Do You Condemn?

Negotiating Power Relations through (In)Direct
Questions and Answers Design in Ethno-political Interviews

Political Condemnations and Moral Scripts

Condemnations are an integral rhetorical resource of epideictic rhetoric, the rhetoric of praise and blame, which acknowledges and promotes moral values on the one hand, while on the other disparages those social actors who violate them. In assigning nobility or baseness to public actors and their actions, epideictic rhetoric sets models for proper conduct and thereby reinforces shared values and traditions (Hauser 1999). As articulations of an epideictic of blame, political condemnations are speech acts that presuppose the facticity of prior transgressive acts and involve a negative evaluation made by one actor (individual, state, or organization) toward another (Kampf and Katriel 2016).

Defined as expressive speech acts (Searle 1976) that give voice to speakers’ critical stance toward violation of a law, a norm, or a code of behavior, condemnations are constructed in terms of normative scripts that inform a moral dissent from the alleged transgression and justify their public performance (Kampf and Katriel 2016). The act of condemnation reconfigures an adversarial relationship between the condemning party and the target of the condemnation (Chouliaraki 2000; Butler 2005), seeking to mobilize the latter’s shame and to induce a deterrent effect, thus establishing a discourse of accountability in political affairs (Keenan 2004).

The models for “proper” civic behavior are dramatized through discursive rituals of morality that involve self-distancing and pointed disapproval (Kampf and Katriel 2016). Discursive rituals of condemnations center on a particular pivotal speech act – a condemnation or a demand to condemn – and epitomize the relation of speech acts to societal values. Condemnations and calls for condemnations are thus rhetorical resources in political communication since they are grounded in normative scripts and conventions that inform individual and community conduct (Kampf 2013).

Adopting Lakoff’s argument (2001:212) according to which concentrating on speech acts “located in a specific cultural and societal time and place, we can come to understand a great deal about who we are, what we want, and the rules and assumptions that bind us together as a society,” the study of condemnation rituals enables us to understand public actors’ scripts of morality and their social and political positioning vis-à-vis acts, events, or other actors within or outside their group.

Calls to condemn as rituals of loyalty in political interviews

During a panel discussion on Channel 2, Jewish-Israeli journalist Sivan Rahav-Meir identified a “recurrent ritual” in Israeli news interviews with Arab-Israeli representatives. According to Rahav, following a violent action inflicted by Palestinians against Israelis or provocative statements made by an Arab-Israeli representative, there is:

“a kind of amusing practice in which an interviewer tells himself he will be the one who is going to educate the (Arab-Israeli) interviewee (by asking) ‘Do you condemn the terrorist attacks?’” (July 19, 2006, Channel 2).

The call for condemnation serves in this case as a pivotal action around which a ritual of loyalty to the nation is constructed. The ritual is opened with an assertive yes/no “do you condemn” question (Clayman and Heritage 2002a), which in the context of the ethnic identities of the two participants can be interpreted as a demand to choose between one of the two components of the Arab-Israeli identity: civic affiliation (resulting from citizenship in the State of Israel) or national sentiment (Arab-Israeli affinity to the Palestinian people who are not citizens of Israel) (see Al-Haj 2000).

In the second part of the ritual, interviewees face an avoidance dilemma (Bavelas, Black, Chovil, and Mullett 1990) since they must choose between one of two untoward alternatives: to condemn the act and thereby publicly adhere to the normative model of the Jewish-Israeli political community while ignoring national Palestinian sentiment, or conversely, to refuse to condemn and thereby distance themselves from what is constructed as consensual by the interviewers while aligning with the national Palestinian sentiment.

As happens in most cases in which interviewees face an avoidance dilemma, a third option, that of equivocation by means of indirect answer design, is also plausible (Bavelas, Black, Chovil, and Mullett 1990; Bull 1998). If the call to condemn is rejected by interviewees, the ritual continues with a negotiation over the non-normative stance taken by them or by discussing the equivocal answer in order to make it less ambiguous (Blum-Kulka and Weizman 2003).

The call to condemn and its respective answer serves as a resource for self-and-other positioning at both the interactional and social levels (Blum-Kulka, Liebes, and Kampf 2003; Harré and Moghaddam 2003; Weizman 2008).

At the interactional level: The various options for responding to the direct question – ranging between direct yes/no to indirect answers – represent a struggle over interactional power and a negotiation over the level of freedom allowed in responding to an assertive question (Clayman and Heritage 2002b).
At the social level: In calling to condemn a previous act, Jewish-Israeli interviewers pose the threat to discursively exclude their interviewees from their mutual civic community. The call requires interviewees to conform to the political script the interviewers envision as binding so as to regain a moral status and membership rights in the national community.

Thus, in responding to the call, Arab-Israeli interviewees have a range of options to position themselves in relative proximity to the Jewish-Israeli political community and the Palestinian one. In what follows I will discuss the interactional and social functions of each turn in the ritual.

Interviewers’ self-positioning through a “do you condemn” question

Consider the following two exchanges that were broadcast following a Hamas rocket shelling in 2009 (Example 1) and the murder of Eitam and Na’ama Henkin by Hamas terrorists in the West Bank in 2015 (Example 2).

Example 1

“Seven to Nine,” Radio 99, July 22, 2009.

Interviewers: Immanuel Rosen and Guy Meroz

Interviewee: Talab al-Sana, an Arab-Israeli politician, member of the United Arab List.

Rosen: But do you condemn Hamas terrorism? Do you condemn Hamas terrorism? / Aval haim ata megane et teror Hamas? Haim ata megane et teror Hamas?
al-Sana: I don’t want to be seen as coming here today to justify anything. / Ani lo rotse leheraot keilu sheba hayom lehitstadek.

Example 2

“Orly and Guy,” Channel 2, October 8, 2015.

Interviewer: Guy Meroz

Interviewee: Basel Ghattas, Arab-Israeli MK, member of the Arabic National Democratic Assembly Party (56 seconds from the start of the interview)

17. Ghattas: I oppose all types of violence / Ani neged kol sug shel alimut
18. Meroz: So why aren’t you condemning it? / Az lama ata lo megane et ze?
19. Ghattas: All types of murder / Kol sug shel retsah
20. Meroz: How much would it cost you to condemn? / Kama ya’ale leha leganot et ze?
21. Ghattas: Just a second, no. It’s, it is important to me that you’ll understand why I am not using your lexicon and your terminology. / Reg’a. Lo, ze… ze hashuv li shetavin lama ani lo mishtamesh baleksikon shelha ubaterminologia shelha

As these examples demonstrate, calling on an interviewee to condemn manifests journalistic exercise of power at both the interactional and social levels. At the interactional level, the aggressiveness displayed in the two examples by Rosen and Meroz diverts from the relative tolerance for equivocal answers found in the past in mediated interactions with Jewish-Israeli interviewees (Blum-Kulka and Weizman 2003).

In turns 18 and 20 of Example 2, we see how the interviewer is not satisfied with the interviewee’s general objection to violence and insists on explicit performance of condemnation. In Clayman and Heritage’s terms (2002b), Meroz is using a global hostility strategy, which structures the most hostile relations between the interviewer and interviewee. Meroz is using a question cascade (Clayman and Heritage, 2002b:256) with a growing sense of aggressiveness by designing two accountability questions. The first is negatively formulated (“Why aren’t you condemning it?”), and the second is hostile in its keying (manifested in the sarcastic question in turn 20: “How much would it cost you to condemn?”). Meroz’ question cascade serves as a tactic for pushing Ghattas for a specific response (Heritage 2002) by way of mounting an escalating frontal attack on him for not acting the way Meroz expects from an Israeli Knesset member (the responses to the questions will be discussed in the next section).

On the social level, “do you condemn” questions manifest interviewers’ efforts to exercise power by resorting to their national, professional, and organizational identities and roles. At the national level, the questions explicitly demand the adoption of a suggested model of national conduct and its respective Jewish-Israeli terminology. They encode a blatant demand to reaffirm values and world views (e.g. that a rocket attack is indeed terrorism) that transfer the interviewer from the sphere of legitimate controversy to the sphere of national consensus (Hallin 1986; Schudson 2002; Kampf and Daskal 2013). If the values encoded in the questions are rejected by the interviewees, they are pushed from the sphere of legitimate controversy to that of political deviation, thus becoming an object of condemnation in and of themselves for not adhering to the national decree.

The “do you condemn” question also positions interviewers in the role of representatives of the public responsible for clarifying public figures’ stances regarding urgent issues on the public agenda (Montgomery 2007). In formulating such a question, interviewers create an appearance of professionalism, one that embodies the journalistic ideal of demanding accountability, disclosing deviations, and enforcing norms (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1948; Ekstrom 2001).

At the organizational level, “do you condemn” questions have the potential to arouse mini-scandals around the unconfirmed social value and as such to create a melodramatic narrative that sells (Kampf 2011). The refusal to condemn becomes a quotable statement (Clayman 1995) generating cycles of discourse in both news-media platforms and political institutions. Interviewers responsible for the public turmoil are credited with generating the quotable news, thus enhancing their own media personae as well as organizational visibility in public discourse.[^1]

Interviewees’ Responses to “Do You Condemn” Questions

Responding to a “do you condemn” question poses an avoidance dilemma (Bavelas, Black, Chovil, and Mullett 1990) to Arab-Israeli interviewees, as any answer they provide may result in a negative uptake by one or more of their attuning audiences. On the one hand, confirming or rejecting the interactional action demanded by the interviewee (by formulating direct yes or no answers) will deviate from the expectations of either the Jewish-Israeli audiences or the Arab-Israeli electorate and the Palestinian people at large. On the other hand, resorting to an indirect, equivocal answer – one that evades the topical or action agenda suggested by the interviewee (Blum-Kulka 1983; Clayman and Heritage 2002b; Harris 1991; Bull 1998) and is considered the most practical way to confront an avoidance dilemma – may result in “pointed follow-up questions from IRs [interviewers], negative inferences about ulterior motives from audience members, and unfavorable publicity” (Clayman 2015:13).

The analysis of the responses to “do you condemn” questions indicates that Arab-Israeli interviewees employed the full gamut of options in their answer designs – from overt resistance or willingness to condemn to a variety of evasion strategies. The diversity of responses found in the corpus may hint at the difficulty inherent in answering such a question, which leads interviewees to try out a variety of alternative responses that on occasion align with the interviewer and the Israeli-Jewish audiences, but on other occasions align with their Arab-Israeli electorate. In what follows, I will demonstrate the responses to “do you condemn” questions that were found, starting with direct refusal to condemn, continuing with direct acceptance of the interviewers’ call to condemn, and ending with the various indirect question designs.

Direct refusal to condemn

In refusing to condemn, interviewees overtly reject the interviewers’ effort to push for a particular answer (Heritage 2002). Such a refusal usually opens up a sequence of adversarial negotiation over the reason for rejection in which both participants are involved in the co-construction of self-and-other positioning (Weizman 1996, 2006, 2008; Ekstrom 2009). Consider the following exchange between interviewer Guy Meroz and MK Basel Ghattas, part of which was discussed earlier:

Example 2 (continuation)

6. Meroz: But I didn’t hear any condemnation / Aval lo shama’ati, lo ginuy
>>7. Ghattas: I don’t condemn / Ani lo megane
8. Meroz: Why not? / Lama?
9. Ghattas: I’ll tell you why / Ani asbir leha lama
10. Meroz: Two people have been murdered. / Nirtsehu shnei anashim
11. Ghattas: I will explain. If you’ll let me / Ani asbir leha. Im atem notnim li
12. Meroz: Four of their children were in the car / Araba’at yaldeyhem baoto
13. Ghattas: No, I, I, just a second. First of all, we / Lo, ani, ani, shniya. Kodem kol, anahnu
14. Meroz: Only by chance the children were not murdered. Because of a technical failure, you know / Bemikre lo nirtsehu gam hayeladim. Biglal eize takala tekhnit, ata yode’a
15. Ghattas: First of all, I, as an Arab politician, a Palestinian, a citizen of the State of Israel, where I grew up, in my political culture, and ha. / Alef, ani betor politikai aravi, palestini, ezrah medinat Israel, eifo shegadalti, batarbut hapolitit sheli veha.
16. Meroz: Yes / Ken
17. Ghattas: I oppose all types of violence / Ani neged kol sug shel alimut
18. Meroz: So why aren’t you condemning it? / Az lama ata lo megane et ze?
19. Ghattas: All types of murder / Kol sug shel retsah
20. Meroz: How much would it cost you to condemn? / Kama ze ya’ale leha leganot et ze?
21. Ghattas: Just a second, no. It’s, it is important to me that you’ll understand why I am not using your lexicon and your terminology / Reg’a. Lo, ze… ze hashuv li shetavin lama ani lo mishtamesh baleksikon shelha ubaterminologia shelha
22. Meroz: Okay / Okei.
23. Ghattas: There is the victim’s terminology, of which I am part, and there is the ruler’s terminology, of the occupier, the one that decides, that takes everything. And you want to force your terminology on me? / Yesh terminologia shel korban, sheani shayah elav, veyesh terminologia shel hashalit, shel hakovesh, shel mi shemahlit, shetofes hakol. Veata rotse likhpot alay gam lehishtamesh baterminologia shelha?

(Meroz and Ghattas overlap each other for several turns.)

As this example demonstrates, refusals to condemn, i.e., rejection of interviewers’ preferred answer at the interactional level, are justified on the basis of the interviewees’ social positioning – being part of a group subordinate to the Jewish-Israeli majority represented by the interviewers.

The direct refusal to condemn in turn 7 (“I don’t condemn”) opens up 15 turns of adversarial exchange in which Meroz demands reasons for the refusal (turn 8: “Why not?”), while Ghattas builds his justification. Interestingly, while Meroz establishes his moral positioning on a universal moral script, one that demands accountability on the basis of non-politically identified human beings (turn 10: “Two people have been murdered”; turn 12: “Four of their children were in the car”), Ghattas establishes his refusal based on specific cultural and political moral scripts.

[^1]: For example, Ghattas’ refusal to condemn the murder of the two Jewish-Israeli settlers Eitam and Na’ama Henkin (see Example 2) became a news item in a later news edition of Channel 2 and on other media platforms.