Framing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Comparative Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of The New York Times in June 2014 and October 2023

This thesis analyses how The New York Times framed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in twoescalation months—June 2014 and October 2023—by examining a corpus of 807 articleswith AntConc and interpreting the results through Critical Discourse Analysis. In bothperiods Israelis are consistently lexicalized via state power (soldiers, military, forces),whereas Palestinians are cast through detention and factional frames (prisoners, jails,authority, factions), perpetuating an in-group/out-group asymmetry. By 2023 the Israelilexicon shifts toward aerial warfare and U.S. partnership (airstrike, warplanes, counterparts),while Palestinian discourse, still marked by incarceration, foregrounds humanitarian need andtransnational activism (aid, refugees, flags, pro-). Although negative acts by each side arereported, the underlying hierarchy of legitimacy endures. The study shows how stablekeywords can cloak evolving ideological work and demonstrates the value of pairing corpuslinguistics with CDA for longitudinal media research.