摘要：The present study aims to provide a semiotic analysis of verbal and visual posts published before and during the latest Palestinian-Israeli conflict in 2021. It attempts to depict the sociopolitical context by focusing on the stances and practices of Arab users on social media toward the Palestinian issue. The data of the current study consisted of verbal and visual posts that were collected from Facebook accounts of some Arab activists and Arab cartoonists. This paper argues that visual encoding can convey intensive messages which need to be analyzed in order to uncover the hidden symbolic meanings as well as the interactions between the various codes (i.e., signs) in caricatures and their ideological and social impacts. The model of analysis, which was adopted from Kress and van Leeuwen's social semiotic approach, clarifies different messages in visual codes that are categorized according to Kress and van Leeuwen’s representational process types. The study tackles an ignored part of visual communication in the Arab world and highlights novel visions into the domains of semiotics and discourse analysis.
