The Mechanism of Activating and Realizing the Context of the Middle East Conflict in the Israeli Political Discourse

Based on the assumption that a long-lasting political/social conflict is a phenomenon determining potentially all communicative events in which political speakers representing the conflicted parties participate, irrespective of their individual time and place, this article illustrates an interesting mechanism of activating and realizing the context of the Middle East conflict in the Israeli political discourse, which has been identified in a detailed study of 2009–2014 speeches of the Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. The above mentioned study revealed that this specific mechanism is one of proofs that the Israeli party to this conflict has developed their own, distinguishing way in which they discursively (re)construct the situation in the Middle East. As such, this mechanism also turned out to be one of the key elements responsible for some major regularities in structure, content and functions of Netanyahu’s speeches destined and delivered to audiences either in Israel or outside, which in turn enabled to approach it as a potentially new political genre. The goal of this article is to illustrate how, in the course of six years, Netanyahu activated and realized the context of Middle East conflict in front of diverse audiences, and how this mechanism governed the distribution of preferred messages about the Israeli stance in this struggle across time and settings