- Abstract
- Skirmishes between Israelis and Palestinians, on the one hand, and Israel and Iran, on the other hand, are commonplace nowadays and take all sorts of forms. Unsurprisingly, these two topics represented the core of Benjamin Netanyahu’s speeches during his time as Prime Minister of Israel. Yet, his discourse and the strive for narrative imposition it entails is largely understudied. The ambition of this paper is to investigate both the power struggles and the power display occurring within Netanyahu’s discourse to understand Israel’s approach to its international environment. It does so with a Critical Discourse Analysis approach using thematic analysis to sort out the themes put forward by Netanyahu. This is combined with Badie’s humiliation framework (2017) which helps to demonstrate how antagonizing speeches actually sideline and exclude actors from the international system. Analyzing Netanyahu’s speeches at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) since he has been back to the Prime Minister’s office in 2009, such an approach allows to highlight Netanyahu’s focus on Iran. Iran is introduced as the core threatening actor from whom others derive their own threatening character. As such, this paper shows how Netanyahu introduces Iran as an extreme “other” unworthy of being considered as a proper actor on the international scene. The paper further demonstrates how such a narrative constrains the understanding of Iran’s actions as threatening and as unjustifiable anyhow but by their loathing of the values “we” represent. Thereby, Iran is relegated to a “sub-level” and actions against it are justified within that framework.
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Dieudonné, J. (2022). Terror- ‘East’: Benjamin Netanyahu’s Speeches at the UN and the Construction of the Self, the Other, and the Seeds of Humiliation. BRISMES Annual Conference, University of Saint-Andrews. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/100641