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Article published In: Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict
Vol. 6:1 (2018) ► pp.58–78

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False reasoning and argumentation in the Twitter discourse of the Prime Minister of Israel

 | Panteion University, Greece
Published online: 2 July 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00003.bou
Abstract
This paper explores the Twitter discourse of the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, regarding security issues and the threat of ‘Islamist terrorism’ as manifested in the latest election campaign (March 2015) and his tweets and statements on Operation Protective Edge (July – August 2014). By focusing on national security and the underlying threat of terrorism against Israel and the West on Twitter, I argue that Netanyahu disseminates his political agenda further and attempts to communicate political decisions on the Gaza conflict in a digital environment.
By synthesizing Aristotle’s dialectic and rhetoric and the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), and drawing on the concepts of topos and fallacy, I attempt to understand and explain how the Gaza conflict is communicated on social media by the Israeli Prime Minister. My aim is also to shed light on the validity of social media in political discourse and to examine whether and how social media can play a role in the propagation of political discourse in times of crisis through an argumentative discourse analysis of the tweets posted by the Prime Minister of Israel.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Towards an argumentative discourse analysis in a digital environment: Synthesizing the DHA and Aristotle’s thought
    • 2.1Discourse Historical Approach and digital communication
    • 2.2The concept of topos: From Aristotle to the DHA
    • 2.3False reasoning: The concept of fallacy
    • 2.4Research corpus: A Discourse Historical Approach to Twitter
  • 3.‘Operation Protective Edge’
  • 4.National elections
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Funding
  • Notes
  • References
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