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Stacked ballots at Israeli election headquarters. (AP)
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| By Israel Insider staff and partners March 28, 2006 |
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Israelis vote Tuesday in a Knesset election expected to affect their nation's future borders. The leading candidate, acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, promises to pull back from most of Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") and draw Israel's final borders by 2010.
Turnout at 4pm was reported at 47%, the lowest in the nation's history and down from the 2003 election, when 53% voted by that time.
Online English coverage, beginning at 8 pm local (1 pm ET) is available by registering here.
Olmert's Kadima party, and its left-wing allies, were reported to be concerned about the low turnout, fearing that the lack of interest for middle of the road voters would play to the advantage of more ideologically motivated right of center candidates.
Israel began the "disengagement" process last summer with its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria, expelling some 10,000 residents and destroying their communities. Tuesday's vote marked the first time the leading candidate has laid out a concrete vision for the future of Judea and Samaria.
Polls opened at 7 a.m. (0500 GMT) and were to close at 10 p.m. (2000 GMT), to be followed immediately by exit poll results broadcast by the three main TV stations. Final unofficial results were expected early Wednesday.
Election Day is a state holiday in Israel, where many of the 8,276 polling stations serving 4.5 million voters are set up in schools. By midmorning, turnout was about 10 percent, the lowest for the hour since election officials started keeping score in 1973.
Rafi Friedman, a resident of the Tel Aviv suburb of Kochav Yair, voted as soon as the polls opened before rushing off to the airport for a business trip. "Voting is not just a right. It's a duty," he said.
Security was extremely tight, with some 22,000 police and border police patrolling Israel's frontier with the West Bank, particularly around Jerusalem. The military had sealed off the West Bank and Gaza two weeks earlier, barring all Palestinians to prevent possible attacks by terrorists. But Islamic Jihad took credit for a missile attack that killed an Israeli Bedouin man and a child in southern Israel.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, attending the Arab Summit in Sudan, appealed to voters to back candidates who support a peace deal. "We hope that the Israeli voters will direct their vote to peace, for parliament members who are looking for peace, who want peace, because there is no future for us and for them, there is no security for us and for them without peace," he told The Associated Press.
Pollsters predicted that Olmert's centrist Kadima Party, founded in November, would win the most votes, well ahead of the center-left Labor Party and the right-wing Likud. However, an unusually large number of voters said they were undecided, and pollsters said large fluctuations were possible.
Success for Kadima has been defined as winning at least 35 of 120 seats in parliament. The party, which Olmert took over after its founder, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, lapsed into a coma following a stroke on Jan. 4, has been polling around 34 seats in recent days, several seats less than pollsters predicted at the start of the campaign.
In Israel's electoral system, the leader of the largest party is asked first to try to form a ruling coalition. No party has ever won a majority in parliament.
The shape of Olmert's government -- whether stacked with moderate or more hardline parties -- could well determine how far he can go in carrying out his plan.
Olmert has said he would only invite parties that back his plan, but might be forced to seek other allies if Kadima gets fewer seats than expected. Labor, in favor of territorial concessions, was expected to win around 20 seats, and Likud, which wants to keep most of the West Bank, was polling at 14 seats.
Under Olmert's plan, Israel's partially completed separation barrier would become the new border within four years, with some alterations. Settlement blocs on the Israeli side of the barrier would be beefed up, while tens of thousands of settlers living on the other side would be uprooted from their homes.
"We will determine the line of the security fence, and we will make sure that no Jewish settlements will be left on the other side of the fence. Drawing the final borders is our obligation as leaders and as a society," Olmert wrote Tuesday in an op-ed piece published in the Yediot Ahronot daily, once again laying out his vision.
Joined by his wife Aliza, a left-wing activist, Olmert cast his ballot near his Jerusalem home. Smiling for a crowd of TV cameras, Olmert slowly slipped the ballot into the box, then embraced his wife.
In all, 31 parties were competing, including about two dozen with narrow agendas, such as pensioner rights, legalization of marijuana and parties for the ultra-Orthodox. About a dozen parties were expected to clear the 2 percent-of-the-vote threshold to enter parliament.
Raheli London, 18, of Jerusalem, planned to support the ultra-Orthodox Aguda Yisrael party at the behest of religious leaders. "All the rabbis send me to them, so I vote for them," she said.
Olmert's idea of unilateral action gained support after the victory of the Hamas militant group in legislative elections. The Palestinian parliament was set to approve Hamas' Cabinet on Tuesday, sending it to Abbas for final approval.
During the campaign, Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu had warned that unilateral pullbacks simply bring Hamas closer to Israel, and Labor leader Amir Peretz complained that the Kadima approach kills prospects for peace talks. Peretz, a former union leader, also has promised to narrow the growing gap between rich and poor.
Peretz voted in his hometown of Sderot, a working-class community in the southern Negev Desert, flanked by his wife.
Sharon's main legacy was to plant the idea that Israel need not wait for a formal peace treaty to separate from the Palestinians. His stand-in, Olmert, has positioned himself as the man most likely to make that happen.
"Olmert did what Sharon would not have done on the eve of elections: He told the voters what he intends to do," columnist Nahum Barnea wrote in Yediot. "He turned these elections into a referendum on the future of Judea and Samaria."
With Kadima considered the clear front-runner, the election campaign was described as the dullest in Israeli history. But some uncertainty remained. Right-wing parties, aligned with religious forces, hoped to form a "blocking bloc" that would prevent Olmert from carrying out his plan.
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