The use of the past in news articles

In December 2023 South Africa filed a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice for committing genocide in the Gaza strip. After the decade long conflict between Israel and Palestine had escalated again in the months before. This escalation and South Africa's meddling in this conflict on the world stage caused media from all over the world to report on the events. The role of journalism in conflict reporting has been widely explored in academic literature. These studies have shown that journalism plays a significant role in influencing public opinion and government policies. They also showed that various tactics and frameworks are used to either bring peace to conflicts (which is aimed with peace journalism) or to focus on winning, which often lexically increases conflicts (this is done with war journalism). Additionally, a considerable amount of research on collective memory has been done, often focusing on the role of collective victimhood on society. Yet, despite the inextricable link between history and journalism, little research has been done on the influence of the past on conflict journalism. This thesis tried to bridge this gap between memory studies and conflict journalism with answering the following research question: What role does the past play in Israeli and South African newspapers, reporting the South Africa v. Israel ICJ genocide case? To answer the research question a qualitative discourse analysis was performed on news articles from South Africa and Israel, using a comparative approach. This was done using ten articles from two papers from South Africa, and ten articles from two papers from Israel. The articles that were used were published in the first weeks of the case. An overlexicalization of the Holocaust in Israeli newspapers and an overlexicalization of South Africa's Apartheid history in South African papers showed that the newspapers use their own past as big explanatory thing for current events. The news articles covering the conflict were structured by a humanitarian discourse with which the newspapers tried to establish a position of moral authority for their country. The collective victimhood the countries experienced due to their traumatic past was used as a framework for this discourse. Findings of this thesis, thus, show that the past was primarily used to legitimize government policy and actions.