Abstract
This study investigates the United States’ 20-point plan, unveiled in September 2025, which seeks to end the Gaza-Israel conflict and outline a conditional pathway toward Palestinian statehood. The main objective is to examine how linguistic and pragmatic choices within the plan construct peace, power, and legitimacy between the two parties. The analysis adopts Searle’s speech act theory, conceptual metaphor theory and critical discourse analysis as its theoretical framework, focusing on the performative and pragmatic functions of the speech acts embedded in each of the plan’s twenty clauses. Methodologically, the study employs a pragma-discourse analytical approach, treating each clause as a performative utterance to uncover implicit meanings and power relations. The findings reveal that, although the plan emphasizes humanitarian aid and reconstruction, it systematically prioritizes Israeli security concerns while deferring substantive Palestinian sovereignty. The study concludes by recommending that future peace proposals should adopt more balanced linguistic framing to ensure equitable representation of both parties and to avoid reproducing geopolitical hierarchies through discourse.
Introduction
Peace proposals and post-conflict frameworks are not neutral diplomatic instruments; they are complex linguistic artefacts that construct particular visions of reality through discourse. The words and metaphors used in such texts perform strategic acts of persuasion, legitimation, and identity framing. Within the Gaza-Israel context, where conflict narratives have long been contested, each proposal for peace is itself a pragmatic act, an attempt to re-define agency, morality, and responsibility through language. This study examines the United States 20-Point Gaza-Israel Peace Framework (2025) as a site of political communication, analysing how pragmatic and discourse strategies encode ideological meanings and shape perceptions of peace, security, and reconstruction.
Political discourse analysts such as Fairclough (1995), van Dijk (1998), and Charteris-Black (2004) have shown that language in policy texts reflects and reproduces relations of power. Similarly, pragmatics scholars including Austin (1962), Searle (1969), and Grice (1975) argue that speech acts and implicatures reveal the performative intentions underlying communication. When combined, these perspectives illuminate how political texts do not merely describe social realities but enact them. In the case of Gaza, diplomatic discourse operates as both a performative commitment to peace and a strategic attempt to manage international legitimacy.
Political discourse analysts such as Fairclough (1995), van Dijk (1998), and Charteris-Black (2004) have shown that language in policy texts reflects and reproduces relations of power. Similarly, pragmatics scholars including Austin (1962), Searle (1969), and Grice (1975) argue that speech acts and implicatures reveal the performative intentions underlying communication. When combined, these perspectives illuminate how political texts do not merely describe social realities but enact them. In the case of Gaza, diplomatic discourse operates as both a performative commitment to peace and a strategic attempt to manage international legitimacy.
Content
Literature review
Scholarly work on the Israel-Palestine crisis consistently demonstrates that the conflict is not sustained purely through military confrontation or diplomatic stalemate but through deeper historical structures, socio-political asymmetries, and discursive mechanisms that shape how actors, events, and responsibilities are represented.
Foundational analyses by Bar-Tal (2013) conceptualise the conflict as an intractable socio-psychological formation, drawing upon collective memory, fear, and entrenched narratives of victimhood. His findings establish that political texts, policy frameworks, speeches, communiqués, play a central role in reproducing these repertoires by determining whose suffering is foregrounded and whose agency is backgrounded.
Studies have traced how settler-colonial logics, territorial dispossession, and the long-term securitisation of Palestinian identity have shaped the linguistic architecture of peace proposals over many decades. Their analyses show that official discourse routinely recasts structural domination as security necessity or humanitarian intervention, thereby embedding asymmetry into the very grammar of diplomatic communication. These historical dynamics are mirrored in the contemporary political economy of Gaza (Khalidi, 2020; Pappe, 2006; Masalha, 2012; Shlaim, 2014).
Roy’s (2011) extensive study shows that the enclave has been systematically transformed into a humanitarian space without sovereignty, where economic precarity is not an accidental by-product of conflict but the outcome of sustained political design. Her work shows that international aid frameworks, reconstruction plans, and technical policy language often function as instruments of governance, distributing resources while simultaneously constraining Palestinian autonomy. Peteet (2017) adds a spatial and bureaucratic dimension to this analysis, showing how checkpoints, mobility restrictions, and administrative regimes produce fragmentation not only on the ground but also in how Gaza is discursively constructed as an exceptional, securitised space requiring management rather than genuine political resolution. These studies collectively establish that any contemporary peace-related text emerges within a material context defined by occupation, blockade, and institutionalised asymmetry, and that such texts often naturalise these constraints through ostensibly neutral administrative vocabulary.
Research on political communication deepens this understanding by showing how metaphors, framing devices, and lexical choices shape public perception and policy reception in the conflict. Farsakh (2011) demonstrates that debates around sovereignty, particularly the viability of one-state versus two-state models, are linguistically structured through demographic metaphors, territorial framings, and moral narratives that subtly guide interpretations of what constitutes a “realistic” solution. In parallel, Gordon and Perugini (2015) examine how human rights discourse itself can be mobilised as a technology of domination, lending moral legitimacy to practices that reinforce differential control. Their work reveals that even normative vocabularies of protection and accountability may displace or obscure structural violence when selectively applied. Collectively, these studies emphasise that political texts are not neutral containers of policy but ideological acts that allocate agency, distribute moral standing, and prescribe acceptable forms of political behaviour.
Recent empirical analyses extend these theoretical insights into the 2023–2025 period, focusing particularly on Gaza’s representation during the escalations of those years. Corpus-driven and discourse-analytic studies identify recurring metaphorical patterns, Gaza as a wounded or diseased body, conflict as a virus requiring containment, peace as reconstruction or rehabilitation, that reinforce interventionist and securitised framings consistent with historical scholarship (Bar-Tal, 2013; Shlaim, 2000; Roy, 2011). These metaphors frequently appear in Western political briefings, international organisations’ reports, and official Israeli and Palestinian statements. Analysts note that such metaphors are not merely stylistic: they activate cognitive models that legitimise external oversight, technocratic governance, and incremental or conditional sovereignty.
Furthermore, emerging commentary on the 2025 U.S. peace framework situates it within a long lineage of externally engineered post-conflict plans characterised by managerial peacebuilding, conditional sovereignty, and security-led sequencing. These studies argue that policy documents of this type often link peace to economic liberalisation, stabilisation forces, and supervisory international bodies. In this sense, they echo the concerns articulated by Roy (2011) and Gordon and Perugini (2015), suggesting that the grammatical structures and lexical choices of such plans, phrases like “capacity-building,” “pathway,” “reform,” “assessment mechanisms”, operate to normalise dependency and defer substantive sovereignty. Critics describe these frameworks as advancing a “new colonial peace,” in which reconstruction is framed as a benevolent gift contingent upon compliance, thereby aligning with Bar-Tal’s (2013) findings on delegitimising narratives and Khalidi’s (2020) account of historically entrenched asymmetry.
Across these bodies of literature, a consistent gap emerges: while there is extensive scholarship on media representations, historical roots, and humanitarian dimensions of the Gaza–Israel conflict, systematic pragma-discourse analyses of full policy texts remain rare. Most studies analyse speeches, negotiations, or media excerpts rather than conducting clause-by-clause examinations of an official, contemporary peace framework.
The integration of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, pragmatic speech-act analysis, and Critical Discourse Analysis has been proposed in theoretical discussions but remains underapplied in the context of formal policy texts issued by external powers. This absence is striking given the central role these documents play in shaping international decision-making, humanitarian strategies, and the conditions of Palestinian life.
The present study directly addresses this lacuna by offering a comprehensive pragma-discourse analysis of the full 20-point framework. By combining metaphor identification, illocutionary analysis, and CDA, the study builds upon the historical and critical insights of the literature while providing a fine-grained account of how peace is linguistically constructed as a conditional, technocratic, and asymmetrically administered process. This approach situates the document not only within the geopolitical landscape of the conflict but also within the broader scholarly tradition that interrogates how language constitutes power, legitimacy, and political possibility in the Israel-Palestine crisis.
3. Theoretical Framework
3.1 Speech act theory: The performative power of policy language
Originally developed by Austin (1962) and extended by Searle (1969, 1979), Speech Act Theory posits that utterances are not merely descriptive but performative, they do things in the world. Austin distinguished between three levels of speech acts: the locutionary act (the literal expression), the illocutionary act (the speaker’s intended function, such as requesting or promising), and the perlocutionary act (the effect produced on the hearer). Searle (1979) further classified illocutionary acts into representatives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations, each with unique felicity conditions.
Policy documents, though formally written, operate performatively much like speech acts. Their clauses often serve as commissives (“Gaza will be redeveloped”), directives (“Hamas members… will be given amnesty”), or declarations (“Gaza will be a deradicalised terror-free zone”). Each clause enacts a commitment, an instruction, or an institutional fact once accepted by relevant actors. Thus, within this Framework, language itself constitutes political action, the textual act of constructing peace, delineating obligations, and legitimising authority. This interpretation aligns with Chilton’s (2004) and Cap’s (2017) analyses of international diplomatic discourse, where linguistic form serves as a medium of institutional performativity.
In addition, Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principle and conversational maxims, of quantity, quality, relation, and manner, assist in identifying implicatures and presuppositions. Policy discourse often violates these maxims strategically, creating implicatures that conceal coercive content under the guise of cooperation. For example, the clause “New Gaza will be fully committed to peaceful coexistence” presupposes that the old Gaza was uncommitted, thereby moralising the text’s ideological stance. These pragmatic mechanisms are therefore central to uncovering how policy language performs persuasion while maintaining an appearance of neutrality.
3.2 Critical discourse analysis
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) provides the ideological lens through which speech acts and implicatures are contextualised. CDA views discourse as a social practice that both reflects and constructs social relations of power (Fairclough, 1995; van Dijk, 1998). Its key assumption is that linguistic structures are neither arbitrary nor value-free; rather, they reproduce ideologies that sustain institutional dominance. Van Leeuwen (2007) identifies four major legitimation strategies, authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, and mythopoesis, through which political texts justify authority and policy. Each of these strategies can be observed within the Framework’s language.
For example, authorisation is visible in repeated references to the “Board of Peace” headed by named international figures, invoking institutional legitimacy. Moral evaluation occurs when the text contrasts “terror-free Gaza” with the presumed immorality of radical groups. Rationalisation emerges through technocratic and developmental terminology (“modern and efficient governance,” “economic development plan”), suggesting that intervention is justified by pragmatic necessity rather than ideology. Finally, mythopoesis, the narrative construction of moral exemplars and lessons, appears in the promise of “New Gaza” as a symbol of redemption and progress. By identifying these legitimation patterns, CDA helps reveal how the Framework disguises asymmetric power relations as humanitarian cooperation.
Fairclough’s (1995) three-dimensional model, comprising textual analysis, discourse practice, and sociocultural practice, underpins this study’s analytical structure. The textual level involves clause-level examination of lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical choices; the discourse practice level considers production and consumption contexts (e.g., U.S. authorship, global media circulation); and the sociocultural level interprets ideological implications within the geopolitical and humanitarian fields. Integrating CDA ensures that pragmatic insights are not treated as isolated linguistic observations but as manifestations of ideological strategies that reinforce global hierarchies and political dependency.
3.3 Conceptual metaphor theory
Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Kövecses, 2010; Musolff, 2016; Semino, 2008) extends the analysis from linguistic pragmatics to cognitive representation. According to CMT, metaphor is not a mere stylistic device but a fundamental mechanism of thought by which abstract target domains (e.g., governance, peace, reconstruction) are understood through concrete source domains (e.g., medicine, architecture, commerce). These mappings structure the ways individuals and societies conceptualize political realities and, in doing so, normalise particular ideologies (Charteris-Black, 2004; Kövecses, 2020).
Metaphor studies of political discourse reveal recurring patterns such as THE NATION IS A BODY, POLITICS IS WAR, and ECONOMY IS A MACHINE (Musolff, 2016). In post-conflict discourse, these metaphors often shift to therapeutic or technocratic frames, as in SOCIETY IS A PATIENT or PEACE IS CONSTRUCTION. Within the Framework, metaphorical mappings such as GAZA IS A PATIENT, GAZA IS A CONSTRUCTION SITE, and PEACE IS AN ENGINEERING PROJECT perform cognitive work by framing reconstruction as a technical, curative process rather than a political negotiation. Kövecses’s (2020) dynamic view of metaphor supports this approach by allowing the identification of “metaphor scenarios,” in which multiple lexical expressions cluster around shared cognitive models, such as healing, building, or managing, that encode ideological assumptions about agency and control.
CMT therefore complements both Speech Act Theory and CDA. While Speech Act Theory explains what the text does (its illocutionary functions), and CDA explains why it does so (its ideological motivations), CMT reveals how these acts are cognitively framed to make them persuasive and naturalised. The three frameworks are thus not independent but hierarchically aligned: pragmatic structure (speech acts and implicatures) feeds into cognitive framing (metaphor), which is finally interpreted within the socio-political ideology (CDA).
Scholarly work on the Israel-Palestine crisis consistently demonstrates that the conflict is not sustained purely through military confrontation or diplomatic stalemate but through deeper historical structures, socio-political asymmetries, and discursive mechanisms that shape how actors, events, and responsibilities are represented.
Foundational analyses by Bar-Tal (2013) conceptualise the conflict as an intractable socio-psychological formation, drawing upon collective memory, fear, and entrenched narratives of victimhood. His findings establish that political texts, policy frameworks, speeches, communiqués, play a central role in reproducing these repertoires by determining whose suffering is foregrounded and whose agency is backgrounded.
Studies have traced how settler-colonial logics, territorial dispossession, and the long-term securitisation of Palestinian identity have shaped the linguistic architecture of peace proposals over many decades. Their analyses show that official discourse routinely recasts structural domination as security necessity or humanitarian intervention, thereby embedding asymmetry into the very grammar of diplomatic communication. These historical dynamics are mirrored in the contemporary political economy of Gaza (Khalidi, 2020; Pappe, 2006; Masalha, 2012; Shlaim, 2014).
Roy’s (2011) extensive study shows that the enclave has been systematically transformed into a humanitarian space without sovereignty, where economic precarity is not an accidental by-product of conflict but the outcome of sustained political design. Her work shows that international aid frameworks, reconstruction plans, and technical policy language often function as instruments of governance, distributing resources while simultaneously constraining Palestinian autonomy. Peteet (2017) adds a spatial and bureaucratic dimension to this analysis, showing how checkpoints, mobility restrictions, and administrative regimes produce fragmentation not only on the ground but also in how Gaza is discursively constructed as an exceptional, securitised space requiring management rather than genuine political resolution. These studies collectively establish that any contemporary peace-related text emerges within a material context defined by occupation, blockade, and institutionalised asymmetry, and that such texts often naturalise these constraints through ostensibly neutral administrative vocabulary.
Research on political communication deepens this understanding by showing how metaphors, framing devices, and lexical choices shape public perception and policy reception in the conflict. Farsakh (2011) demonstrates that debates around sovereignty, particularly the viability of one-state versus two-state models, are linguistically structured through demographic metaphors, territorial framings, and moral narratives that subtly guide interpretations of what constitutes a “realistic” solution. In parallel, Gordon and Perugini (2015) examine how human rights discourse itself can be mobilised as a technology of domination, lending moral legitimacy to practices that reinforce differential control. Their work reveals that even normative vocabularies of protection and accountability may displace or obscure structural violence when selectively applied. Collectively, these studies emphasise that political texts are not neutral containers of policy but ideological acts that allocate agency, distribute moral standing, and prescribe acceptable forms of political behaviour.
Recent empirical analyses extend these theoretical insights into the 2023–2025 period, focusing particularly on Gaza’s representation during the escalations of those years. Corpus-driven and discourse-analytic studies identify recurring metaphorical patterns, Gaza as a wounded or diseased body, conflict as a virus requiring containment, peace as reconstruction or rehabilitation, that reinforce interventionist and securitised framings consistent with historical scholarship (Bar-Tal, 2013; Shlaim, 2000; Roy, 2011). These metaphors frequently appear in Western political briefings, international organisations’ reports, and official Israeli and Palestinian statements. Analysts note that such metaphors are not merely stylistic: they activate cognitive models that legitimise external oversight, technocratic governance, and incremental or conditional sovereignty.
Furthermore, emerging commentary on the 2025 U.S. peace framework situates it within a long lineage of externally engineered post-conflict plans characterised by managerial peacebuilding, conditional sovereignty, and security-led sequencing. These studies argue that policy documents of this type often link peace to economic liberalisation, stabilisation forces, and supervisory international bodies. In this sense, they echo the concerns articulated by Roy (2011) and Gordon and Perugini (2015), suggesting that the grammatical structures and lexical choices of such plans, phrases like “capacity-building,” “pathway,” “reform,” “assessment mechanisms”, operate to normalise dependency and defer substantive sovereignty. Critics describe these frameworks as advancing a “new colonial peace,” in which reconstruction is framed as a benevolent gift contingent upon compliance, thereby aligning with Bar-Tal’s (2013) findings on delegitimising narratives and Khalidi’s (2020) account of historically entrenched asymmetry.
Across these bodies of literature, a consistent gap emerges: while there is extensive scholarship on media representations, historical roots, and humanitarian dimensions of the Gaza–Israel conflict, systematic pragma-discourse analyses of full policy texts remain rare. Most studies analyse speeches, negotiations, or media excerpts rather than conducting clause-by-clause examinations of an official, contemporary peace framework.
The integration of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, pragmatic speech-act analysis, and Critical Discourse Analysis has been proposed in theoretical discussions but remains underapplied in the context of formal policy texts issued by external powers. This absence is striking given the central role these documents play in shaping international decision-making, humanitarian strategies, and the conditions of Palestinian life.
The present study directly addresses this lacuna by offering a comprehensive pragma-discourse analysis of the full 20-point framework. By combining metaphor identification, illocutionary analysis, and CDA, the study builds upon the historical and critical insights of the literature while providing a fine-grained account of how peace is linguistically constructed as a conditional, technocratic, and asymmetrically administered process. This approach situates the document not only within the geopolitical landscape of the conflict but also within the broader scholarly tradition that interrogates how language constitutes power, legitimacy, and political possibility in the Israel-Palestine crisis.
3. Theoretical Framework
3.1 Speech act theory: The performative power of policy language
Originally developed by Austin (1962) and extended by Searle (1969, 1979), Speech Act Theory posits that utterances are not merely descriptive but performative, they do things in the world. Austin distinguished between three levels of speech acts: the locutionary act (the literal expression), the illocutionary act (the speaker’s intended function, such as requesting or promising), and the perlocutionary act (the effect produced on the hearer). Searle (1979) further classified illocutionary acts into representatives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations, each with unique felicity conditions.
Policy documents, though formally written, operate performatively much like speech acts. Their clauses often serve as commissives (“Gaza will be redeveloped”), directives (“Hamas members… will be given amnesty”), or declarations (“Gaza will be a deradicalised terror-free zone”). Each clause enacts a commitment, an instruction, or an institutional fact once accepted by relevant actors. Thus, within this Framework, language itself constitutes political action, the textual act of constructing peace, delineating obligations, and legitimising authority. This interpretation aligns with Chilton’s (2004) and Cap’s (2017) analyses of international diplomatic discourse, where linguistic form serves as a medium of institutional performativity.
In addition, Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principle and conversational maxims, of quantity, quality, relation, and manner, assist in identifying implicatures and presuppositions. Policy discourse often violates these maxims strategically, creating implicatures that conceal coercive content under the guise of cooperation. For example, the clause “New Gaza will be fully committed to peaceful coexistence” presupposes that the old Gaza was uncommitted, thereby moralising the text’s ideological stance. These pragmatic mechanisms are therefore central to uncovering how policy language performs persuasion while maintaining an appearance of neutrality.
3.2 Critical discourse analysis
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) provides the ideological lens through which speech acts and implicatures are contextualised. CDA views discourse as a social practice that both reflects and constructs social relations of power (Fairclough, 1995; van Dijk, 1998). Its key assumption is that linguistic structures are neither arbitrary nor value-free; rather, they reproduce ideologies that sustain institutional dominance. Van Leeuwen (2007) identifies four major legitimation strategies, authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, and mythopoesis, through which political texts justify authority and policy. Each of these strategies can be observed within the Framework’s language.
For example, authorisation is visible in repeated references to the “Board of Peace” headed by named international figures, invoking institutional legitimacy. Moral evaluation occurs when the text contrasts “terror-free Gaza” with the presumed immorality of radical groups. Rationalisation emerges through technocratic and developmental terminology (“modern and efficient governance,” “economic development plan”), suggesting that intervention is justified by pragmatic necessity rather than ideology. Finally, mythopoesis, the narrative construction of moral exemplars and lessons, appears in the promise of “New Gaza” as a symbol of redemption and progress. By identifying these legitimation patterns, CDA helps reveal how the Framework disguises asymmetric power relations as humanitarian cooperation.
Fairclough’s (1995) three-dimensional model, comprising textual analysis, discourse practice, and sociocultural practice, underpins this study’s analytical structure. The textual level involves clause-level examination of lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical choices; the discourse practice level considers production and consumption contexts (e.g., U.S. authorship, global media circulation); and the sociocultural level interprets ideological implications within the geopolitical and humanitarian fields. Integrating CDA ensures that pragmatic insights are not treated as isolated linguistic observations but as manifestations of ideological strategies that reinforce global hierarchies and political dependency.
3.3 Conceptual metaphor theory
Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Kövecses, 2010; Musolff, 2016; Semino, 2008) extends the analysis from linguistic pragmatics to cognitive representation. According to CMT, metaphor is not a mere stylistic device but a fundamental mechanism of thought by which abstract target domains (e.g., governance, peace, reconstruction) are understood through concrete source domains (e.g., medicine, architecture, commerce). These mappings structure the ways individuals and societies conceptualize political realities and, in doing so, normalise particular ideologies (Charteris-Black, 2004; Kövecses, 2020).
Metaphor studies of political discourse reveal recurring patterns such as THE NATION IS A BODY, POLITICS IS WAR, and ECONOMY IS A MACHINE (Musolff, 2016). In post-conflict discourse, these metaphors often shift to therapeutic or technocratic frames, as in SOCIETY IS A PATIENT or PEACE IS CONSTRUCTION. Within the Framework, metaphorical mappings such as GAZA IS A PATIENT, GAZA IS A CONSTRUCTION SITE, and PEACE IS AN ENGINEERING PROJECT perform cognitive work by framing reconstruction as a technical, curative process rather than a political negotiation. Kövecses’s (2020) dynamic view of metaphor supports this approach by allowing the identification of “metaphor scenarios,” in which multiple lexical expressions cluster around shared cognitive models, such as healing, building, or managing, that encode ideological assumptions about agency and control.
CMT therefore complements both Speech Act Theory and CDA. While Speech Act Theory explains what the text does (its illocutionary functions), and CDA explains why it does so (its ideological motivations), CMT reveals how these acts are cognitively framed to make them persuasive and naturalised. The three frameworks are thus not independent but hierarchically aligned: pragmatic structure (speech acts and implicatures) feeds into cognitive framing (metaphor), which is finally interpreted within the socio-political ideology (CDA).
Conclusion
Across the twenty clauses, a consistent pragma-discursive pattern emerges. Directive acts dominate, portraying Palestinians as subjects of reform and Israel as guarantor of order. Commissives function as rhetorical tools of moral authority, while conditionals encode hierarchy through dependency. Metaphorically, the Framework constructs peace as purification, development, and control, reinforcing Western managerial logic. Pragmatically, it redefines peace as compliance, not equality. Ideologically, it legitimises asymmetric governance through humanitarian and economic rhetoric. This study examined the United States’ 20-Point Gaza-Israel Peace Framework (2025) through a pragma-discursive lens, integrating insights from Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1979), Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995; van Dijk, 1998; van Leeuwen, 2007), and Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Kövecses, 2010; Musolff, 2016).
The analysis treated each clause in the framework as a performative unit, combining illocutionary force, cognitive framing, and ideological presupposition. In doing so, it illuminated how the language of peace functions not merely as description, but as linguistic action, performing power, shaping perception, and legitimising geopolitical hierarchy.
The findings reveal that the 20-point text operates as a linguistic apparatus of control in which peace is defined and administered from a position of asymmetry. Through a predominance of directive and commissive acts, the United States projects authority and moral guardianship, while Palestinian agency is linguistically constrained. Clauses such as “Gaza will be a deradicalised terror-free zone” and “Hamas members who commit to peaceful co-existence will be given amnesty” construct peace as obedience, positioning Palestinians as the moral object of reform. Conversely, Israeli actions, such as “Israel will not annex Gaza,” are represented as voluntary benevolence rather than compliance with international law.
Across the text, linguistic strategies of conditionality, enumeration, and bureaucratic precision reframe coercive measures as administrative fairness. Humanitarian promises and economic pledges, phrased through metaphors of healing (“redevelop Gaza for the benefit of its people”) and construction (“rebuild and energise Gaza”), encode an underlying technocratic paternalism. Pragmatically, the clauses convert structural inequality into moral logic, turning power into benevolence and dependency into cooperation.
The analysis treated each clause in the framework as a performative unit, combining illocutionary force, cognitive framing, and ideological presupposition. In doing so, it illuminated how the language of peace functions not merely as description, but as linguistic action, performing power, shaping perception, and legitimising geopolitical hierarchy.
The findings reveal that the 20-point text operates as a linguistic apparatus of control in which peace is defined and administered from a position of asymmetry. Through a predominance of directive and commissive acts, the United States projects authority and moral guardianship, while Palestinian agency is linguistically constrained. Clauses such as “Gaza will be a deradicalised terror-free zone” and “Hamas members who commit to peaceful co-existence will be given amnesty” construct peace as obedience, positioning Palestinians as the moral object of reform. Conversely, Israeli actions, such as “Israel will not annex Gaza,” are represented as voluntary benevolence rather than compliance with international law.
Across the text, linguistic strategies of conditionality, enumeration, and bureaucratic precision reframe coercive measures as administrative fairness. Humanitarian promises and economic pledges, phrased through metaphors of healing (“redevelop Gaza for the benefit of its people”) and construction (“rebuild and energise Gaza”), encode an underlying technocratic paternalism. Pragmatically, the clauses convert structural inequality into moral logic, turning power into benevolence and dependency into cooperation.
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Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Polity Press.
Farsakh, L. (2011). The one-state solution and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Palestinian challenges and prospects. Middle East Journal, 65(1), 55–71.
Fassin, D. (2012). Humanitarian reason: A moral history of the present. University of California Press.
Gordon, N., & Perugini, N. (2015). The human right to dominate. Oxford University Press.
Group, P. (2007). MIP: A Method for Identifying Metaphorically Used Words in Discourse. Metaphor and Symbol, 22(1), 1–39.
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