Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, Dar-ul-Madina International University, Islamabad

الملخص

The war in Gaza has triggered a great deal of political conversation that affects how people all over the world view identity, security, and war. In this respective context, Benjamin Netanyahu’s statements are significant in using narratives of civilizations, security, and legitimacy to frame the Gaza war. This study employs a Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CACDA) of five selected speeches delivered by Benjamin Netanyahu between 2024 and 2025 to examine how the language produces the Gaza war within a civilizational framework. The study adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative corpus analysis with qualitative critical discourse analysis and thematic interpretation. AntConc (version 4.3.1.0) was used to analyze the corpus, utilizing methods such as frequency lists, concordance lines (KWIC keywords in context), and collocation analysis, while Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model was employed to examine ideological patterns, positive self-presentation, negative other-presentation, and the construction of “self” and “other.” The findings demonstrate systematic discursive methods that produce a distinct in-group and out-group separation, depicting Israel as democratic, civilized, and morally and ethically justified while on the other hand framing Hamas and Iran as terrorist and existential threats. The corpus findings further reveal the recurrent use of lexical patterns related to Israel, Hamas, Gaza, war, threat, terror, security, civilization, democracy, and victory, which contribute to the construction of threat, legitimacy, collective identity, and ideological boundaries. These patterns reflect a wider narrative of civilizational war related to that addressed in Samuel P.Huntington’s thesis The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order and strengthen themes of collective identity, threat building, and the justification of military action. The study contributes to Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis by examining ideological representations in political discourse and demonstrating how quantitative linguistic patterns can be connected with qualitative interpretations of power, identity, and civilizational narratives. It also provides a useful reference for future research on political discourse and war rhetoric.