Engineering of Consent on Social Media: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Israel Lobby Facebook Discourse in U.S.

The present study seeks to investigate the Israel-Zionist Lobby's Facebook pages’ discourse in the U.S. in 2018. This study examines the Lobby discourse in terms of engineering the American consent process regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, discourse construction (language, power, and ideologies usage within the Lobby's discourse), themes that emerged from the discourse and media representation of the conflict and all its components. The present study adopts Critical Discourse Analysis and NVivo program to analyze sixty most interactive Facebook posts of the most popular Israel Lobby's Facebook pages in the U.S. (StandWithUs, United with Israel, Stand for Israel, Christians United for Israel, and The Israeli Project). The posts include texts, images, and videos. In terms of the theoretical framework, the study examines the Engineering of Consent approach, and the Discourse Theory within the Israel Lobby's discourse on Facebook pages. Findings show that the Israel Lobby applied Bernays’s eight-steps system of the engineering of consent for their discourse. In addition, the study detects abuse of power within the discourse and, the discourse was constructed in a biased, ideological, and hegemonic way, that only serves the interests and narrative of the Jews and Israel, the powerful side of the conflict. The themes that were identified are; terrorism and anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, religious and national occasions, Israel and the U.S. relationship, world silence and support for Israel, humanization, Israel in the victim's status. Additionally, on one hand, the discourse represents and reflects the in-group (Jews, Israelis, Americans) in a positive manner and on the other hand, it also represents and reflects the out-group (Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians) in a negative manner.