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Article published In: Radical Right-Wing Populism and Borders: Positioning antagonistic discourses in the (de)bounded spaces of power
Edited by Christian Lamour and Oscar Mazzoleni
[Journal of Language and Politics 23:3] 2024
► pp. 438–459

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Of infiltrators and wild beasts

Nationalism and populism in Benjamin Netanyahu’s narrative of the borders

ORCiD logo with link | University of Turin
Published online: 8 April 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.23084.dem
Abstract
This paper addresses Benjamin Netanyahu’s border discourse in the context of radical right-wing populism. It discusses how, in the speeches and statements appearing in his official government website, Netanyahu construes groups located spatially outside Israel’s borders, mainly terrorists and migrants (the “wild beasts” and the “infiltrators”), as existential threats to Israel. The aim is to prove that, in legitimizing the militarization of borders through “security fences”, so that the “other” can be excluded from the nation, Netanyahu uses the same power geometries and discursive strategies, i.e. Proximization (Cap, Piotr. 2013. Proximization. The Pragmatics of Symbolic Distance Crossing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and dehumanizing metaphors (Santa Ana, Otto. 1999. ‘Like an Animal I Was Treated’: Anti-immigrant Metaphor in US Public Discourse.” Discourse & Society 10 (2): 191–224. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Musolff, Andreas. 2015. “Dehumanizing Metaphors in UK Immigrant Debates in Press and Online Media.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 31: 41–56. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Taylor, Charlotte. 2021. “Metaphors of Migration over Time.” Discourse & Society 321: 463–481. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), typically used by right-wing populist parties and leaders. By appealing to both populism and certain interpretations of Zionism, his ethnonationalist view of borders is based on the normalization of the discourse of delegitimation and exclusion of those groups considered as a threat to the nation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Borders and “othering” in the discourse of the nation
  • 3.Borders and populism in Israel in the age of Netanyahu
  • 4.The dataset
  • 5.Netanyahu’s border discourse
    • 5.1The necessity for a “security fence”: The “villa”, the “wild beasts” and proximization
    • 5.2Creating the threat through metaphors: The “waves of infiltrators”
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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