ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a historical-discursive context to current West Bank political discourse, by offering a historical context while examining the dialectics of occupation normalization and estrangement discourse since 1967. We present and critically analyze exemplary texts by leading political actors which have shaped political awareness in Israel with respect to the Occupied Territories. The dialectical movement of a West Bank ideology is based on attempts, at various stages, to both normalize and estrange the occupation. The discourse dialectically advances from a benevolent conqueror discourse, towards mythic and absolutist discourses (as normalization strategies), to an estrangement discourse which portrays people and territory as Other, and finally towards a discourse which attempts to synthesize these elements into a strategy that conflates oppositions into a coherent ideology. The dialectical movement from one period to the next represents a process in which the ideological tensions of each period necessitate giving way to an oppositional approach which attempts to either normalize or estrange the occupation. This discursive-historical framework both illustrates the dialectic movement of this discourse and establishes a backdrop to the examination of current discourse in the next chapters.
