Abstract
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is amongst the most polarizing topics today, particularly when comparing predominant U.S. and Arab perspectives. News media are often criticized for being pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, and more so during deadly wars. This study examines all 320 images Al Jazeera Arabic and Fox News put out in their articles covering the May 2021 Gaza War and investigates how Qatar and the U.S.’s proximity to Israel and Palestine factored into the outlets’ visual framing choices. Despite both invoking the David and Goliath master narrative, they provided a polarized coverage of the war, with Al Jazeera proliferating narratives of Hamas and pro-Palestine supporters and exclusively foregrounding the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and Fox legitimating Israeli military actions and presenting Hamas as a terrorizing force that disrupts the lives of Israelis as well as wreaks havoc and fuels anti-Jewish sentiments in the U.S. After dissecting the cross-cultural differences in death and dying portrayals, displays of Israelis and Palestinians, and recurrent visual themes, the study concludes with a discussion on the influence of news agencies on media’s photographic decisions and the implications of extreme alignment in the proximity-framing nexus on the propagation of mediated clash of civilizations in the digital news sphere.
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