Avoiding Blame in Israeli Editorials the March of Return and the Terror Wave

With the recent violence inside Israel and the Palestinian territories showing how distant peace in the region really is, engaging with the question of responsibility for the occupation and the conflict's future is paramount to finding a just solution for it. As influential gatekeepers of the public sphere, the media plays an important role in this discussion by framing and evaluating events, ushering in specific understandings into the public debate. Editorials are a particularly powerful tool in this process because they are unencumbered by the pursuit of objectivity, and overtly serve persuasive and normative purposes through the mobilisation of intersubjective knowledge. As the occupying power's society is precluded from engaging in conversations about responsibility while blame avoidance strategies obscure events and offer a way out of engagement with criticism, this research aimed to answer the following question: what forms of blame avoidance took place in the editorials published by Haaretz and Jerusalem Post during the 2015 and 2016 Terror Wave and the 2018 and 2019 March of Return? Embedded in the qualitative approach, this study engaged with Discourse Analysis to reveal the presence of blame avoidance strategies in both Israeli newspapers. In accordance with the literature that establishes bias as a form of social identity construction, this research found that whilst the left-wing Haaretz did not employ blame avoidance strategies, the right-wing Jerusalem Post made extensive use of them. The analysis of the Jerusalem Post's editorials further revealed the use of extreme claims to avoid engagement with criticism stemming from the International community. As no indication of such claims was present in Haaretz, their presence on the Jerusalem Post indicated the materialisation of a discourse of persecution and imminent danger that seems out of place in the contemporary reality and standing of Israel.