TO BE in Jerusalem is to be certain that Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu will win today's Israeli elections.
For a while, the Labour Party activists kept up the fight, valiantly sticking up Prime Minister Peres's gently reassuring features on billboards across the city, only for their more numerous Likud counterparts to often swiftly supplant them with the sterner visage of Mr Netanyahu. In the last few days, though, Labour seems to have given up on the billboards, and Mr Netanyahu stares out from all of them.
If reading the walls suggests Mr Netanyahu's dominance, taking taxis cements the impression. "We need some answers," barked a Jerusalem cabbie yesterday offering a slightly curious answer to the question of why he intends to vote for Mr Netanyahu today.
Still, though Jerusalem is Bibiville, Tel Aviv is equally obviously Perestown. It is the Labour activists who crowd the crossroads, pressing Peres leaflets into the outstretched hands of receptive motorists. Tel Aviv, after all, has gained the most from the Rabin Peres policies of peace massive international investment creating a secular yuppie class utterly alien to the religious traditionalists who predominate in the holy city.
Although almost all voters have surely made their choice by now between the very different charms of Mr Peres and Mr Netanyahu, the efforts to woo new supporters continue to the very last moment. An exceptionally ill conceived campaign, directed by the firmly right wing loyalists of the late, messianistic, ultra Orthodox "Lubavitch" rabbi, has seen placards that assert, "Only Netanyahu - It's Good for the Jews."
Since Mr Netanyahu already enjoys all the support of the more determinedly racist Jewish voters, the posters can only do him harm.
Labour's last minute tactics may not be offensive, but they are probably similarly ineffectual. The big stunt yesterday was to print full page ads backing Mr Peres containing the photographs and endorsements of American TV and film stars. Headlined "With you, on the path to peace, the ad featured such politically informed luminaries as Goldie Hawn, balladeer Michael Bolton, and some of the stars of Friends, The X-Files, Seinfeld, NYPD and more. Immensely popular though these programmes are in Israel, it is doubtful that many Israelis will be changing their vote so as to identify with the Peres backing Christina Applegate, best known as the empty headed blonde from Married With Children.
Labour's final television commercials, broadcast on Monday night, featured lengthy footage of the November 4th peace rally at which Yitzhak Rabin was shot down, and served to underline how curiously little Rabin's presence has really been felt in the past three weeks of campaigning. It is as though Labour felt there would be something dirty in capitalising too overtly on Mr Rabin's ringing final message of peace, on his final triumphant hours at that last gathering. Yet if anyone has the right to invoke Mr Rabin's memory, it is surely Mr Peres, the man who persuaded an initially sceptical Rabin that Mr Arafat was worth testing out as a peace partner.
The decision on how to use Mr Rabin, indeed all the key campaign decisions, fell to Haim Ramon, the youthful Interior Minister and hitherto acclaimed political whizz kid. Mr Ramon has been criticised for advising Mr Peres to act aloof in Sunday's TV debate with Mr Netanyahu a strategy that definitely misfired. And if Labour loses, he'll be rapped too for under employing the Rabin legacy, and for under employing the talents of Foreign Minister Ehud Barak, the supremely persuasive former chief of staff whose sporadic appearance in Labour ads may have much to do with the fact that he is Mr Ramon's main rival to succeed Mr Peres.
But if the infighting in Labour would be fierce should Peres lose, the arguing in the Likud after a Netanyahu defeat would be positively nuclear. Mr Netanyahu's coalition of supporters is a quintessential alliance of political expedience. To put it bluntly, his numbers two and three, David Levy and Rafael Eitan, hate his guts. They only reluctantly put aside their own prime ministerial ambitions when their research showed how decisively he would beat them, and how much better a chance he had of defeating Mr Peres.