Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, who is struggling to win a second term as Israel's Prime Minister, has tried to turn Monday's elections into a virtual referendum on Israel's relationship with the Palestinians. If voters keep their faith in him, he has told them, he will relinquish as little occupied West Bank land as possible to Mr Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, and drive the toughest bargain in talks on a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.
If they lose faith and vote for his challenger, Labour's Mr Ehud Barak, he warns, they will almost be casting a ballot for Mr Arafat himself, since the Palestinian leader is excitedly awaiting the election of a more moderate prime minister, who will give in to Palestinian territorial demands and endorse independent Palestinian statehood.
Although Mr Barak has a glorious military record, Mr Netanyahu asserts, he is a soft touch as a politician, and will make dangerous concessions to Mr Arafat, under the influence of Labour's other left-wing leaders, and its potential coalition partners in far-left and Israeli Arab parties.
In conceiving this central election strategy, Mr Netanyahu had every reason to believe that it would work. A similar approach in 1996 had brought him an unexpected victory over the incumbent Labour prime minister, Mr Shimon Peres.
But three years later, the campaign this time has failed to gell. It has proved far more difficult to denigrate Mr Barak than it was Mr Peres as being naively spellbound by Mr Arafat. And, indeed, while the result of these elections will have a profound and immediate impact on Israeli-Palestinian relations, the battle, it now seems certain, will not be determined by this issue at all.
Instead, the elections will likely turn on narrow, internal, sectoral interests. The obsession this time is not with love or hate for the Palestinians, but love or hate for various communities within Israel. The two major collisions are those between the ultra-Orthodox and the fiercely secular communities, and between veteran Moroccan and more recent Russian immigrants.
Friction has simmered for years over the question of how observant a Jewish state Israel should be. But in these elections, a new secular party has emerged, Shinui, led by an ex-journalist and Holocaust survivor, Mr Tommy Lapid. Shinui has relentlessly attacked the ultra-Orthodox community, vowing to reduce the allocation of government funds to that sector, and to ensure that young ultra-Orthodox Jews, like the rest of young Israelis, will be conscripted to the army.
Friction has simmered for several years, too, between Russians and Moroccans, but now it has exploded into outright confrontation. Mr Natan Sharansky's Russian immigrant Yisrael Ba'aliya party is determined to wrest control from the Moroccan Orthodox Shas party of the Interior Ministry - to ensure new arrivals from the former Soviet Union are swiftly registered as Israeli citizens and allocated immigrant aid, rather than being subjected to rigorous scrutiny of their Jewish credentials, as has been the norm at the ministry in recent years.
The horrified Shas Interior Minister, Mr Eli Suissa, remarked last week that Russian rule at the ministry would be disastrous, since who then would prevent the influx to Israel of crooks, whores and pork-butchers?
These two sets of collisions have worked to Mr Netanyahu's disadvantage. He is closely associated with the ultra-Orthodox community, and especially with Shas. Secular Israelis and, especially, the Russians, have been swinging toward Mr Barak's camp in growing numbers as a consequence.
With opinion polls showing him at least 8 per cent behind Mr Barak, the prime minister has one last hope of a turnaround.
As of last night, there were still five official candidates Mr Netanyahu and Mr Barak, as well as three no-hopers: Mr Beni Begin (far-right), Mr Yitzhak Mordechai (centrist) and Mr Azmi Bishara (Israeli Arab).
None of these last three has any chance of winning, but their candidacy could deprive Mr Barak of the 50 per cent vote he needs to be elected on Monday. If he does fall short, he and the other leading candidate, Mr Netanyahu, would compete in a second round run-off two weeks later, on June 1st.