When Israeli citizens commit terrorist attacks against other Israeli citizens, they problematize the dominant Western news narrative that says that Palestinians commit terrorist attacks against Israelis who respond in self-defense. The citizen-terrorist also wrecks the image boundaries of “terrorist” and “citizen,” because citizens are normally victims of terrorism. This study scrutinizes how elite U.S. print reporters covered three different terrorist attacks committed by Israeli citizens against Israeli citizens. Two attacks were carried out by Arab Israelis and one was carried out by an Israeli Jew. In all three cases, reporters managed to repair the image of the “citizen” by suggesting that terrorism came from the West Bank, not Israel. However, reporters repaired the image of the Jewish Israeli but not did repair the Arab Israeli image. By restoring the dominant images of Jew-as-victim and Arab-as-aggressor, reporters managed to re-invoke the narrative that Arabs attack Israelis.
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