This Strange Campaign

It's been said that this is the strangest election campaign in Israeli history because the right is trying to sound like the left and the left is trying to look like the right -- all in an effort to win over the two or three percent of the undecided voters, apparently in the center, whose demographics range from Russian newcomers to third generation sabras, from ethnic North Africans in development towns to fundamentalist Anglo-Saxons in the Jewish settlements of the West Bank.

It's also been said that now that the Likud has adopted at least the rhetoric of the peace camp, that there's no real difference between the two main parties.

But only the cynics and the ignorant believe that there is no difference between the two sides in this campaign, the most critical since at least the 1967 Six Day War, if not all the way back to the first election.

The choice is between those who still do not understand that the right to self-determination is indivisible -- either it is enjoyed by all or by none -- and those who believe that the way to weaken the enemies of the state of Israel -- and Palestine -- is by offering them peace instead of war.

There is no center in that division. No comprimise is possible between fundamentalists who find "salvation" in the Hebrew name for the West Bank and Gaza and define their victories by their enemy's losses, and those who understand that to save the people of the Holy Land, it is the land, not the people, that must be divided so that all the people of the country, no matter where the border is drawn, can live in peace.