The Geopolitics of Palestinian Reality

This chapter investigates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an important arena for global narrative contestation, where not only the primary actors but also rising powers like China strategically deploy multimodal narratives to shape the “first draft of history” and project influence within a shifting world order. This study pioneers a tri-polar comparative analysis of media from Israel, Palestine, and China, and introduces an innovative theoretical framework that synergizes framing theory with Strategic Narrative Theory to deconstruct how crisis events are communicated. The research examines two distinct crises: the kinetic, “fast-burn” Al-Ahli Hospital explosion of October 2023 and the legalistic, “slow-burn” South Africa v. Israel case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) of December 2023 onwards. Through a mixed-method approach combining qualitative multimodal critical discourse analysis with computational and corpus-assisted techniques, this chapter investigates how textual frames and visual grammar are strategically deployed across these three media ecologies to assign blame, construct victimhood, and assert legal and moral authority. 1