The General Population

Abstract

The previous chapter described and explained the fears and stresses of the Gulf War. Its approach was impressionistic, since its aim was, above all, to give the reader a sense of what it was like in Israel during the almost six months of waiting for war to break out and the six weeks of waiting for missiles to fall. The rest of the book takes a closer look at the public’s response and tries to refine and fill out with hard data the picture drawn thus far. Each chapter focuses on a specific group in the population. Because the Gulf War targeted civilians without regard to gender, age, status, or any other distinguishing feature, we begin our exploration by looking in general at the Israeli public’s responses to the war.