the fall of the peace camp in israel: the influence of prime minister ehud barak on israeli public opinion – july 2000-february 2001

The present paper tries to analyze the significant changes in Israeli Jewish public opinion, and especially among peace supporters, that occurred in the summer and fall of 2000. It proposes that particularly influential factor in the psychological earthquake the Israeli public underwent was the information provided by Ehud Barak. The paper presents the major events and the major sets of information coming from Ehud Barak, evaluates the validity of the provided information and then describes the changes that Israel's Jewish public went through. In order to analyze the persuasive effects of the information, we use the classical work of Hovland and his colleagues, which was done in the 1950s, as a conceptual framework. They suggested that the key to understanding why people are persuaded lies in the study of the characteristics of the communicator (source), the content of the message and the characteristics of the audience who receive the message. We analyzed the persuasion process of the Israeli Jewish public in this line.