Ariel Sharon is perhaps the worst prime minister in Israel's history, yet he is almost certain to be re-elected, reports Graham Usher from Jerusalem Unless all are proved wrong this time next week Ariel Sharon will be re-elected as Israel's prime minister at the head of a government of right wing and religious parties should he choose to form one. It appears less likely he will reconstitute his preferred National Unity coalition, given the suddenly powerful Shinnui Party's ban on any participation in a government that includes Israel's religious orthodox parties, and the Labour Party leader Avram Mitzna's solemn vow not to join a National Unity coalition under Sharon. The latest polls show Sharon's Likud Party winning around 30 seats in the 120- member Knesset and a rightist, religious coalition forming a majority of 63. This is the most remarkable feature of what has been a featureless campaign. Under Sharon's 23-month stewardship five times as many Israelis have been killed in the conflict with the Palestinians than in any two-year period of Israel's history, excluding wars. Partly as a consequence of his inability to crush the Intifada, Israel is now in the throes of its worst economic crisis in 50 years, with unemployment at 10 per cent, growth at minus one per cent and major cuts in social services to the poor, sick and elderly. Sharon and his party have also been dogged by unprecedented charges of sleaze, with the state this week issuing three more indictments on Likud activists for bribery during the party's primary elections last year. Yet Sharon continually rises unsullied and unscathed, shielded by the ironclad message that the only way forward is to "beat terrorism and stand united". It is a code the majority of Israel's Jewish electorate accepts. Scripted initially by his predecessor Ehud Barak -- and made visceral by Palestinian suicide bombings -- Israeli Jews have internalised the Sharonian consensus that "the collapse of the peace process and the violence that ensued were not of Israel's making but were due to Yasser Arafat's obduracy", says Israeli political analyst, David Landau. It is a consensus that explains the peculiarities of the contest, particularly the failure of the left to make mileage out of Sharon's travails. One reason is the Israeli public's keen awareness that Likud can hardly be blamed for policies to which Labour was party during most of his tenure. Another, deeper one is that at a time of war with the Palestinians and the threat of another with Iraq, Israelis passionately want national unity, and hold Labour responsible for bringing about unnecessary elections that will do nothing to address or avert either. They may warm to Mitzna's nebulous (and unrealisable) promise of "separation" from the Palestinians. But they are left cold by his pledge to resume negotiations with Arafat from the point they left off under Barak. Israelis are now a wholly post-Oslo people. The same reasoning explains why Meretz is likely to do worse in these elections than it did in the last. Instead, the contest has become less about toppling Sharon than about who should serve under him. A case in point is the spectacular rise of the secularist Shinnui Party, currently with six seats in the Israeli parliament, but predicted to reach 15 in the next. Unashamedly middle class, Ashkenazi and elitist, it has nothing to say about the conflict with the Palestinians or Israel's economic freefall other than advocating larger tax breaks for the rich. Rather it predicates participation in government on the exclusion of Israel's orthodox parties, which it charges exert "religious coercion" on the secular majority and whose growing power will turn Israel from "a Western civilisation into a mediaeval ghetto" in the phrase Shinnui leader and former journalist Tommy Lapid. It was left to other Israeli journalists to point out that Lapid is hardly the first politician to use orthodox Jews as the scapegoat for the economic and social ills of their country. Meanwhile the Sephardi orthodox Shas Party has gained strength and moved to the right, urging a coalition with Sharon as the only way to thwart a secularist, Ashkenazi backlash at the hands of Shinnui and perhaps Labour. The ultra- nationalist National Union has also gained ground with the fear that a Likud coalition with Labour will bring about some kind of diplomatic process and with it a freeze on settlement construction and the establishment of a Palestinian state, however truncated. Neither Lapid, Shas nor the National Union question Sharon's right to lead: they simply want him to steer the wheel their way. The only constituency making that claim is outside the Israeli Jewish consensus and therefore irrelevant: the 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel who make up 12 per cent of the electorate. Polls predict a 65 per cent turn out among Israel's Palestinian minority, down from the 1999 elections but considerably higher than the boycott anticipated had Israel's Supreme Court not overturned decisions to ban from the elections its two best known politicians, Ahmad Tibi and Azmi Bishara. The intention to vote expresses less a belief in the Israeli system than the fear that "nothing for Palestinians in Israel can any more be taken for granted -- not even the right to political participation," says Palestinian Ameer Makhoul. But few are doing so with conviction. Take Buthayna Dabit. She is a young Palestinian community activist from Ramle -- home to 20,000 Palestinians, ravaged by poverty and victim to a new wave of house demolitions that she believes is part of the election campaign in this staunchly Likud town in central Israel. Will she again play the game of citizenship? "O yes. We have nothing to lose. But I doubt it will make the slightest difference. We know we are not welcome here".
