PRESIDENT CLINTON wants Shimon Peres to win. So do Jordan's King Hussein and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. Yasser Arafat is positively praying for a Peres victory.
Mr Peres will give the Palestinians their state, which will delight Mr Arafat and quieten the Islamic extremists in Jordan and Syria. And he will do his best to reach a treaty with Syria, which will delight President Clinton by giving him a concrete regional foreign policy success.
But Messrs Clinton, Hussein, Mubarak and Arafat are not among the four million people with the right to vote in the elections here tomorrow. And there's absolutely no certainty that a majority of the Israeli populace is going to hand that quartet the Peres victory they so desire.
To the watching world and the world is certainly watching to judge by the number of foreign television crews roaming the streets this week it's all about the Middle East peace process, a black and white choice between the dark figure of Likud challenger Benjamin Netanyahu and the white knight Peres.
Mr Netanyahu would spend millions moving more Jews into the West Bank, Mr Peres would move the settlers out. Mr Netanyahu would risk war by telling Syria's President Assad to go whistle for the Golan Heights, Mr Peres would bring calm to the region by telling Mr Assad he can have the Golan if he'll only come whistle in the Knesset.
But for Israelis, the issue is not the wider network of peace treaties good and bad, signed or gone begging it is the particular question of personal security. Whether the Palestinians have an independent state or not is largely immaterial. Whether the Golan is returned is only marginally less so. The real question is whether continuing the peace process will put an end to bus bombings stabbings and drive by shootings.
Much of Mr Netanyahu's campaign was based on the not unreasonable assumption that, some time in the run up to May 29th, at least one Hamas bomber would manage to kill himself and a large group of Israelis in a perverted act of martyrdom. The slogans have been broadcast daily and plastered at every crossroads, ready to respond to the bombers and sweep Mr Netanyahu to victory "There's no peace, no security, no reason to vote for Peres."
Except that Hamas, so far, has not been reading the Likud script. There has even been talk in the last few days of some kind of Hamas Arafat agreement taking shape, under which the Islamic radicals would confine their opposition to the peace process to expressions more civilised than suicide bombing. So Mr Peres has been able to maintain his 4 to 6 per cent lead in the polls.
Conventional wisdom has it that continued Hamas restraint will guarantee a Peres victory tomorrow. But that conventional wisdom assumes the polls are accurate. And there's precious little wisdom in such an assumption. The pollsters, after all, gave Mr Peres victory in 1981 (he lost to Menachem Begin) and predicted a landslide for Yitzhak Rabin in 1992 (he squeezed in on a wafer thin majority).
And the pollsters seem impossibly hampered this time by the difficulties in predicting Arab and ultra Orthddox voter turnouts, and by Russian immigrants' inbred reluctance to disclose their true preferences. Israeli society is so divided Jews and Arabs secular and religious Jews. Jews from European backgrounds and those of Middle Eastern origin the ultra Orthodox dynasties of Jerusalem and the yuppies of Tel Aviv that it's hard to see how the pollsters can accumulate their so called "representative sample".
This is also an election like no other by virtue of the unprecedented twin ballot a vote for either Mr Peres or Mr Netanyahu, and a second vote for a Knesset party. For the first time, the competing parties are almost irrelevant. There are some fascinating shifts the rise from no where of Natan Sharansky's immigrant party, the recovery of the National Religious Party from the shame associated with the Rabin assassination, the continued disunity in Israeli Arab political ranks. But neither Mr Peres nor Mr Netanyahu will have much trouble wooing the minor parties into a coalition. So everything hinges on the prime ministership.
To watch Mr Peres's propaganda, you might be forgiven for thinking there had been no bombings, no violence, just handshakes, an economic boom, and the growth of Israel's first generation of untroubled teenagers. Watching the Likud's campaign, you'd think Israel's past four years had been nothing but bus bombs, government lies, and unpleasant speeches by Mr Arafat. Reality has little to do with it.
But the reality tomorrow is that Israelis have a stark choice, between trusting Mr Peres's assertion that the Arab world is truly ready to coexist with Israel, and Mr Netanyahu's insistence that every Arab still dreams of Israel's destruction. The stakes have never been higher.