On October 11, the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas under leader Khalid Mish’al agreed to a prisoner swap of unprecedented proportions. 1000 male and 27 female Palestinian prisoners will be freed from Israeli jails in exchange for the Israeli soldier Gil’ad Shalit. The respective interpretations of the deal by Netanyahu and Mish’al, due to their position in the discourse, illustrate the respective Israeli and Palestinian right wing discourse structures, thereby serving as a prototypical introduction to Israeli-Palestinian conflict discourse.
Mish’al gave a televised speech on the prisoner swap deal. In the following, the relevant discourse fragments from his talk are analysed. Please keep in mind that a public speech like this is very different from an everyday speech act. It is rhetorically polished, full of figures of speech, and aimed at a particular audience which is, in this case, spread all over the globe.
“(…) On this day, 11 October, after five years of hard work and steadfastness in the form of severe sacrifices, fatigue, sweat, and blood and after difficult indirect negotiations with the Israeli occupier via the mediation of our brothers in Egypt, we were able, with God’s grace, to reach this exchange deal for our heroic and noble prisoners in the occupation jails, both men and women, in exchange for the soldier and Israeli prisoner of war we captured in a battle, in exchange for the prisoners who were abducted and arrested, their only sin being that they were steadfast about their land and were engaged in a legitimate resistance against the occupation. I bring good tidings! of this deal to all our people, inside the territories and outside, to our Arab and Islamic nation, to the free people of the world, and to lovers of freedom who are eager to break the shackles of the occupiers.
Tonight we are not going into details. (…) Rather, we will talk about the form, the promise, and about this national achievement that was carried out by the mujahid wings on the land of Palestine. (…) This deal is part of God’s grace upon us. It is a great achievement, in the distinct scope and quality of our prisoners, in exchange for the Zionist imprisoned soldier Gil’ad Shalit. (…)
“(…) A very important point is that the deal encompasses the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, the 1948 territories, the Golan, and the Palestinian diaspora. Geographically, it is an expression of the nation’s unity and the unity of the Palestinian people. This is a unified people. This deal says that the Palestinian people are one, whether inside the Palestinian territories or outside. The Palestinian people, in any geographical area they reside, whether inside or outside, are one people, with one fate, one cause, one blood, and a single suffering. Our responsibility, as a resistance force, must be one. This is why we devoted efforts and engaged in a fierce battle to secure their release from prison – for the sake of our people in Jerusalem, in the 1948 territories, and in the Golan.
“Furthermore, this deal embodies and cements the unity of the people because it includes all the factions. We did not focus on one particular faction just because it was the one who captured the soldier. This is a national achievement, O sons of people and our nation – this is your achievement for all the people. Everyone engages in the struggle, everyone is part of the nation, and everyone has made sacrifices. Everyone carries a weight round our necks. This is a national achievement, you deserve it, and we are all proud of it, with God’s grace. (…)
“We are happy about this great achievement and we praise God for it. But our happiness is mixed with pain and sadness, because we are not able to release all the prisoners. We have secured the release of all of the female prisoners in this deal, but we are concerned about all the other male prisoners. However, we were not able to include all 8,000 prisoners. This is still painful for us. We were looking forward to releasing as many as possible, but a deal in exchange for one soldier, after five years of hard work, could not carry more than this maximum achievement which we managed to impose on the Israeli leadership and the Israeli negotiator. O sisters and brothers, sons of my people and sons of the great nation, this agreement was not made easily. We waged a fierce battle, which is why it comes a few years late, because the enemy procrastinated and blackmailed, but in the end, the will of our people and our fierce negotiator prevailed, with God’s grace, until we wrested this great achievement. This is the very maximum that a deal could achieve in exchange for one soldier. Those who will be released are heroes. They should go back to their families and homeland, go back to their path in life, the path of freedom, and resume their national and struggle activities. Ask that God accrue all that they suffered during life in prison to their credit. They are an emblem of confidence for their people and we are all proud of them. (…)
“To those who remain in the prisons, we say: We promise and swear that we will continue our efforts until we release all of you. This is a promise with God, and a pledge to you. He who releases 1,027 people will secure the release of 8,000 prisoners, and of any prisoner arrested in the past or the present, or anybody the enemy is thinking of arresting in the future. The Palestinian resistance leadership is entrusted with this responsibility and it will not stop exhibiting it. Moreover, it will do the impossible to release all of you. This is a promise and an oath, God willing. We fulfilled our promise today, and we will do the same tomorrow.(…) This is an opportunity to send our thanks and grace, first of all to God almighty; he is the one who helped capture the soldier and ensured the success of the operation. We do not say this as an exaggeration. This deal today is one more in a series of blessings that have preceded it. But this is the first deal involving a Zionist prisoner inside Palestine. (…)
“From here I am sending greetings, praise, and pride to the heroic Al-Qassam Brigades, and to the other resistance factions, who managed to bring this soldier from the battlefield in Operation Shattered Illusion, which in fact shattered the illusions of the occupying enemy and made the dream of releasing our prisoners a reality for our people, with God’s grace. Greetings to the Al-Qassam Brigades and all the Palestinian resistance factions. God have mercy on the martyrs of the Operation Shattered Illusion. May God heal those wounded in this operation and release those arrested by the occupation forces in the aftermath of this operation. We thank our great people in the Gaza Strip who withstood so much after the operation: 500 martyrs in a matter of days and weeks as the enemy exacted revenge after we succeeded in capturing the soldier Gil’ad Shalit. The Gaza Strip suffered five lean years of siege, punishments, distress, and continuing aggression and paid an exorbitant price. Greetings to the people of Gaza, our beloved people and heroes and families. Greetings to our great people in the West Bank, who have also paid an exorbitant price in hardships, siege, aggression, and in the arrest of cabinet ministers, deputies, and leaders. The West Bank is still bleeding and suffering pain and torment because of Israel’s revenge.
“We thank the brotherly Egypt for engaging in the difficult negotiations with us and for exerting efforts that are worthy of gratitude. We thank its general intelligence apparatus for taking up a national duty of which we are proud. Their efforts were fruitful, with God’s grace. We thank everyone who helped make this deal happen, both states and individuals, especially Qatar, Turkey, Syria, and the German mediator. It is a privilege and a duty for me, my brothers in HAMAS, the leaders engaged in Palestinian national and Islamic activities, and all the leaderships of the Palestinian resistance to praise our negotiating team. They are four great and wonderful stars who stand out for their devotion, expertise, experience, efficiency, skill, knowledge of detail, and patience so that this deal could be secured. Pray God to reward our people and our nation because of them. The military and political leadership take pride in them.
“Let me conclude by saying: O great people, this is a great achievement, a national achievement, which we should not turn into a partisan or factional issue. We are all part of this great nation. This is a national achievement. The people who accomplished it can make additional national achievements. They can liberate land, cleanse Jerusalem, attain the right of return. They can strengthen national unity, unify the Palestinian ranks and the decision making process, based on a Palestinian point of reference. For this reason, I call on my brothers in the Palestinian [National] Authority, leaders of the resistance, leaders of Palestinian factions, and political forces – I call on everyone both within and outside the Palestinian territories, and I say to you that this achievement was made by all of us. We are proud of it and we are preparing for other achievements. Moreover, we are planning more achievements in our national enterprise until we liberate Palestine an! d establish o ur independent state, God willing. May God bless you, peace and God’s mercy and blessings be upon you.”
This discourse fragment contains numerous allusions and ellipses that indicate discourse interlacings and the borders of the sayable in Palestinian right wing discourse. With “severe sacrifices, fatigue, sweat, and blood”, Mish’al alludes to both the martyrdom discourse strand which glorifies all those who have died in the fight against Israel, and to the overall discourse strand which identifies Israel as the cause of all Palestinian hardship. The wording “fatigue, sweat and blood” is reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s famous “sweat, blood and tears”-speech during the Second World War, thus reinforcing the understanding that Palestinians are, in fact, at war with Israel. Here, Mish’al leaves out the numerous efforts for peace that have been made in the past decades. The use of religious vocabulary (“with God’s grace”, “sin”, “Islamic”) establish a connection between Hamas’ politics and a higher power which supposedly sanctions those very politics.
The use of the personal pronouns “we” (37 mentions) and “our” (19) mark the borders of the in-group, while mass labels like “the Israeli occupier” evoke the image of a homogenous, faceless, dehumanized mass. The in-group is characterised as “heroic and noble”, “steadfast about their land”, “engaged in a legitimate resistance”. Israel is characterised by the words “difficult”, “abducted”, “arrested”, “occupation”, “Zionist” and the chism between in- and outgroup is made explicit by the inherent antagonism between Israel and the “lovers of freedom who are eager to break the shackles of the occupiers”. All heterogeneity of Israeli society, all Israeli efforts for peace, in short: the whole Israeli narrative is left out.
The image of “our brothers in Egypt” and the mentioning of “our Arab and Islamic nation” evoke the idea of Pan-Arabism, of brotherhood among the all Arabs, leaving out not only the kinship between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Arabs, who are part of the enemy state, but also ethnic and historical relations between Israeli Jews and Middle Eastern Arabs as well as the numerous political disruptions between Palestinian Arabs, especially Hamas, and the political leaderships of the neighbouring states.
The phrase “this national achievement that was carried out by the mujahid wings on the land of Palestine” connects the activities of Palestinian militant and armed factions to Palestinian national identity, thereby reinforcing the understanding that military action against Israel is acceptible as long as it is for the cause of establishing a Palestinian nation. The wording “that was carried out (…) on the land of Palestine” underlines the extreme position taken by Hamas that all of Israel really is Palestinian land: Shalit was captured inside Israel.
One of Mish’al’s main aims is to establish – regardless the facts – that the Palestinian people is one, united and, thus, unbreakable. The frequent mentioning of words like “unity” (5), “unified” (1), “one” (in connection to attributes of national unity, 6), “national” (6, 3 times “national achievement”), “proud” (5), “pride” (2), “great nation” (2) and, again, the use of the pronouns “we” and “our” illustrate this. This leaves out, of course, that the Palestinian political factions are and have been divided for several years now, and are still far from a “unity government”. Social psychology has proven that conflicts, especially if they are longterm, give a group extreme cohesion against the “enemy”; on the flip-side, however, this sort of cohesion also considerably narrows the spheres of the “speakable”, so that critique of the in-group, let alone acceptance of members of the out-group, becomes all but impossible. The fact that Palestinian hegemonic discourse still includes numerous and regular mentions of “collaborators with the enemy” and “traitors” illustrates these constraints.
The twice-mentioned phrase “paid an exorbitant price” refers to another common strand in Palestinian discourse (and parts of the International, for that matter), that Israeli measures against Palestinians in the Gaza strip and the Westbank tend to be considerably out of proportion. In the phrase “they can liberate land, cleanse Jerusalem”, the verb “liberate” alludes to the discourse of national liberation movements worldwide, the noun “land” refers to the key role of territory in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the verb “cleanse” has strong anti-Israeli connotations and connects Mish’al’s statement to Nazi ideology and discourse, the international discourse on “ethnic cleansing”, but also to the American discourse on the strategy of “clear, hold, shape and build” that has been used in Afghanistan, where the initial phase of “clearing” is very similar to that which the verb “cleansing” implies.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remarked on the day of Gilad Shalit’s release:
“Citizens of Israel, today we are all united in joy and in pain.
Two-and-a-half years ago, I returned to the Prime Minister’s Office. One of the principal and most complicated missions that I found on my desk, and which I set my heart to, was to bring our abducted soldier Gilad Shalit back home, alive and well. Today, that mission has been completed.
It entailed a very difficult decision. I saw the need to return home someone whom the State of Israel had sent to the battlefield. As an IDF soldier and commander, I went out on dangerous missions many times. But I always knew that if I or one of my comrades fell captive, the Government of Israel would do its utmost to return us home, and as Prime Minister, I have now carried this out. As a leader who daily sends out soldiers to defend Israeli citizens, I believe that mutual responsibility is no mere slogan – it is a cornerstone of our existence here.
But I also see an additional need, that of minimizing the danger to the security of Israel’s citizens. To this end, I enunciated two clear demands. First, that senior Hamas leaders, including arch-murderers, remain in prison. Second, that the overwhelming majority of those designated for release either be expelled or remain outside Judea and Samaria, in order to impede their ability to attack our citizens.
For years, Hamas strongly opposed these demands. But several months ago, we received clear signs that it was prepared to back down from this opposition. Tough negotiations were carried out, night and day, in Cairo, with the mediation of the Egyptian government. We stood our ground, and when our main demands were met – I had to make a decision.
I know very well that the pain of the families of the victims of terrorism is too heavy to bear. It is difficult to see the miscreants who murdered their loved ones being released before serving out their full sentences. But I also knew that in the current diplomatic circumstances, this was the best agreement we could achieve, and there was no guarantee that the conditions which enabled it to be achieved would hold in the future. It could be that Gilad would disappear; to my regret, such things have already happened.
I thought of Gilad and the five years that he spent rotting away in a Hamas cell. I did not want his fate to be that of Ron Arad. Ron fell captive exactly 25 years ago and has yet to return. I remembered the noble Batya Arad. I remembered her concern for her son Ron, right up until her passing. At such moments, a leader finds himself alone and must make a decision. I considered – and I decided. Government ministers supported me by a large majority.
And today, now Gilad has returned home, to his family, his people and his country. This is a very moving moment. A short time ago, I embraced him as he came off the helicopter and escorted him to his parents, Aviva and Noam, and I said, ‘I have brought your son back home.’ But this is also a hard day; even if the price had been smaller, it would still have been heavy.
I would like to make it clear: We will continue to fight terrorism. Any released terrorist who returns to terrorism – his blood is upon his head. The State of Israel is different from its enemies: Here, we do not celebrate the release of murderers. Here, we do not applaud those who took life. On the contrary, we believe in the sanctity of life. We sanctify life. This is the ancient tradition of the Jewish People.
Citizens of Israel, in recent days, we have all seen national unity such as we have not seen in a long time. Unity is the source of Israel’s strength, now and in the future. Today, we all rejoice in Gilad Shalit’s return home to our free country, the State of Israel. Tomorrow evening, we will celebrate Simchat Torah. This coming Sabbath, we will read in synagogues, as the weekly portion from the prophets, the words of the prophet Isaiah (42:7): ‘To bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house.’ Today, I can say, on behalf of all Israelis, in the spirit of the eternal values of the Jewish People: ‘Your children shall return to their own border [Jeremiah 31:17].’ Am Yisrael Chai! [The People of Israel live!]“
Similar to the respective Palestinian discourse fragment, the use of the personal pronouns “we” (13) and “our” (6) in this fragment reinforces the idea of the Israeli people as one nation, united on its land, standing steadfast against its enemies. The use of the word “home” (6), “unity” (2), illustrates this, too. ” Unity is the source of Israel’s strength, now and in the future.”
The sentence “As a leader who daily sends out soldiers to defend Israeli citizens, I believe that mutual responsibility is no mere slogan – it is a cornerstone of our existence here” refers to numerous realities of life in Israel, namely the on-going and perpetual perception of danger which is answered by entertaining and deploying a highly trained army in defence of the Israeli nation, the very strong rootedness of the Israeli Defense Force in Israeli society up to the point where membership in special forces becomes an attribute in itself, and the afore-mentioned group cohesion in conflict situations which entails the need to take responsibility for one another regardless the circumstances. Again, this leaves out the partly extreme disparities and controversies inside the Israeli in-group, most recently illustrated by the large protests against social disparity and housing policies, not to mention the perpetually fragile government coalitions of recent years.”It is a cornerstone of our existence here” contains a classic securitizing move and alludes to the fact that Israel has perceived itself surrounded by enemies ever since it was established in 1948. By discursively connecting mutual responsibility to the possibility of existing here – thereby implying that without mutual responsibility, that existence were threatened – the speaker securitizes and legitimates the Shalit deal as necessary to avoid danger to the existence of the state of Israel in a hostile environment.
The phrase “those designated for release either be expelled or remain outside Judea and Samaria” mirrors the Palestinian discourse strand that speaks about “cleansing” (see above”), while “Judea and Samaria”, the official Israeli term for the Westbank which is prominent in Israeli right-wing discourse, connotates an exclusively Israeli control over Palestinian territory.
The phrasing “The State of Israel is different from its enemies: Here, we do not celebrate the release of murderers. Here, we do not applaud those who took life. On the contrary, we believe in the sanctity of life. We sanctify life. This is the ancient tradition of the Jewish People” contains a classic glorification of the in-group in contrast to a demonized out-group. Palestinians in general are depicted as faceless, dehumanized, cruel mass in this discourse fragment, illustrated by terms and phrases like “miscreants”, “rotting away in a Hamas cell”, “enemies” and “murderers”. With the phrase “any released terrorist who returns to terrorism – his blood is upon his head”, all the people released as part of the Shalit-deal are depicted as terrorists who may or may not choose to “return” to terrorism; however, there are numerous Palestinian prisoners in Israeli cells who have never been tried, the evidence against whom would at least in some cases not suffice to sustain a terrorism charge. By calling all released prisoners terrorists, the speaker securitizes them for the Israeli people and inherently legitimizes any future extraordinary measures against what Israeli hegemonic discourse defines as terrorism. Also, the Palestinian narrative is ignored altogether, leaving out Israeli aggression towards Palestinian citizens as well as efforts for peace on the Palestinian side.
These two discourse fragments illustrate the mistrust, fear and anger which resulted from the decades-long confrontation between the two adversaries. It is only in Israeli and Palestinian counter discourse that more cooperative discourse structures can be found; more on that in another post.