Constructing Victimhood in Official Responses to the Israel–Gaza War: A Corpus-Assisted Comparison of Emmanuel Macron and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Abstract

Research on the Israel–Gaza war has focused largely on media and online discourse, while comparative analysis of official leaders’ constructions of victimhood remains limited. This study uses a comparative corpus-assisted discourse design to examine how Emmanuel Macron and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan constructed victimhood in seven official texts and speech records published between 24 October and 4 December 2023. The controlled English corpus contains 6,836 tokens and is aligned with the French and Turkish originals. Keyness, concordance and collocation analyses were integrated with social actor coding, clause-level agency and responsibility analysis, framing analysis and leave-one-document-out checks. Both leaders used humanitarian, moral, legal and diplomatic resources, but distributed victim visibility and responsibility differently. Macron constructed a broader but uneven victim field encompassing Israeli victims, hostages, Palestinians and generalised civilian populations. He associated principal causal responsibility mainly with Hamas, while representing Israel more often through qualified legal and protective obligations. Erdoğan constructed a more concentrated Palestinian-centred victim field, foregrounding children, women, families and kinship. He attributed direct responsibility to Israel and extended enabling responsibility to Western governments and international institutions. The central contrast was not between humanitarian and emotional discourse, or between active and passive grammar, but between the actors associated with harm and the force with which responsibility was expressed. Van Dijk’s ideological square was supported more clearly through its two emphasis operations than through its de-emphasis operations. The study contributes a translation-aware and document-sensitive corpus-assisted account of how official political discourse selectively connects suffering, innocence, blame and legitimate response.