Edited by: Helmut Gruber, University of Vienna, Austria
Reviewed by: Hassan Atifi, Université de Technologie de Troyes, France; Ilaria Moschini, Università di Firenze, Italy; Agnieszka Piskorska, University of Warsaw, Poland
This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Communication
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I analyze Israel president Rivlin's 2020 speech delivered against the background of ongoing COVID-19 health threats and a severe political crisis, and its follow-ups in online news articles and in ordinary readers' comments on news sites and on Facebook. I examine the recontextualization practices used in this three-part discourse event, shedding light on their diversity and focusing on the degree of directness they manifest. Recontextualization is conceptualized as the strategic molding of situations and prior texts and their integration into another discourse through discursive practices. The analysis shows that the president recontextualizes the complex political and social crisis through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic. He frames the pandemic in terms of its morbid, mythic, and moral dimensions, as well as its influence on various aspects of civil and political disorder. This connection is drawn through the juxtaposition of propositions and the shifts between the deliberative and the epidictic keyings, alluding to Jewish tradition, prayers, and blessings. Through the use of the inclusive “we,” he self-positions as a leader on a par with ordinary people, whereas through direct demands formulated in the plural without personal naming he addresses his ratified addressees, the MPs and the ministers, and thus self-positions as an authority demanding accountability from the current leadership. The news articles in leading online media are short and partial, recontextualizing the speech and the situation through their titles, the selection of the extracts they chose to present and the very few evaluations they make. They mostly take up the president's moral framing and some of his explicit demands for political accountability. The commenters mostly follow up on the moral framing and the mythic dimensions proposed by the president but offer a different perspective on these issues. They shift the responsibility for “losing the compass” from the collective “we” advocated by the president to the politicians including the president, and they ironically echo the epidictic keying in order to challenge and even ridicule it. They further add another dimension to the speech event, by framing the president's speech as politically biased. The discursive patterns used all along this thread of discourses by all its participants range in degree of directness and recontextualize the object of talk, perspectives, keying and positionings.
On 12 October 2020 Israel's parliament, the Knesset, reconvened to mark the opening of its winter session. Israel president Reuven Rivlin addressed the Plenum. He was preceded by the then Parliament's Speaker Yariv Levin, and followed by PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Opposition Chair Yair Lapid. The ceremonial opening took place against the background of ongoing COVID-19 health threats and a severe political crisis. In this paper, I analyze the discursive practices employed by Rivlin to recontextualize this complex crisis, and their follow-ups in online news articles and ordinary readers' comments on the relevant news sites and on Facebook. The paper examines the recontextualization practices used in this three-part discourse event, shedding light on their diversity and focusing on the degree of directness they manifest. It shows that the president recontextualizes the complex political and social crisis through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic, with special emphasis on its morbid, mythic and moral dimensions, as well as its influence on various aspects of the civil and political disorder. The news articles in leading online media are short and partial, and recontextualize the speech and the situation through their titles, the selection of the extracts they chose to present, and the very few evaluations they make. The commenters mostly follow up on the moral framing and the mythic dimensions proposed by the president, but offer a different perspective on these issues. The discursive patterns used all along this thread of discourses recontextualize the object of talk, the keying, the president's perspective and his self-positioning in various degrees of directness.
The paper is structured as follows: the notion of recontextualization through follow-ups is briefly sketched, with reference to varying degrees of directness in its realizations (Section Conceptual framework); the speech event is then situated within the political crisis in Israel (Section Political background); the method of data collection is presented (Section Method), and recontextualization practices are analyzed (Section The discursive practices of recontextualization), distinguishing between their realizations in the speech (Section The president's speech), the journalistic reports (Section Online news articles and the president's post on Facebook), and the commenters' responses (Section Readers' comments). The findings are discussed in Section Discussion and conclusion.
Recontextualizations may shape and reshape social structures, interactional and communicative situations, concepts and propositions, objects of talk, and more (Linell,
“There are actual (“direct”) verbal quotes as well as general and rather vague influences. In no case are we faced with a true transfer of something; it is never the propagation of a fixed message across representational instances. Rather, it is a complex transformation, involving shifts of meaning, new perspectives, accentuation of some semantic aspects and the attenuation or total elimination of others.”
Explicit references to context, such as “It really depends on the context” (Fetzer,
Within the framework of relevance theory,
Tacitly-attributive meta-representations include echoic mentions (Sperber and Wilson,
In between the explicit and implicit ends of the scale, a few other practices are located. These will be analyzed and discussed.
Israel president Reuven Rivlin addresses the Plenum at the opening of the 23rd Knesset [Israeli parliament] winter session, 12 October 2020. As mentioned before (Section Introduction), the president's speech takes place in times of severe crisis on several levels. Israel undergoes the second outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic with nearly 2,000 deaths, and tight lockdowns are imposed, accompanied by violent public disputes. The country faces the fourth round of elections in 2 years, and there is a political deadlock over the passing of a new state budget; the then PM Benjamin Netanyahu awaits trial, nationwide demonstrations against him take place all over the country, and the police react violently. Severe breaches of health regulations by president Rivlin and PM Netanhayu took place a few months before, when both invited their children to spend the traditional Passover Evening (
The discussion combines a top-down and bottom-up textual analysis. The corpus consists of (a) the president's speech, published in the parliament minutes (Divrey Haknesset; Rivlin,
Number of comments collected for each outlet.
| Official Facebook page of president Rivlin | 277 |
| Ha'aretz | 117 |
| Ma'ariv | 151 |
| Globes | 3 |
| Israel Hayom | 60 |
| Ynet | 197 |
The discourse unit of analysis is the “conversation,” which is comprised of the article/post and the readers' comments that appeared for a period of two consecutive days from the time the article/post was published in each one of the media outlets selected for the corpora.
The data was collected through an automatic querying system. The database was retrieved in response to a single query that included the Hebrew words for “president” (
Considering Rivlin's speech as a realization of “subjective definitions of interactional or communicative situations” (van Dijk,
(1) “The Coronavirus pandemic and its victims have led me to think about those who have lost their lives, about the invisible angel of death, which does its dreaded deeds in isolated emergency rooms, without family members being able to take their leave at the last moment, to hold hands, to stroke faces.”
All along the speech topic shifts occur, but they are always connected to the Coronavirus. These movements back and forth are illustrated in (2), (3) below. In (2), the splits between the ethnic groups in Israel, which Rivlin calls “tribes,” are addressed. This topic has been of great concern to the president since he was elected, as is well-demonstrated in one of his first and most noteworthy speeches, “the tribes' speech” (
In the current speech, the issue of tribalism, which has preoccupied Rivlin all along, is connected explicitly to the pandemic, and implicitly to the elections and the violent demonstrations:
(2) “I was moved and in wonder by the way we have stood side by side, Jews and Arabs, secular, religious and ultra-Orthodox,
Acknowledging the centrality of the pandemic in this speech, I will henceforth focus on the three main themes adopted by the speaker to recontextualize the situation: the pandemic as morbid and mythic, the pandemic as a moral crisis, and the pandemic as an aspect of the social, cultural and economic crisis.
In his first words, the president recontextualizes the pandemic as morbid and mythic. By so doing, he embraces the epidictic dimension.
In his
President Rivlin's speech addresses multiple audiences, as is always the case with political speeches and, more specifically, with leader's speeches (Cap,
(3) “The Coronavirus pandemic and its victims have led me to think about those who have lost their lives, about the invisible angel of death, which does its dreaded deeds in isolated emergency rooms, without family members being able to take their leave at the last moment, to hold hands, to stroke faces. To those dear people, nearly 2,000 dead, I choose to dedicate words of prayer:
This interesting opening holds tight intertextual relations with several prayers related to death. anchored in Jewish tradition. “May God remember” (
On the whole, the president's opening paragraph alludes to ominous contexts of sadness, sins and morbidity. This rather sinister framing might have some impact on the theme of moral crisis.
We have already seen (Ex. 3) that the president weighs the virus-related helplessness in moral terms, contextualizing it as a sin requiring forgiveness by a Higher Power. He does so both explicitly (“May we be forgiven for the sin we committed […]”) and implicitly, through the allusion to the prayers of
Later in his speech, the president elaborates more explicitly on the theme of moral principles and values. He does so by using the word “compass” (
(4) “Ladies and gentlemen, leaders of Israel, it seems that
Here, the president explains what he means by “compass,” connecting it with Israel's commitments as a nation. The personal pronoun “we” (“we have lost our compass,” “with us,” “we are committed”) is inclusive, and most probably refers to Israeli citizens in general. This meaning is confirmed in the concluding paragraph, in which the speaker self-positions as a moral authority, possibly as a prophet who addresses his people:
(5)
He then proceeds to address the leaders of Israel:
(6) “It is a process that is not limited to the state of emergency. It is a process that demands difficult decisions.
Unlike in Ex. (4), here the president signals his addressees indirectly (“leadership”), alludes to their accountability (“which works for the benefit of all the citizens”), and sketches in some detail what seems to him the requirements from such leadership. However, he does not address the leaders directly.
In Israel's public talk, Rivlin's speech is often referred to as “the compass speech,” The analysis indicates that the president's moral talk is interlaced with shifts in the distribution of accountability for social action, as it is realized in the use of pronouns and the degrees of directness in naming his addressees. As we shall see later, the news articles and the commenters are attracted to the moral perspective. However, whereas the journalists foreground these extracts without commenting on them, the commenters challenge any hints about shared responsibility and thus recontextualize the moral accountability alluded to by the president, foregrounding the accountability of the political elite to the ordinary persons.
As explained earlier (Section Political background), the president's speech is delivered when Israel is in a crisis in many ways. The president establishes a connection between the many problems and the pandemic in a general statement:
(7) “I have seen for myself the medical teams, the volunteers, at Magen David Adom, at the healthcare organizations, in the social initiatives, those who care for the lonely and the isolated, those who work to bring computers that are beyond the means of schoolchildren, from north to south, across the whole country […]
He then proceeds to elaborate on some of the main aspects of the crisis, always connecting them explicitly to the pandemic:
(8) “The current crisis is amongst the worst we have experienced because, unlike other crises, it takes our basic freedoms from us and undermines our foundations as a Jewish and democratic state.
Here, he speaks of the risks posed to democracy by the regulations which forbid gatherings in the public space, including prayers in synagogues, demonstrations on the streets and sharing working spaces, and thus affect human and civil rights. Through the use of the first-person plural pronoun in the context of the opposition between “we understand” and “but find it hard to accept,” the president self-positions on a par with ordinary citizens who challenge the authorities. More specifically, he establishes a rather artificial link between the pandemic and the malfunctioning of the police. As part of the general disorder caused by frequent elections, a Chief of police has not been appointed by the PM for two years. The president connects it with the pandemic:
(9) “
The concluding demand (“Appoint a police commissioner now!”) is most probably addressed to PM Netanyahu, although the verb “appoint” (
Later in the speech, the president details the results of the malfunctioning of the police: disorder, aggressive demonstrations, commotions on the streets:
(10)
And finally, additional aspects of the crisis are addressed, including the educational, economical, occupational, medical, and social systems:
(11) “
Here again, as in (9) before, the president addresses his ratified addressees—members of parliament, ministers and the PM—in his demand to solve the problems and, more specifically, to pass a budget.
These extracts illustrate the way the president recontextualizes the political instability in Israel as tightly connected with the pandemic in terms of its morbid, mythic and moral dimensions, as well as its influence on various aspects of the civil and political disorder. He does so by establishing co-textual connections between those aspects, and switching between deliberative and epidictic keyings. Through the use of the inclusive “we,” he self-positions as a leader on a par with ordinary people. He further addresses his ratified addressees, the MPs and the ministers, with a list of demands, formulating them in the plural, without naming PM Netanyahu explicitly, even when specific contextual clues (Dascal and Weizman,
In the next sections, I examine the ways the president's perspective and his positioning are recontextualized in the articles and in his Facebook post, considering that they follow up on the speech and at the same time initiate readers' comments.
The key-word based search for relevant texts (see Section Method) yielded articles published in the news sections of the online journals under study. No op-ed was retrieved, which means that the speech did not initiate any major discussions. The news articles are short, the quoted extracts are partial and the journalists' evaluations are scarce and brief, as will be illustrated. These findings seem to indicate that the president's speech was not framed as particularly newsworthy. In the reports on the president's speech, his viewpoint is recontextualized in three ways: through the titles and sub-titles, through the selection of the quoted extracts and through the journalists' remarks.
(12) “The president delivered a speech in the opening of the winter session of the 23rd Knesset, in which he did not spare criticism of the PM's conduct: It seems we have lost the compass which has been with is since the establishment of the state.” (
This interpretation is particularly interesting since, as we saw earlier, in this statement the president uses the first person plural and does not address anyone specifically.
Only
(13) “A fierce attack by Citizen no 1.” (
On the whole, only small parts of the speech are quoted, and only two journals—
On the official Facebook page of president Rivlin only parts of the speech are posted. These include all the references to the compass metaphor, his direct demands from the leadership (e.g., “appoint a Chief of police,” “Pass a budget now,” “it's time for an attentive leadership […]”), references to the economic, cultural and social crisis, and expressions of belief and trust in the people (“I believe in this people. I believe in our ability to win. Believe in it too”). The only references to the pandemic are “The pandemic is here to stay,” and “we cannot cope with it with our hands tied behind our backs.” The epidictic allusions are omitted. However, a video of the full speech is posted, and the commenters' follow-ups indicate that they do not limit themselves to the written post.
The commenters mostly take up two themes of the president's speech—the moral framing and the epidictic contextualization of the pandemic—but they reshape both of them explicitly and implicitly: they shift the responsibility for “losing the compass” from the collective “we” to the politicians, including the president, and they ironically echo the epidictic keying in order to challenge and even ridicule it. Many of them further elaborate on another dimension which was partially hinted at in two news articles—the re-framing the president's speech as purely political. Two of the three central themes of the speech are of less interest to the commenters: they tend to show less interest in the pandemic as an aspect of the economic, cultural, and social crisis, and the few who do pursue this theme either challenge the president's symmetrical positioning of the police and the demonstrators (e.g., “The logical problem in your sentence is that you put the protesters and the police on the same side!!!,”
In what follows I will discuss the three main loci of the commenters' recontextualization—the epidictic (Section Challenging the epidictic perspective), the moral (Section Challenging the accountability for the moral crisis), and the political (Section Recontextualizing the speech as purely political).
We have seen that the president dedicates the first part of the speech to the presentation of the pandemic as morbid and mythic, both of them characteristics of the epidictic speech. In the Aristotelian perspective, unlike the deliberative speech, the epidictic raises no objection, since its interest lies in its virtuosity and dramatic value (or, in contemporary parlance, in its poetic function), rather than in its content (Aristotle,
In extract (14) below, the commenter addresses the president and criticizes what seems to him a disproportionate attitude:
(14)
He thus rejects explicitly the morbid framing as inappropriate (“You are fanning the flames with the fuel of pathos”) and even mocks it through the funeral metaphor (“The funeral ceremony is unnecessary”). Indirectly alluding to the coming elections (“Neither is the ballot box”), he echoes the claim that the president is politically biased (see Section Recontextualizing the speech as purely political), i.e., that the epidictic hides deliberative argumentation.
Another criticism is addressed at the president's allusions to the Jewish tradition:
(15) “Excuse me honorable president this is the Knesset not a synagogue (
The commenter plays with the Hebrew words
More indirect are the challenges in extracts (16), (17) below. Here, the commenters challenge the president's keying through ironic ad-hominem or ad-personam remarks. The notion of ad-hominem, literally “addressed at the man,” signifies arguments regarding the personality, background or circumstances of the person who makes the argument. Ad-hominem arguments are considered fallacious to the extent that they do not contribute to the argumentation. However, some researchers consider ad hominem to be non-fallacious if they draw on facts that undermine the speaker's reliability and authority in presenting his arguments (Amossy,
In (16) below, the commenter responds with both direct and ironic ad-personam challenges:
(16) “How I love you our dear President! Your lips speak emotionally and overcome the tremor. Thank you! You are a man full of compassion and human love.” (
Here, the commenter explicitly presents the president's serious and dramatic keying as a sign of his weakness through an ad-personam expression of disdain (“Your lips speak emotionally and overcome the tremor”). He adds ad-hominem ironic challenges, which include an insincere declaration of love and appreciation (“How I love you our dear president, you are a man full of compassion and human love”), followed by an insincere expression of gratitude (“Thank you”). Blatant violations of the sincerity condition are used as cues for ironic performance of illocutionary acts (Haverkate,
The irony in the following is more sophisticated:
(17) “Blessed be the one who resurrects the dead (
The commenter echoically mentions the president's construction of the epidictic through allusions to Jewish prayers and blessings, and thus ironically criticizes it. Unlike the president, however, the blessing alluded to has no connection to grief and sorrow (“Blessed be the one who resurrects the dead”), as it is traditionally given to someone who re-appears after more than a year of absence. This echoic mention can be understood as mockingly addressing the president's passiveness (or absence, in terms of the echoed blessing) in his role as leader. The commenter thus contests the president's authority and non-accountability to the public. This, in addition to the blatantly insulting term of address (“president nobody”), repositions the president as having no right to speak to the people and on behalf of the people.
Even more indirect is the extract below:
(18)
The first sentence is an echoic mention of the memorable announcement (19 below) written and read by Eitan Haber, special media adviser and speech writer of Israel Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin, immediately following Rabin's murder in November 4, 1995:
(19) “The government of Israel
Obviously, these words, which “became lodged in the national consciousness at many of the country's key junctures” (
We saw earlier that the president contextualizes the pandemic as a moral crisis. He does so, to a large extent, by elaborating on the notions of sins and forgiveness (Ex. 3) and repair (Ex. 5), as well as those related to ethics and the compass of principles and fundamental values (Ex. 4–6). The moral failures are attributed to a collective, inclusive entity referred to by “we,” which seems to position the president on equal footing with ordinary people. We saw also that the moral perspective is highly accentuated in the news articles (Section Online news articles). The analysis of the comments indicates that commenters largely elaborate on the metaphor of “losing the compass,” but they recontextualize it as a political failure rather than a moral one, and strategically use it to demand accountability from the president or from the political elite to the ordinary public. They do so mostly through meta-pragmatic comments that contest the president's use of the inclusive pronoun “we”.
This is the case, for example, in (20)–(24) below. The speakers accept the president's notion of 'losing the compass, but unanimously reject the implication that ordinary people like themselves share the blame. They thus demand accountability from the president himself (20), the political elite including the president (21), the members of parliament (22) and Prime Minister Netanyahu (23, 24), who awaits trial for fraud and breach of trust.
The speaker in extract (20) enjoys a word-play:
(20) “No Mr. president,
We have already seen that the president plays with the phonetic similarity between
The other remarks on the president's political aspirations are direct:
(21) “You're confused....
(22) “Ruby darling, those who lost their compass are the 120 clowns [=MPs] who sit in the Knesset [parliament] and do nothing and nothing.” (
(23) “The accused of fraud and breach of trust [= PM Netanyahu] lost his compass.” (
(24) “Rivlin, understand, Bibi has a compass that leads him to evade justice.” (
Other commenters are less specific. In (25), the speaker indirectly rejects any implications regarding shared accountability, in a comment that represents his metapragmatic awareness of the function of “we,” but unlike in the previous extracts, he does not point out to the responsible:
(25) “How Rivlin loves to speak in the plural […].” (
This expressive speech act may be interpreted as an ironic criticism of what seems to the commenter to be Rivlin's satisfaction with his self-positioning as solidary with the ordinary people, if it is interpreted as an echoic mention of his thoughts and beliefs.
Closely related to these accusations is the shift from the president's self-positioning as an unbiased, somewhat spiritual leader to his other-positioning by the commenters as a mere politician who promotes his political agenda. This is in line with Dori–Hacohen and Shavit's (
The comments which represent this perspective are clearly ad-hominem. Most of them adopt a personal, emotive self- positioning, as in (26):
(26) “
Ad hominem criticism is expected from readers of
(27)
The political positioning assigned to the president is unanimously condemned as inappropriate. Only once does the commenter seem to praise the president for what she considers as political involvement:
(28) “Join one of the parties as the next prime minister. The entire people will vote for you! You are the only one who can save the country.” (
Of course, it could well be the case that the commenter ironically echoes the president's presumed thoughts, in which case he is critical too. Whether ironically critical or praising, this extract joins examples (26), (27) in repositioning the president as being motivated by political interests, thus replacing the self-positioning of the president as an ideologist and moralist with his other-positioning as a biased politician.
On the whole, the commenters seem to be attracted to the idea that the crisis and the pandemic are related to a moral failure. More specifically, they seem to take up and develop the metaphor of a compass that has been lost. However, they shift explicitly and implicitly from its rather abstract contextualization in the speech as related to sins, punishment and forgiveness and its attribution to a collective, blurred “we” which includes the president, the people and the leadership, to a specific list of wrongdoings which they explicitly assign to political leaders including the president himself. Additionally, they reject the epidictic keying, mostly through intertextual ironic echoic mentions, and they explicitly recontextualize the speech as political rather than ideological. Through these strategies, they recontextualize the object of talk, the president's perspective, the keying and his self-positioning.
The speech event analyzed in this paper consists of three components: a speech, reports on the speech on Facebook and in online leading journals, and readers' comments on Facebook and on the news sites. I consider all the components of this recontextualization thread as subjective interpretations of social events and their textual representations. I further adopt van Dijk's understanding that “this does not mean that social and political situations and structures may not have objective dimensions (e.g., of time and space), or that they are not experienced as ‘real' by social members […], such social situations are able to influence discourse only through their (inter) subjective interpretations by participants” (van Dijk,
This thread of texts made it possible to examine the complexities of recontextualization. First, the speech represents the recontextualization of the extra-textual, social situation, whereas the news articles and the comments recontextualize prior texts and by so doing—reframe also the situation. Second, this thread of discourses, which develops across media and genres, sets the stage for the examination of a rich array of recontextualization practices and their degree of directness.
The speech is represented only partially in the news sections of Israel leading journals.
The commenters mostly take up two themes of the president's speech—the moral framing and the epidictic contextualization of the pandemic—but most of them offer a different perspective on these issues. They do so directly and indirectly: they shift the responsibility for “losing the compass” from the collective “we” to the politicians including the president, and they ironically echo the epidictic keying in order to challenge and even ridicule it. They further add another dimension to the speech event, by framing the president's speech as politically biased. At the same time, they tend to show less interest in the framing of the pandemic as an aspect of the economic, cultural, and social crisis. The comments range from direct,
The pragmatic analysis of recontextualization practices in this paper profited from the multi-modal and multi-participant nature of the thread of discourses that constitutes the discourse event under study. It provides further support to the understanding that participants are regularly engaged in construing their different perspectives in relations to social events and prior texts, and it sheds light on the intertwining of discursive resources used to recontextualize objects of talk, perspectives, keying, and positioning.
The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.
Ethical review and approval was not required for the study involving human subjects in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent from the subjects for the publication of potentially identifiable data was not required in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.
The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.
I am most grateful to the reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments, and to Ms. Veronica Zilberstein-Michaeli for her invaluable contribution to the methodological aspects of this research.
The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
1A scale of resemblance between echoed sources and echoing mentions underlying the notion of meta-representation has been proposed in Weizman and Kohn (
2The URLs in this paper are linked to the Hebrew source texts. All URLs were last accessed on November 16, 2022, unless indicated otherwise.
3This is particularly prevalent in the comments on Facebook (with 20 occurrences of the “compass” “metaphor”), and in the newspaper