Media Framing of the Israeli Arabic-Speaking Social Media Pages Directed to the Palestinian Audience

Abstract

In recent years, Facebook and social media, in general, have become an essential and critical platform for Israel to direct its daily messages to all Arabs in general and the Palestinian audience in particular as part of its new digital diplomacy to polish its image among the Palestinian FB users. The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian land made Israel an oppressor state that the Palestinians consider the enemy. Since Israel cares about its public image and hopes to normalise this occupation, it attempted to directly exploit social media to interact with people via modern technology. This qualitative study attempted to analyse four official Israeli official Facebook pages in Arabic, namely 'Avichay Adraee,' 'the Coordinator,' 'ofir Gendelman', and 'Israel Speaks Arabic,' which are primarily directed toward the Palestinians in the occupied territories, and the Arabs in the Middle East, generally. The study collected Facebook posts for 11 months, from February to December 2019, and conducted a content analysis on these pages. The results exhibited in these pages adopted several media frames and strategies to attract and positively influence the Palestinian audience to change their image towards the occupation, become a more cultural and civilised entity, and normalise the occupation as a goal.