Description
This paper assesses seven of the most influential Western thinktanks for tone, content and coverage on the situation in Israel and Palestine for eight months between 7 October 2023 and 6 June 2024. The media has long been an object of research in terms of bias and partial viewpoints, particularly in the context of Israel and Palestine. But thinktanks are rarely put under the spotlight despite the fact they target opinion-influencers and policymakers – and are therefore possibly more important to analyse. In summary, my paper shows that six of the seven western thinktanks analysed are promoting a pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian agenda. Extensive and continual bias towards Israel was shown, even eight months after the Hamas attack on 7 October.
Parmar and Yin propose that thinktanks constitute part of an “elite knowledge network” which they define as “a system of flows (of ideas, people, money), a technology of power embedded in, crystallizing and dynamizing the Gramscian concept of ‘hegemony’” (Parmar and Yin, 2021). In this paper, I argue that thinktanks operate as “hegemony factories” deliberately manufacturing consent for certain ideas and perspectives, carefully curating who is allowed to speak by processes of inclusion and exclusion, and rarely offering a range of perspectives that diverge from Western elite opinion.
