The 2014 Israel-Gaza War and the Role of Translation in the Re-narration of Palestinians by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW)

This research investigates the translation project of Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), an Israeli advocacy group. It examines how PMW used translation in the context of the 2014 Israel-Gaza War to narrate Palestinians as anti-Semites and Islamist terrorists. This paper analyses both the textual and paratextual framing devices that PMW used in its translation of Palestinian texts to build these negative narratives about the people of Palestine and their leaders. To conduct the analysis, this research benefits from narrative theory and the notion of framing. It reveals that PMW weaved these narratives about Palestinians by selectively appropriating texts, decontextualising them, and emplotting them in a PMW predetermined narrative. Addition and omission of textual material were also broadly used by PMW to frame readers’ interpretation of the translated material. Titles of PMW’s publications, its introductions, and executive summaries were used to foreground its narratives.