Visual Framing of Israel and Palestine on the Covers of Time Magazine

Since its unofficial inception, Israel has persistently sought to legitimise its existence while obscuring the ethnic cleansing associated with its de facto establishment in 1948. This effort includes the consistent erasure of Palestine's history from global consciousness, intertwining historical revisionism with political narratives to reshape public perception. Contextualised within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a protracted and contentious dispute in modern history, this study explores the visual framing of the social agencies, Israel and Palestine, in the covers of TIME magazine from the year 2000 - 2025. As visual framing has been described as a method of shaping social realities by influencing readers through various interpretations of events and occurrences, this study investigates how magazine covers are used to produce meaning and social representations by contemporary image-makers and how these ‘meanings’ connect to the historical events. This paper utilises Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) interactional metafunction framework and van Dijk’s (1998) notion of ideological square as analytical and conceptual frameworks. The findings reveal a disparity in the representation of the two parties by TIME magazine; however, there is a balanced ideological positioning as TIME can be seen “humanising” both parties and rejecting polarised political leanings. Ultimately, this paper may serve as a call for emancipatory movements against war crimes, as suggested by the covers of TIME magazine.

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