Leiden University Student Repository

Bouka, Panagiota (2025)

Israel’s political discourse justifying its actions towards Palestinians from October 7th, 2023

Master thesis | Middle Eastern Studies (MA)

October 7, 2023, marked the beginning of yet another escalation of violence between Israel and Palestine, triggered by Hamas attacks and the Israeli military response. From that day until now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's public discourse has played a central role in shaping the political narrative and legitimizing state violence against the Palestinians. This paper examines how Netanyahu used rhetoric to construct the idea of the enemy and present the use of military force as a moral imperative. Based on Michel Foucault's theory of discourse and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study analyzes twelve historically and semantically selected statements made by Netanyahu between 2023 and 2025. The work concludes with an analysis of this rhetoric in other historical cases (the US in the Vietnam War and Russia in Ukraine), to highlight whether the phenomenon of rhetorical legitimization of violence is a unique case or part of a broader state practice.

Author

Bouka, Panagiota

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Supervisors

M.S. Berger

ECTS Credits

20

Language

en