Political Comparisons and Russian Imaginaries in the Affective Politics of Israeli Twitter
The article examines the use of political analogies that mobilized Russian imagery on Israeli Twitter from 2017 to 2023, a period of ongoing political crisis that included five election campaigns and the advancement of the “legal reform” in Israel. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis based on a corpus of approximately ten million tweets in Hebrew, the study shows how these analogies act as an emotional and moral framing mechanism in polarized political discourse. They mediate between different times and spaces, carry emotions into the present, and shape the political imagination of the future.
The study’s findings reveal that the Netanyahu camp mainly mobilizes historical Bolshevik-Soviet images, which tie narratives of historical Jewish victimhood, the silencing of the people by an Ashkenazi-leftist elite, and sacred religious unity; while the opposition camp uses images from the contemporary Putinist era, which evoke narratives of violations of civil rights and freedom of expression, erosion of the rule of law, and liberal civic solidarity required to mobilize in place of gatekeepers who betrayed their position. This timeline-oriented difference – past versus present – shapes two parallel emotional realities that do not meet, and reflects two opposite forms of populism: authoritarian and liberal. Thus, the analogies not only reflect political emotions but also shape them. They convert vague feelings – repressed resentment on the one hand, shame and humiliation on the other – into coherent narratives that generate moral urgency for action. Thus, the study contributes to understanding how social networks serve as an arena for the emotional processing of opposing political identities in a polarized society.
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