Even Herzog himself has seemed skeptical on whether his efforts can succeed. “I don’t want to build expectations,” he said at a recent campaign stop.

Even Herzog himself has seemed skeptical on whether his efforts can succeed. “I don’t want to build expectations,” he said at a recent campaign stop.

The electorate is skeptical too, and few Israelis even want to discuss the subject. A month before the rally, a few hundred people packed into a hangar at Tel Aviv’s old port for a debate on foreign policy and security issues. The debate included a broad spectrum of Israel’s main Zionist parties, from Meretz to Jewish Home. It was also conducted in English — a hint as to the intended audience.

Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to Washington and now a candidate with the centrist Kulanu party, told the audience it might take “two or three generations for a Palestinian leader to emerge and sign a deal with us.” Hilik Bar, the Labor Party’s secretary-general, joked about a recent trip to Northern Ireland. “They told us it took 700 years to resolve their conflict,” he said.

Nor is Herzog promising a clean break from Netanyahu on other security issues. The prime minister’s opponents panned his controversial Iran speech in Washington, but they broadly agree with his Iran policy. In January, when Israel and Hezbollah seemed close to a war after tit-for-tat attacks on the northern border, Herzog rushed before the cameras to announce his support for Netanyahu. “There is no coalition and no opposition,” he declared.

Indeed, by the end of the debate, the audience had grown bored. Attendees started asking questions about gay marriage, the cost of living, the status of asylum-seekers from Africa — anything but security.

“In this election, in this campaign, I think it’s the first time that the word ‘peace’ doesn’t exist, in any party’s slogan. No one talks about peace,” said Ayelet Shaked, a prominent member of the right-wing Jewish Home party. “And I think that, in reality, most of the public acknowledges that we cannot make peace, even in the far future.”

* * *

Sderot translates to “boulevards,” but the city of 24,000 people in southern Israel is better known for the bomb shelters that line its streets. It becomes a focal point for the media every few years when Israel goes to war against Hamas: The city sits just a few miles from the border with Gaza, and more than 8,000 rockets have landed there over the past decade, according to the mayor.

In peacetime, Sderot is just another working-class locale in the underdeveloped regions away from Jerusalem and the coastal plain. More than half of Sderot’s residents live under the poverty line; salaries are well below the national average. It is also a Likud stronghold: 37 percent of Sderot voters opted for Likud in 2013, compared to 23 percent nationwide.

Today, though, many lifelong Likudniks in Sderot say they have soured on a party that has become so closely identified with one man. Some will vote this week for Kulanu, led by popular ex-Likud minister Moshe Kahlon, or simply not vote at all. “I’ve always voted for Likud. My parents voted for Likud,” said one man. “But he hasn’t done anything for us…He says he’s a strong leader, but he’s just verbally strong.”

Last week Netanyahu toured Mahane Yehuda, a teeming market in Jerusalem that lies in a traditionally Likud area. He didn’t take the media along, citing security concerns. There were none. The real concern was political: Vendors say they are also leaning toward Kulanu. Netanyahu had to cancel a rally in Ashdod, another Likud stronghold, when party activists could not find enough warm bodies to fill the event hall.

For all the Netanyahu fatigue, however, voters are not crossing the partisan divide to back the Zionist Union. The center-left party has plateaued in most surveys at around 24 seats, just one-fifth of the Knesset. That may be partially due to Herzog, the man at the helm: The Ha’aretz columnist Ari Shavit wrote a fawning profile but nonetheless described him as a “bar mitzvah boy” — the mild-mannered opposite of the brash combat veterans who dominate Israel’s political life. His running mate, Livni, is one of Israel’s least popular politicians, seen as a self-interested carpetbagger now on her fourth political home. Just 29 percent of the public holds a favorable view of her.

The result has been the deepening fragmentation of the Israeli electorate. Labor and Likud, the traditional stalwarts of center-left and center-right, will win just two-fifths of the vote. The rest will go to four religious parties, two centrist parties focused on the economy, a secular right-wing party for Russian speakers, a secular left-wing party, and an Arab list that includes communists, Islamists and secular nationalists.

The confusion has helped to resurrect a number of politicians that had been left for dead. A large poster featuring Amir Peretz, a former defense minister who is deeply unpopular due to his role in formulating the disastrous strategy in the 2006 Lebanon war, graces the Zionist Union headquarters in Sderot. He grew up in Sderot, and the party hopes the personal appeal will help. The ultra-Orthodox Shas, which caters to mizrahi Jews, faced its own crisis when a video of its spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, leaked, in which he attacked one of the party’s two leaders, Aryeh Deri, for corruption and said he was unfit to lead the movement.

Rabbis set the agenda for ultra-Orthodox parties, but they rarely do so from beyond the grave: Yosef died in 2013. No one took credit for the leak, but it was believed to have come from Deri’s rival for control of Shas, Eli Yishai. Deri briefly stepped down, a political stunt that ended when the Shas “council of sages” begged him to return. The party has rebounded in the polls since then, focusing its outreach on working-class Israelis who feel ignored in the socioeconomic debate.

“People are confused with their options,” said Tal Schneider, an Israeli political analyst. “Voter turnout is going to be lower than usual because of the general sentiment of disgust.”

* * *

The sun was setting over Yarka, a Druze village in northern Israel, and hundreds of people—local politicians, religious leaders, ordinary residents — were thronged outside a wedding hall to welcome a man most hadn’t even heard of until January.

The one fresh face in this election is, surprisingly, Ayman Odeh, a 41-year-old lawyer and activist from the city of Haifa. He was previously a city councilman and a low-ranking candidate with Hadash, the joint Jewish-Arab communist party. He was catapulted onto the national stage after being chosen to head the Joint List, a coalition of the four parties that traditionally represent Israel’s Arab minority, which makes up one-fifth of the country’s population.

On Friday he was crisscrossing the Galilee. His campaign managers, in an endearing bit of naivete, scheduled four rallies in four hours. The Yarka event alone ran for almost three.

This is the first time the Arab parties have run together. It was a decision born out of necessity: Last year the Knesset passed a “governance bill,” promoted heavily by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, that raised the electoral threshold to 3.25 percent. The Arab parties rarely clear that line; some, if not all, would have been forced out of government.

So they joined forces — an unwieldy marriage, as Odeh and other parliamentarians admit. The list’s candidates cover the spectrum from communists to Islamists; there is a women’s rights activist, and a polygamist. Some of them had not spoken in years owing to longtime rivalries.

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