Linguistic Strategies in Arabic Media Representations of the Palestine–Israel Conflict: A Faircloughian Analysis

Abstract

News language rarely merely reports; it takes part in constituting how an event becomes intelligible. This study examines the linguistic strategies through which Arabic media represented the Palestine–Israel conflict, focusing on Al Jazeera Arabic reporting between October and December 2023. The research is qualitative and descriptive-critical, and it applies Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis to twenty purposively selected linguistic units, which were analysed at the levels of text, discursive practice, and social practice, with transitivity and social-actor categories used as supporting analytical instruments. Three findings emerge. First, the evaluative lexicon names events through the semantic fields of occupation, resistance, and aggression, so that classification precedes description. Second, grammatical agency is distributed asymmetrically along a cline that runs from explicit agents through nominalisation and passive constructions to abstraction, and the position of an actor on this cline correlates with whose responsibility is at stake. Third, the hierarchy of quoted sources allocates institutional authority unevenly. The study argues that lexical and grammatical selection operates as an ideological practice, and it proposes contemporary Arabic media discourse as a productive object for Arabic studies in Indonesia.