Evaluative Representations of the 2025 Global Sumud Flotilla in British Newspaper Editorials: A Critical Discourse Analysis Using Appraisal Theory

Abstract

The Global Sumud Flotilla interception raised a lot of editorial comment in the British media on the issue of access to humanitarian aid, international law, and state security in 2025. The aim of this study is to explore the ways in which two ideologically divergent British newspapers (The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph) created opposing representations of the interception using evaluative language. Martin and White (2005) proposed Appraisal Framework in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) interpretive framework was applied to analyse thirteen editorials from June to October 2025 under three Appraisal subsystems namely Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. The results show that The Guardian builds a humanitarian-solidarity discourse by using positive Judgement of activists, and foregrounding Affect related to Palestinian suffering, while giving Contractive heteroglossic attribution to institutional sources. The elements that construct a hegemonic-securitisation discourse are the Daily Telegraph's activists' negative Judgement and the monoglossic normalisation of Israeli security narratives and the upscaled criticism of the flotilla and downscaled humanitarian urgency. The study demonstrates that the three elements of Attitude, Engagement and Graduation are not acting in isolation, but as some sort of interlocking evaluative system, that produces mutually reinforcing ideological representations of the same political phenomenon.