| Summary: | Focused on the issue of discursive identities, this paper investigates how the CRIF reacted to the Palestinian Authority’s request for recognition as a Member state of the UN, on September 23rd, 2011. Caught between its allegiance to France as well as its institutional status of privileged interlocutor of the public authorities on one side - and its emotional attachment and strong solidarity with Israel on the other, the CRIF chose in this case to distance itself from the official policy of the French government by aligning itself globally with the stance of the Hebrew State. The paper is based on a micro-analysis of two texts published on the CRIF web site on the day of the request to the UN. Grounded in a theory of argumentation embedded in the new rhetoric (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1970 [1958 ]; Maingueneau 1999; Amossy 2010), it investigates how the CRIF negotiates its discursive ethos both with the French public opinion and with the community which it represents; how it ensures the consistency of its argumentation indexed simultaneously on two contradictory official political discourses, and which rhetoric and argumentative strategies it adopts to build two antithetical images of the Hebrew State and of the future Palestinian State within the legitimacy war between them.
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