`Telling-it-like-it-is': the delegitimation of the second Palestinian Intifada in Thomas Friedman's discourse

Abstract

The concept of legitimation is essentially social and political (Martin Rojo and Van Dijk, 1997). That is, what or who is legitimized depends to a large extent on who speaks and in what capacity, social status and role he/she speaks from. Legitimation, in this sense, is linked to power, with which comes the authority to `define the situation' (Parsons, 1986), and consequently the authority to determine what is right and wrong, and what is legitimate and justifiable and what is not. In this paper I examine the delegitimation of the second Palestinian Intifada in Thomas Friedman's discourse by analysing how the Intifada is discursively constructed in a column which Friedman contributed to the op-ed page of the New York Times. I aim to do this by (1) analysing the column's argumentative structure and moves employed in Friedman's delegitimizing construction of the Intifada, and (2) showing how the legitimation of political actors, including self-legitimation, is closely linked to Friedman's argumentation. I also report on the results of a critical discourse analysis of a corpus of Friedman's columns which support the analysis findings of the main text.