Framing the Conflict: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Political Leaders' Ideological Positioning on Twitter (X) Regarding Israel-Palestine Issue

Abstract

This study explores how international political leaders’ discourse on social media, particularly Twitter (X), to frame the Israel-Palestine conflict. While extensive media coverage exists, limited research focuses on political leaders’ digital discourse. This research fills the gap by analyzing how leaders construct ideologies through their tweets, shaping global perceptions of the conflict. The main focus of this research is to investigate the lexical and discursive choices political leaders use to represent the Israel-Palestine conflict, focusing on how they construct ideological positions. It aims to understand how such discourse promotes or challenges dominant narratives by using critical discourse analysis. Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used to analyze 100 tweets from 20 international political leaders. Tweets were purposively sampled and analyzed across three layers: linguistic features, intertextual references, and sociopolitical context. The data is categorized into themes reflecting ideology, power, identity, and alignment with geopolitical positions. Leaders use emotionally loaded language, moral appeals, metaphors, and ideological vocabulary (e.g., “genocide,” “martyrs,” “self-defense,” “barbarism”) to position themselves and others in the conflict. It contributes to discourse studies and political communication by revealing how social media acts as a tool for identity construction, ideological framing, and public persuasion. It shows that digital political discourse plays a significant role in shaping international views on conflicts and highlights the need for further research on the impact of online narratives in global crises.