| The purpose of the present thesis is to investigate how socially embedded interpretations of Israeli identity influence Israel's warring foreign policy towards Palestinians and conversely, how this warring foreign policy contributes to securing and stabilizing the underlying identity narratives of the dominant Israeli national identity. Based on an interpretative Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework which adopts a Foucauldian conceptualization of discourse as social practice, this thesis argues that today's dominant Israeli discourse of identity provides the interpretative framework for enabling and legitimizing the formulation of a warring foreign policy. It further contends that this formulation is pivotal to the cultural governance of the Israeli state by reproducing the dominant Israeli political identity and dismissing alternative Israeli and Jewish subjectivities. The case under study is the 2008 Gaza War, bearing the Israeli code name Operation Cast Lead. Borrowing from a CDA maxim which insists that analysis should be multimodal, this thesis takes the "aesthetic turn" and provides a reading of the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir (2008), showing how this popular cultural production may provide alternative critical discursive narratives about the Self and the Other, that may offer a challenge to war-as-policy. |
