How Israelis Represent the Problem of Violence in Their Schools 167almost completely their own in this study. They framed it as (yet) another sign of the moral
deficiencies of secular Israel. Framed often as only one of the many signs of the mistaken
ways of secular Israel, there was perhaps less of a need to focus on it. In any event, the larger
point here stands. Had this study focused on religious newspapers, this firmly established
causal proposition along with others would have changed what was presented above as the
analytical view on what was ̳common‘. That is, this causal proposition would have changed
from an indexically located proposition not considered common enough to be a part of the
focal construction into a ̳common‘ one that constituted the construction. That is, the reflexive
and relative nature of discursive constructions is an unavoidable conclusion.
Consider some final examples of causal propositions that were not cited frequently
enough in the data to be considered ̳common‘ signs within this construction. In these cases,
we see the introduction not of indexically marked propositions signaling some specific kind
of speaker or social context, but rather propositions that largely indexed the relative
influences of time on discursive constructions. These two propositions were not common, but
they are arguably strengthening. Nevertheless, it is not yet clear what other regular indexical
associations they will develop. They both related to the introduction of a large number of
Russian immigrants into Israeli society at the time of this study. Their number, estimated at
nearly a million in a nation of around six million at the time, suggests the obvious influences
that these ̳new Russians‘ were already beginning to have on essentially all aspects of Israeli
life. Relevant here however was their role as causal explanations for Israeli problems.
Violence in the school system was sometimes represented as the result of the ̳negative
influences of immigrant children‘ and ̳youth membership in alternative groups‘.
Why were these propositions not found to be common enough to be included in this
study? One obvious fact is that what they reflected was at the time a relatively new
demographic fact. The discourses about Russians, and whatever roles those discourses were
going to play in any others beyond those that included them as immigrants being absorbed in
the project of nation-building, hadn‘t yet had time to crystallize. Even at the time of this
study, however, supporting discourses were emerging. That is, the appearance of these
propositions in the data was not completely culturally incoherent. Stereotypes of Russian
violence (and ̳mafia‘ affiliation) and reports on the relatively high rates at which Russian
children dropped out of school were two particularly widespread examples of mutually
supporting ideologies.
Yet another reason for their under-representation in data drawn from written instances in
widely read public newspapers relates to the fact that it was somewhat taboo to express these
ideas in written form in a public forum, such as a newspaper. There was a verbal taboo, albeit
a weakening one in recent years, on criticizing any specific (Jewish) ethnic group explicitly in
any official, public forum. Such explanations run the risk of sounding ̳racist‘ (or, perhaps in
more native Israeli terms, at the very least ̳anti-Jewish‘ or ̳anti-Israel‘). Indeed, given that
published newspapers were the source for this study, both of the propositions aimed at the
Russians typically used the Hebrew equivalent of politically correct language. In the first
case, though clearly only Russian children were being referred to, there was a ̳polite‘
euphemistic overgeneralization of the referent to include all immigrant children. Similarly,
though ̳alternative groups‘ is what was written, Russian youth gangs were the known
referent.
Here too then one sees the relative nature of any attempt to represent a discursive
construction. Indeed, it was in fact quite easy to document causal propositions about this