Interested publishers and supporters please contact me at cherryllsmith@gmail.com
Book-in-Progress
Book-in-Progress
Framing Israel
how Israel is framed by
media, at universities, and on the world stage
In
2000, after visiting Israel for the first time, my life took a turn I could not
have predicted. The voices dominating at universities so dramatically
conflicted with what I had just observed in Israel that suddenly I was out of
synch, for the first time outside the mainstream of my familiar academic and
Berkeley world. Eventually I began to investigate, making use of my own
academic field, Rhetoric and Composition, for it gave me tools to describe the
cognitive dissonance I had felt and to analyze the rhetoric I encountered.
Framing is part of our natural
thinking process as we sort out and classify information; it is also a way of
describing how media sort, classify and present their material. Academics in a
number of fields use “rhetorical framing analysis” to notice patterns of
language, at times outlining limitations, slant, or bias.
I identify the interconnected
frames that appear with great frequency in the rhetoric about Israel and that
easily create misleading, fallacious claims. I’m interested in highlighting the
frames so that our attention is drawn to them.
For, we may not notice how a story or argument is framed because we are
naturally focused on the content, just as we don’t pay attention to a picture
frame but to the picture it encloses.
Of course, you can find instances
where this framing of Israel is not operating but these particular perspectives are increasingly
significant because they occur regularly in places of the greatest influence:
in mainstream media, where the frames are broadcasted in their mildest form; at
universities where they appear in a stronger and more abstract language; and at
world forums like the United Nations, where an extreme kind of rhetoric shows
up.
This does not mean that Israel, like other countries, does not have a good supply of problems of its own making. Nor will I propose that we replace these fallacious frames with other more Israel-friendly distortions through which to view the Jewish state. I’m advocating here for a freer thinking about Israel, one unconstrained by the limits of this dominant framing. For, the negative framing of Israel ultimately makes the achievement of peace a far more distant possibility.
This does not mean that Israel, like other countries, does not have a good supply of problems of its own making. Nor will I propose that we replace these fallacious frames with other more Israel-friendly distortions through which to view the Jewish state. I’m advocating here for a freer thinking about Israel, one unconstrained by the limits of this dominant framing. For, the negative framing of Israel ultimately makes the achievement of peace a far more distant possibility.
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