Representation of US Role in Palestine-Israel Conflict: a Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Cartoons Published in Global Times

Abstract

This study examines how the United States' role in the Palestine-Israel conflict is represented in political cartoons published by the Global Times, a Chinese state-affiliated newspaper. Using multimodal discourse analysis grounded in Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) visual social semiotics, it analyses 32 cartoons from 2023 and 2024 in terms of the representation of participants, salience and framing, colour, modal affordances and information value, alongside captions and embedded text. The cartoons fall into six themes: US escalation and war profiteering, the UN Security Council veto as obstruction of peace, hypocrisy and moral blindness, US overstretch, NATO militarism, and media bias and civilian suffering. In 24 of the 32 cartoons, the US is the principal actor and is represented negatively, most often through Uncle Sam, who is enlarged, centred and coloured in saturated national colours against dark or fiery backgrounds. Conventional metaphors such as fuel and fire, doves, guns and tilted scales compress complex diplomatic processes into legible images. Israel and Palestinians rarely appear as agents, so criticism of the conflict is displaced onto the US, while China is the only positively represented actor. The cartoons correspond to van Dijk's (1998) ideological square and align with China's declared foreign-policy position. The study shows how visual satire constructs a counter-hegemonic narrative of US foreign policy.