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.