In Defense of Negotiated Readings: How Moderates on Each Side of the Conflict Interpret Intifada News

Based on a study of conversations within 50 Jewish and 15 Arab families in Israel during and after “Mabat,” television's evening news program, this article examines the ways in which extremists and moderates in the two communities frame the televised representation of the Israeli‐Arab conflict. Practices of partisan journalists who belong to one of the sides in such conflicts between “us” and “them” are shown to reinforce viewers' tendencies to attribute dispositional motives to aggression of the other side (in this case Palestinian uprisers). At the same time, violence on our side (i.e., Israeli soldiers) is explained in situational terms. Analysis of the families' discourse reveals that Jewish and Arab nationalists accept the text at face value: Jewish extremists read it hegemonically while their Arab counterparts decode it oppositionally. Jewish and Arab moderates, on the other hand, negotiate the text and, drawing on their personal and collective experience, invoke various rhetorical strategies to counter the unbalanced picture it presents. The study suggests that awareness and understanding of the constraints of the news genre, and of its social significance, are necessary for literate viewing and critical moderate decoding.