Syria-Israel Relations in Al-Assad’s Speeches and Interviews: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Study

Abstract

This paper uses a 1,445,000-word corpus to examine Syria-Israel relations in the speeches and interviews of Syrian President Basher Al-Assad from 2000 to 2016. Van Dijk’s (2009) notions of manipulation and polarization are employed to highlight the discursive strategies that Al-Assad uses to legitimize his points of view regarding a range of regional issues. Examining how Al-Assad constructed Israel* in his speeches revealed recurrent thematic categories, such as conflict, occupation, negotiation, and criminality/violence. The analysis suggests that Al-Assad used Israel to build solidarity with his people portraying himself as a man of values who does his best to resist the occupier and liberate the occupied Arab lands.