Israelis have begun voting in an election that the leading opposition candidate has described as a choice between despair and hope.
Voting in Tel Aviv, Isaac Herzog, the Zionist Union leader, was addressing the domestic audience.
But this choice may be even more keenly felt in areas under Israeli occupation, where local people have no say in this election - in the West Bank and Gaza.
The Palestinian leadership has already reacted with anger at Monday's announcement from Benjamin Netanyahu that, if he is re-elected, there will be no Palestinian state - and therefore no end to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said: "Netanyahu essentially is doing everything in his power to bury the possibility of the two-state solution."
The sudden statement of what the Palestinians already expected of Mr Netanyahu was timed to shore up his support among Israeli right-wingers, while the left-wing Zionist Union began to pull ahead in the latest polls.
That the Palestinian issue was even mentioned was something of a surprise. Neither the Likud nor the Zionist Union had made much of it during the campaign.
If Israelis were disappointed with the collapse of the peace process and blamed anyone but the Palestinians they would have been as likely to blame the Zionist Union co-leader Tzipi Livni as Mr Netanyahu - after all she was his chief negotiator.
Mr Herzog is on record as saying he is very much in favour of a two-state solution. That means an independent Palestine established through negotiations.
His predecessors on the left, notably Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, offered what many Israelis believed were tolerable but risky concessions in return for long term peace, but the Palestinians rejected the terms.
Now few Israelis believe that yet more talks will yield anything more than hot air.
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Gallery: Israel Goes To The Polls In Tight Election
An Israeli soldier choosing a ballot from behind a voting booth near Ofakim
Isaac Herzog, co-leader of centre-left Zionist Union party, poses for a photograph at his party's headquarters in Tel Aviv
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