Characterizing “the Enemy”: Zionism and Islamism in the Iranian and Israeli Press

Abstract

This research sought to identify how 2 news outlets, Israel's Ynetnews and Iran's Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), framed the Iranian nuclear issue and Israeli-Palestinian conflict beyond the scope of objective reporting. The study examines the embedded strategy of journalists to spiritually elevate a national cause against the assumed enemy nation. Fifty-two news stories were examined under the chosen pretext of international conflict reporting. The findings show that IRNA typically framed the nation of Israel as a ''savage regime,'' Zionist oppressors, and general enemies of Islam. Ynetnews demonstrated a more narrow characterization of Iran's president rather than his countrymen, regularly casting the Iranian leader as the chief supporter of Islamic terrorist action and immediate threat to the Jewish State.

‘I have two homelands’: constructing and managing Iranian Jewish and Persian Israeli identities

“…The two identities may be perceived as irreconcilable and inherently antagonistic in view of the threat representations that underpin contemporary Israeli-Iranian relations -in Israel, Iran is represented as attempting to build a nuclear bomb to annihilate Israel, while in Iran, Israel is constructed as an anomaly in the "Muslim Middle East (Jaspal, 2014b;Klein, 2009). The siege mentality has been described in relation to Israeli society (Bar-Tal, 2000), but it is also observable in predominantly Shia Muslim Iran (Mokhtari, 2005).…”

“…There are widespread cultural perceptions of mutual threat between Israel and Iran (Klein, 2009). This can create tensions between Iranian-Persian and Israeli-Jewish identities, which, as exemplified by the data presented in this article, individuals endeavoured to synthesise and reconcile:…”

“…Israeli-Iranian relations have undergone significant changes over the last few decades -the two states have gone from being friends to foes. Given the prominent representation of intergroup threat in the mass media, political rhetoric and societal thinking (Jaspal & Coyle, 2014;Klein, 2009), coupled with the ideology of assimilation that underpins both nationstates, it is likely that self-identification as both Persian/Iranian and Jewish/Israeli could present potential social and psychological challenges.…”

Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in Iran

“…Moreover, given that the Iranian media follow an authoritarian press system and therefore represent the government position, it is difficult to make any definitive statements regarding social attitudes towards Jews and Israel among Iranian citizens on the basis of media research. 105 However, government media do constitute a major source of societal information and social representations. This has led some to argue that 'it is likely that ordinary Iranians, who are not exposed to the Western academic literature on the Holocaust, do believe the propaganda that they are served' by the Iranian regime.…”

Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism in Iran: The Effects of Identity, Threat, and Political Trust

“…There is now a body of social sciences research into the development and deployment of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in Iran (Jaspal, 2013a;Litvak, 2006;Shahvar, 2009). Much research in this area tends to focus upon the political functions of this ideological stance (Küntzel, 2010;Takeyh, 2006) and its manifestation in social and political institutions in Iran, such as the newspaper media (Jaspal, 2014;Klein, 2009). There is only very limited empirical insight into attitudes towards Jews and Israel among the Iranian general population (though see Jaspal, 2014, for smallscale qualitative interview research).…”