
The Enemy from Within: A Study of Political Delegitimization Discourse in Israeli Political Speech
We present the first large-scale computational study of political delegitimization discourse (PDD), defined as symbolic attacks on the normative validity of political entities. We curate and manually annotate a novel Hebrew-language corpus of 10,410 sentences drawn from Knesset speeches (1993-2023), Facebook posts (2018-2021), and leading news outlets, of which 1,812 instances (17.4\%) exhibit PDD and 642 carry additional annotations for intensity, incivility, target type, and affective framing…