Arts as resistance to ethnic cleansing: a multimodal discourse analysis of political cartoons on Trump's Gaza displacement plan

Abstract

This study examines political cartoons depicting Trump's proposal to own Gaza and displace its people, while identifying the predominant themes within these cartoons. The dataset comprises ten political cartoons, purposively selected from an initial corpus of 50, sourced from various Arabic online newspapers. Multimodal discourse analysis, an approach that integrates language analysis with the analysis of other semiotic elements such as images, gestures, and symbols to interpret meaning (O’Halloran et al., 2011), is employed for the analysis. Kress and Van Leeuwen's Visual Social Semiotics framework, drawing on Halliday's functional socio-semiotic theory of language, is adopted to analyse the cartoons’ visual elements through its three metafunctions – representational, interactive, and compositional. The findings revealed ten predominant themes: (i) the hidden agenda of Trump's plan: ethnic cleansing of Palestinians; (ii) the Palestinian rejection of forced displacement; (iii) regional opposition and outrage against Trump's displacement plan; (iv) standing together: Arab unity against displacement; (v) fuelling occupation: power and materialism driving displacement; (vi) displacement and oppression are universal struggles; (vii) the unyielding steadfastness of Palestinians in the face of adversity; (viii) the land resists: defying displacement and occupation; (ix) the inevitable failure of the displacement plan; and (x) the right of return for Palestinian refugees. The author concludes that the significance of studying political cartoons cannot be overlooked.