Negotiated and Mediated Meanings: Ethnicity and Politics in Israeli Newspapers

In this article the author explores the ways in which the media articulate discursive structure and lived experience through an analysis of the coverage of the 1999 Israeli national elections in one Israeli newspaper. Recent changes in Israeli electoral law unleashed new social forces that granted major political influence to ethnic parties. The renewed salience of (Jewish) ethnicity clashes, however, with dominant discourses of national identity, according to which a unitary Israeli identity subsumes particularistic Jewish ethnicities, while silencing Palestinian identity. Such changes imply an important role for the Israeli media, which has traditionally marked identity difference through distinct regimes for the expression and control of affect. The author examines constructions of affect, and their inscription onto particular social identities, in Yediot Ahronot, Israel's widest-circulation daily.