The woman in the red dress holding up her elderly mother with one hand while the other clutched her cell phone was clearly uneasy. She was next in line for ballot box 1.1 at the community center of Even Yehuda, a town of 14,000 in the Sharon region north of Tel Aviv. “Help me,” she pleaded. “I have to go in in a minute and I don’t know who to vote for,” she told the person on the phone. The guard was politely urging her to end her conversation and go in to vote. “OK, OK,” she said, shrugging. “I wanted to vote for [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu but my daughters are making me vote for [Blue and White leader Benny] Gantz.”

An outsider overhearing the conversation would have thought that he had walked into the midst of elections for the country’s premiership or presidency. It’s Netanyahu or Benny. It’s a choice between the corrupt guy everyone knows and the new guy with an unblemished record but lack of political experience.

The fruit vendor at the market in the nearby town of Netanya, trying to convince his friend to “give Gantz a chance,” asked, “What do you prefer, an unripe peach or a rotten one?” A young woman selecting fruit at the stall piped up, “Unripe, of course. It can ripen. The rotten one goes in the garbage.”

The virtual tie in the Sept. 17 election results between the right-wing bloc and the center-left parties is not an expression of ideological differences between advocates of the greater Land of Israel and the peace camp. No one talked about the occupation during the campaign. Those in line to cast their ballots were not heard arguing for or against the government’s economic policies. Even the chilling report that surfaced days before the election about Netanyahu’s decision to launch war on Gaza without consulting the country’s top defense echelons or convening the security cabinet, a move foiled at the last minute by the attorney general, did not shock voters.