Instrumentalizing the war in Gaza in Polish media: a mixed-method analysis of ideological framing and symbolic proximity

The war in Gaza is domesticated globally by national media ecosystems using locally-resonant frames. Research suggests that this produces a pro-Israeli bias in Western outlets, with the opposite observed in the Middle-East. The article analyzes how these patterns function in a semi-peripheral media system. It studies how four key Polish outlets framed the war in Gaza in 2023–2024, arguing that they instrumentalized the conflict to reproduce pre-existing ideological narratives. Drawing on the proximity-framing nexus, the analysis conceptualizes proximity as ideological alignment between outlets and the actors, causes, and values they foreground. The study uses a mixed-method design, combining dictionary-based code co-occurrence analysis and code mapping with a qualitative analysis of media articles. This allows the capturing of actors, processes, and evaluative frames. Findings show that right-wing outlets embedded Gaza primarily in security- and threat-oriented frames, while left-wing outlets used the conflict to articulate projects of anti-colonialism and social justice. Media narratives remained Poland-centric, foregrounding domestic politics, historical memory, and identity projects and only secondarily representing Palestinian and Israeli voices. The article contributes to scholarship on conflict reporting, Eastern European semi-peripheries and mediated solidarity by showing how distant wars become discursive resources in domestic struggles over democracy, memory, and belonging.