Force Dynamics in Sadat’s Speech to the Knesset

After forty-five years of its delivery, Sadat’s speech to the Knesset is still an unprecedented outstanding speech in human history, that if fully implemented by then, the Arab Israeli conflict would have come to an end.  Sadat’s oration has been an allure to many researchers, and previous studies have been concerned with Sadat’s rhetorical strategies.  However, Sadat’s speech to the Knesset was primarily centered around the concept of establishing peace as a force conquering war, an inspection not proposed in any available literature.  The present article provides a different viewpoint of investigating Sadat’s speech to the Knesset through analyzing it within the framework of force dynamics as a cognitive semantic category.  Findings indicated that the most frequent force dynamic patterns used are “onset causation” that marks out the beginning of the road to peace, and “cessation of impingement” that delineates the start of a new era of accepting each other through peace.  The article is considered one of the prior attempts in the application of force dynamics to political speeches, and it is recommended to try it out to other genres as it is an innate feature of language construction.