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Next Tuesday the Israelis will elect a new prime minister, or, more accurately, an old primer minister.

If polls are to be believed, and barring dramatic events during the weekend, in all likelihood, Ariel Sharon will be reelected as primer minister of Israel.

If readers are then left wondering what’s the purpose of this national election in the fist place — especially at a time when Israel is under a frenzied Jihadistic campaign of terrorist attacks, and with the war on Iraq perilously looming on the horizon — they should find solace in the fact that most Israelis share the feeling.

This explains to a great extent why the Labor Party probably will not be the voters’ favorite choice next week. Labor’s decision last October to leave a national unity government at times of war, and forcing the current elections on a population now queuing to get their gas masks, did not seem to have won the heart of most Israelis. The fact that Labor abandoned a government to which it had been invited after it was badly defeated by a Likud leader who won by landslide may shed more light on the voters’ prospective decision. This leader was chosen precisely to handle the violence and mayhem that Labor’s brainchild — the unbelievably nave and reckless Oslo process — brought about.

Furthermore, now Labor leaders seem comfortable criticizing a government to which they themselves had been part of for the last two years. After two months in the opposition, Labor seems to have forgotten the extent to which it shares responsibilities for the failures of the Sharon administration.

As pice de resistance, Labor crowned as its new leader a man who epitomizes all that was wrong with Oslo: an appeaser of Palestinian terror and incitement, willing to make concessions under fire, who, to top it all, rejected out of hand joining a Sharon-led government when polls show that most Israelis favored such governmental union. You don’t need a Sherlock Holmes to discover why Labor will likely loose next Tuesday.

Now let’s turn to the Likud. All the dirt that emerged from the primaries’ corruption scandals (where bribery allowed politicians’ chauffeurs and personal secretaries to become candidates to Parliament) left voters frustrated and, according to recent polls, cost the party around 10 seats in the coming elections. Its leader, Sharon, has to be credited for cultivating close personal relations with President Bush, for showing unexpected ideological flexibility and thus garnering centrist votes, and for advocating and managing to keep for a relatively long period of time national unity during this most difficult war.

But Sharon made a strategic mistake by discrediting — both domestically and internationally — the so-called military option without even trying it.

Sending F-16s to bomb terrorists hide-outs in Rammallah, destroying weapons factories in Gaza, and selectively targeting Palestinian terrorist leaders all over the territories, may have been necessary military measures. But they were certainly insufficient, and, in the end, these limited actions played all too well in the hands of Israel bashers who all they needed to vent their dislike of Israel was to see on CNN those Appache helicopters circling the skies of Tulkharem.

The famous and controversial former Israeli general was voted into office in 2001 to do one thing only: to crush Palestinian terror and restore security for all Israelis. Sharon knows how to do it. He did it very well in the past. And while circumstances may have changed and different approaches are indeed in order, all he has been able thus far to offer Israelis in the realm of security is a perpetuation of the unlivable status quo. Which is why he doesn’t seem to be that great of an electoral option either.

To their left, Israelis see Labor candidate Amram Mitzna: an appeaser of terror and advocate of failed policies. To their right, they see Likud candidate Ariel Sharon: an old general who failed to deliver the security he promised.

So, in the final analysis, next Tuesday Israelis will end up losing, irrespective of who the next premier will be. Israelis are choosing between bad and worse. They are, politically speaking, between a rock and a hard place.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst in Geneva, and a member of the American Jewish Committee.