conflict
& communication online, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2007
www.cco.regener-online.de
ISSN 1618-0747
Eran Halperin &
Daniel Bar-Tal
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 validity 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.
On the authors:
Eran Halperin is a Ph.D. Candidate in the division of government and political theory, school of political science, Haifa University. He has a B.A in Political Science and Psychology and M.A in Political Science from the University of Haifa. His Ph.D. dissertation examines the role of hatred in politics – the nature of collective hatred, its determinants and its political implications. His research interests include political psychology, emotions and politics, hatred and political xenophobia and emotions in conflict. Eran is also a Project Coordinator of the National Resilience Project and the Psychological Aspects of Terrorism Project at the National Security Studies Center, Haifa University.
Address: School of Political Sciences, Division of Government & Political Theory, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel, 31905.
eMail: eranh75@hotmail.com
Daniel Bar-Tal is professor of social psychology at the School of Education, Tel Aviv University. His research interest is in political and social psychology studying socio-psychological foundations of intractable conflicts and peace making. He has published over fifteen books and over one hundred and fifty articles and chapters in major social and political psychological journals and books. He served as a President of the International Society of Political Psychology and received various awards for his work.
eMail: daniel@post.tau.ac.il, website: www.tau.ac.il/education/homepg/bar-tal