Military conflicts are not only an occurrence on the battlefield, but also in communication. This is why it is important for a state to communicate a narrative that supports the state’s interests, a so-called strategic narrative. And when that narrative is focused to either promote the own state or demote its opponents, antagonistic narrative strategies - a theory made by Wagnsson and Barzanje- can be used for creating a successful strategic narrative.
In this paper the Israeli-Hamas case was studied in the United Nations General Assembly. This report aims to contribute to the research on strategic narratives in the context of armed conflict by analyzing Israel’s strategic narrative in The UN General Assembly regarding the ongoing conflict with Hamas, by analyzing how the strategic narrative can be understood by using antagonistic narrative strategies. A narrative analysis is used to interpret the speeches and the strategic narratives they were built upon, and also whether or not Israel used some kind of antagonistic narrative strategies in their speeches.
The results which were found was that Israel used all three of the antagonistic strategic narratives but to a different extent, in which the strategy suppression was used the most to change the status of states. It also showed that antagonistic narrative strategies are an effective way of describing and analyzing strategic narratives in the United Nations General Assembly.