The use of constitutive invention to mitigate marginalization and adversarial relations by Israeli P.M. Benjamin Netanyahu in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly delivered September 27, 2012
This paper will introduce two new concepts to constitutive rhetoric that expand on current theory as described by Maurice Charland, Michael Leff and Ebony A. Utley, Charles Goehring and George N. Dionisopoulos and others with special consideration of Kenneth Burke's detailed depiction of "identification" as a primary element of persuasion. Observations of this novel usage of constitutive rhetoric emerge from the 2012 speech given by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the United Nations General Assembly. In this speech, Netanyahu's purpose was to urge UN members to consider a failsafe plan for thwarting Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons. However, this effort was complicated by Israel's marginalized position with the UN body, which required Netanyahu to rhetorically reposition Israel as an accepted member within the UN. His remedy was to construct a novel ideological identification and constitute both Netanyahu's target audience and Israel into a shared identity, while simultaneously introducing a new antithetical identification to denote Iran with an oppositional ideology that UN members would reject as their own. Through this constitutive invention, Netanyahu invited his target audience to accept the identification that represented their shared values with Israel to engender consubstantiality between them, and position his audience to also share Israel's perception of Iran's intentions.
