The News Media and the Ever-Present Fear in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Abstract

Fear of war and terror is omnipresent in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and thus fear has become a central theme in its media coverage across the world. The presence of notions of fear is related to current occurrences, but they are also fundamentally rooted in past events, that have led to the present situation, and contextualize audiences’ understandings of current aspects of the conflict. The ongoing presence of the memory of events such as the Holocaust and the 1948 war, that entailed the establishment of the state of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba (Arabic: Catastrophe), provide the interpretive frame through which Israelis, Palestinians, and others shape their opinions and feelings toward the conflict and its possible resolution. In this study, we rely on the media memory approach as we investigate major themes in the news coverage of past events, and especially the presence of fear as a leading interpretive theme. Specifically, in this chapter we explore the ways in which Israeli, Palestinian, American, and German news media have used the past as a curriculum, a context and a form of commemoration in their 2017 coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War.