Ideological Framing of the Palestine-Israel Conflict: A Corpus-Based Eco-Linguistic Analysis of Western and Middle Eastern Media Editorials

Abstract

The current study explores the newly surfacing area of ecolinguistics as a form of critical discourse analysis with respect to the ongoing feud between Palestine and Israel. The aim of the researchers is to trace out the ecological words and linguistic patterns in the specific conflict-related editorials of the Middle Eastern and Western newspapers, Al-Ahram and The Guardian, published during the period of October 2023 to January 2025. Much has been written on the cities destroyed, civilians killed, and infrastructure turned into heaps of rubble because of this catastrophic situation, but nothing significant has been done using Stibbe’s normative framework of ecolinguistics. This involves corpus-based linguistic analysis of the corpora of editorials using Sketch Engine software, highlighting the ecological word keywords, concordance, and collocations. The findings reveal how language encodes the stories we live by and defines our relationship with other species and the earth. Stibbe’s ecolinguistics approach with embedded cognitive stories has enough potential for future researchers to help people in the reinvention of societies along more ecological lines by making them aware of destructive human actions causing harm to all that sustain life on our planet.