Cover not available
Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 9:3 (2010) ► pp.449–468

If both opponents “extend hands in peace” — Why don’t they meet?

Mythic metaphors and cultural codes in the Israeli peace discourse

| Hadassah College, Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University
This article offers a preliminary and partial mapping of some cultural misconceptions inherent in the Israeli peace discourse. It focuses on one of the central mythic metaphors belonging to this discourse: “We extend our hand in peace.” First articulated in “The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel” (1948). After more than six decades of endless repetition in speeches made by Israeli political leaders, the metaphor has become a fertile arena for learning about Israel’s cultural codes and cultural heritage relating to peace: While expressing the sincere will to make peace, use of the metaphor simultaneously demonstrates moral superiority, feelings of deprivation, latent threat, and recognition of its efficiency for creating a positive image abroad. A discursive analysis of the metaphor reveals four barriers to the effective continuation of a peace process: Images of the Arab opponent, Israel’s self-image, relationships between opponents in addition to the opponents’ readiness to achieve peace.
Keywords: metaphor, cultural codes, peace metaphor, critical discourse analysis, critical metaphor analysis, Arab-Israeli conflict, peace
Published online: 1 November 2010
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.9.3.06gav
References (74)
References
Alexander, George, L. 1980. Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy. Boulder: Westview.Google Scholar
Almog, Oz., 2000. The Sabra: the Creation of the New Jew (trans. by H. Weitzman). Berkeley: University of California Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Paul et al.. 2008. A Useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. Discourse and Society 19 (3), 273–306. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baldwin, David, A. 1995. Security Studies and the end of the Cold War. World Politics 481: 117–141. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bar-Siman-Tov, Yaacov. 2001. The peace process and negotiations in the Israeli-Arab conflict.’ H amizrach Hechadash 421, 227–248 (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Bar Yosef, Uri. 2001. The Watchman Fell Asleep: The Surprise of Yom Kippur and its Sources. Lod: Zmora Bitan (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Bar-Tal, Daniel and Teichman, Yona. 2005. Stereotypes and Prejudice in Conflict, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bar-Tal, Daniel and Zafran, Aanat. 2003. Memories of the Holocaust and their Implications for the Peace Process: The Effect of fear and the victim’s self-Image on Israeli beliefs about security. In: Maged, E. and Ben Eliezer, U. (eds.) For the Sake of Security. Haifa: Pardess 329–367 (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. Selected and translated from the French by Annette Lavers, London: Jonathan Cape.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, J. 1988. Selected Writings, M. Poster (Ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press 166–184.Google Scholar
Beer, Francis, A. and De Landtsheer, Christ’l. (eds.) 2004. Metaphorical World Politics. Michigan: Michigan State University Press.Google Scholar
Bridgeman, Cathleen A. 2000. What Kind of Peace is This? Metaphor in the U.S. Press Coverage of Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Program of Linguistics, University of South Carolina.Google Scholar
Bridgeman, Cathleen. 2002. Playing at peace: game metaphors in discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 29 2, 165–167. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cameron, Lynn. J. 2007. Patterns of metaphor use in reconciliation talk. Discourse and Society 21, 197–222. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cavin, Margaret, Hale, Katherine and Cavin, Barry. 1997. Metaphors of control toward a language of peace: recent self-defining rhetorical constructs of Helen Caldecott, Peace and Change 22 3, 243–264. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2005. Politicians and Rhetoric — The Persuasive Power of Metaphor, New York: Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chilton, Paul. 1996. Security Metaphors. New York: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
2005 Manipulation, Memes and Metaphors: The Case of Mein Kampf’ in: L. de Saussure (ed.), Manipulation. Amsterdam — Philadelphia: J. Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chilton, Paul A. and Schaffner, Christina. 1997. Discourse and Politics. In: T.A. van Dijk (ed.). Discourse as Social Interaction. London and New Delhi: Sage. 206–230.Google Scholar
Dimitrova, Daniela V. and Strombeck, Jesper., 2005. Mission accomplished? — Framing of the Iraq War in the elite newspapers in Sweden and the United States. Gazette 67 5, 399–417. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Erjavec, Karmen and Volcic, Zala. 2007. ‘War on Terrorism’ as a discursive battleground: Serbian recontextualization of G.W. Bush’s discourse’. Discourse and Society 18 2, 123–137. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity press.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 2003 Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London and New York: Routledge.
Fairclough, Norman and Wodak, Ruth. 1997. Critical Discourse Analysis. In: T. A. van Dijk (ed.). Discourse as Social Interaction. London and New Delhi: Sage, 258–284.Google Scholar
Gavriely-Nuri, Dalia. 2005. ‘Normal War’ :The Cultural Dimension of Strategic Surprise and the Yom Kippur War. Unpublished dissertation. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
. 2009. Friendly fire: war-normalizing metaphors in the Israeli political discourse. Journal of Peace Education 6 2, 153–169. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (forthcoming). The idiosyncratic language of the Israeli ‘peace’ — A Cultural Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CCDA). Discourse and Society.
Gertz, Nurit. 2000. Myths in Israeli Culture: Captives of a Dream. London: Vallentine Mitchell.Google Scholar
Hartmann-Mahmud, Lori. 2002. War as Metaphor. Peace Review 14 4, 427–432. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hermann, Tamar. 1998. Two people apart: Israeli Jews’ and Arabs’ attitudes toward the peace process. In: Peleg, I. (ed.) The Middle East Peace Process; Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Albany: State University of New York Press, 61–83.Google Scholar
Herzog, Hannah. 2008–2009. Generations apart: A Proposed generational perspective on the sociological discourse. Israeli Sociology 10 2, 259–285 (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Howard, Michael. 1979. The forgotten dimensions of strategy. Foreign Affairs 57 5, 886–975, DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hyatt, Jenny and Simons, Helen. 1999, Cultural codes — Who holds the key? Evaluation 5 1, 23–41. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Inbar, Efraim. 2000. The peace process — An assessment of reality. HaUma 1391 19–25 (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Ivie, Robert .L., 1990. Cold War motives and the rhetorical metaphor: a framework of criticism. In: Martin J. Medhurst et al.. (eds.) Cold War Rhetoric — Strategy, Metaphor, and Ideology. New York: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Janis, Irving L. 1972. Victims of Groupthink. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Kamir, Orit. 1999a. The [Israeli] Declaration [of Independence] has two faces: The Zionist declaration and the democratic declaration. Iyunei Mishpat 231 473–538 (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
1999b. Smoch mentality (“rely on me”) in Israeli culture and law. Tarbut Demokratit 11, 137–179 (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Kampf, Zohar. 2006. Blood on their hands: The story of a photograph in the Israeli national discourse. Semiotica 1621, 1–4, 263–285.Google Scholar
Katriel, Tamar. 1991 Communal Webs: Communication and Culture in Contemporary Israel. Albany: Suny Press.Google Scholar
1999. Keywords: Patterns of Culture and Communication in Israel. Haifa: University of Haifa Press & Zmora-Bitan (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
2004. Dialogic Moments: From Soul Talks to Talk Radio in Israeli Culture. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Victor. 2000. Metaphors in the news — introduction. Metaphor and Symbol 15 4, 209–211. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kövecses, Zoltan. 2005. Metaphor In Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Liebes, Tamar and Katz, Elihu. 1990. The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of Dallas. New York : Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Livnat, Zohar. 2009. An anatomy of governmental vagueness: A linguistic-rhetorical look at political speech in: Gitay, Y. (Ed.) Mila Bsela. Emek Yizrael Academic College, pp. 65–87 (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Lule, Jack. 2004. War and its metaphors: news, language and the prelude to war in Iraq, 2003. Journalism Studies 51, 179–190. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mann, Rafi. 1999. It’s Inconceivable. Or Yehuda: Hed Arzi (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Mannheim, Karl. 1952. The problem of generations in: Mannheim, K. Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 276–320.Google Scholar
Matthew, Nadelhaft. 1993. Metawar: Sports and the Persian Gulf War’, Journal of American Culture 16 4, 25–33. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mio, Jeffery Scott. 1997. Metaphor and politics. Metaphor and Symbol 12 2, 113–33. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Muchnik, Malka. 2009. ‘’smart Bomb“ and “Friendly Fire”: Violence veiled behind words In: Gitay, Y. (ed.) Mila Bsela, Emek Yizrael Academic College, pp. 114–129.Google Scholar
Murray, Williamson, Grimsley, Mark. 1996. Introduction: On strategy in Murray, Williamson, Knox, MacGregor and Bernstein, Alvin (Eds.) The Making of Strategy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Musolff, Andreas. 2008. What can Critical Metaphor Analysis add to the understanding of racist ideology? Recent studies of Hitler’s Anti-Semitic metaphors’. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 2 2, 1–10. [URL].Google Scholar
Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon. 1993–1994. Exile in the midst of sovereignty: A critique of Shelilat HaGalut in Israeli culture. Teoria uvikoret 41, 23–55 and Teoria uvikoret 51, 113–132 (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Rubinstein, Amnon and Medina, Barak. 2005. The Constitutional Law of the State of Israel, 6th ed. Jerusalem: Shocken (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Shachar, Yoram. 2002. The early drafts of the Israeli Declaration of Independence’. Iyunei Mishpat 261 523 (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Shetreet, Shimon. 1998. The Good Land: Between Power and Religion. Tel Aviv: Yedioth Aharonot (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Shimko, Keith, L. 2004. The Power of Metaphors and the Metaphors of Power: The United States in the Cold War and After, in Beer, A. F. and De Landtsheer, C. (Eds.), Metaphorical World Politics. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.Google Scholar
Shi-xu (ed.). 2007. Discourse as Culture Struggle. Hong Kong University Press.Google Scholar
Stein Gross, Janice. 2001. A turning point in the Arab-Israeli conflict: From conflict management to conflict resolution.’ Politika, 61 45–64 (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Swidler, Ann., 1986. Culture in action :Symbols and strategies”. Sociological Review 511, 273–286.Google Scholar
Thornborrow, Joanna. 1993. Metaphors of security: A comparison of representation in defense discourse in Post-Cold-War France and Britain’. Discourse & Society 4(1), 99–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van Dijk. Teun. A. 1993. Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis. Discourse and Society 41, 249–283. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van Dijk, Teun. A. 2005. War rhetoric of a little ally: Political Implicatures and Aznar’s Legitimatization of the War in Iraq. Journal of Language and Politics, 4(1), 65–91. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008. Discourse Reader. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Wenden, Anita L. 1999. Defining peace: Perspectives from peace research” in: Language and Peace. Schaffner, C. and Wenden, A. L. (Eds.), Harwood Academic Publishers, pp. 3–15.Google Scholar
2003. Achieving a comprehensive peace: The linguistic factor. Peace and Change 28 2, 169–201. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wodak, Ruth. 2007. Pragmatics and Critical Discourse Analysis: A Cross-disciplinary inquiry. Pragmatics and Cognition 151, 203–225. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wodak, Ruth. and Chilton Paul. (Eds.) 2005. A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis: Theory, Methodology, and Interdisciplinarity. Amsterdam : Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wohlstetter, Roberta. 1962 . Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. Stanford, Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Yang, Jin. 2003. Framing the NATO Air Strikes on Kosovo across Countries: Comparison of Chinese and US Newspaper Coverage. Gazette 651, 234–240. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zerubavel, Yael. 1995. Recovered Roots, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Cited by (17)

Cited by 17 other publications

Sharaf Eldin, Ahmad Abdel Tawwab, Wafya Hamouda, Walid Reda Ali & Hoda Soliman Mohamed
2024. The role of metaphor in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a cognitive linguistic approach. Cogent Arts & Humanities 11:1 DOI logo
ABDURRAHMAN, Israa Burhanuddin, Aya Qasim HASAN & Ali Hussein HAZEM
2023. A Critical Discourse Analysis of Feminism in Drama: Susan Glaspell and Alice Childress as a Case Study. Asian Journal of Human Services 25:0 ► pp. 45 ff. DOI logo
Friedman, Elie
2023. The “Balfour Gang” versus “the Saladin Gang”: Geographic metaphors and metonyms in Israel as securitized, polarizing constructs. Language & Communication 93 ► pp. 125 ff. DOI logo
Danziger, Roni
2022. Positive Social Acts, DOI logo
Kagan, Maria & Olga Solopova
2022. ‘Ideal Future’ in World War II Media Discourse: Corpus-Based Research of British, American, and French Digitalized Historical Newspapers. In Science and Global Challenges of the 21st Century - Science and Technology [Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, 342], ► pp. 881 ff. DOI logo
Katz, Yuval
2022. When media events fail: the transformation of the Israeli peace discourse at the funeral of Shimon Peres. Critical Studies in Media Communication 39:2 ► pp. 63 ff. DOI logo
Serafis, Dimitris, E. Dimitris Kitis & Stavros Assimakopoulos
2022. Sailing toIthaka. Journal of Language and Politics 21:2 ► pp. 344 ff. DOI logo
Catalano, Theresa & Linda R. Waugh
2020. CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections. In Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Studies and Beyond [Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 26], ► pp. 247 ff. DOI logo
Musolff, Andreas
2018. Nations as persons. In The Discursive Construction of Identities On- and Offline [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 78], ► pp. 249 ff. DOI logo
Waugh, Linda R., Theresa Catalano, Khaled Al Masaeed, Tom Hong Do & Paul G. Renigar
2016. Critical Discourse Analysis: Definition, Approaches, Relation to Pragmatics, Critique, and Trends. In Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society [Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 4], ► pp. 71 ff. DOI logo
Jaspal, Rusi & Adrian Coyle
2014. Threat, Victimhood, and Peace: Debating the 2011 Palestinian UN State Membership Bid. Digest of Middle East Studies 23:1 ► pp. 190 ff. DOI logo
Gavriely-Nuri, Dalia
2010. The idiosyncratic language of Israeli ‘peace’: A Cultural Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CCDA). Discourse & Society 21:5 ► pp. 565 ff. DOI logo
Gavriely-Nuri, Dalia
2012. Cultural approach to CDA. Critical Discourse Studies 9:1 ► pp. 77 ff. DOI logo
Gavriely-Nuri, Dalia
2014. ‘TALKING PEACE – GOING TO WAR’. Critical Discourse Studies 11:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Gavriely-Nuri, Dalia
2014. Collective memory as a metaphor: The case of speeches by Israeli prime ministers 2001–2009. Memory Studies 7:1 ► pp. 46 ff. DOI logo
Gavriely-Nuri, Dalia
2016. The outbreak of peace in Israeli children's periodicals, 1977–1979. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 11:2 ► pp. 214 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2015. Israeli Peace Discourse [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 59], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.