TEL AVIV, Israel – As the nastiest political jabs in the political campaign so far were directed at his Kadima Party, the acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, piloted the final push toward tomorrow’s crucial Israeli elections, which may settle the future of the settlements and the final borders of the country.

Mr. Olmert awarded final interviews to key press outlets, chaired the last weekly meeting of his Cabinet, urged all Israelis to vote, and crunched the latest poll numbers. And then, the man expected to win Israel’s premiership in his own right when the votes are counted, took a two-hour break to do what he loves best.

For security reasons, “he can’t go to soccer games anymore,” Mr. Olmert’s spokesman, Hagay Elias, told The New York Sun.

So instead, Mr. Olmert watched on television as his favorite team, Beitar Jerusalem, took on its oldest and most entrenched rival, Hapoel Tel Aviv, in a sold-out game at Bloomfield Stadium in Jaffa.

Like the political camps that created them, the two teams yesterday fought for the Premier League’s second and third places. At half-time, speaking live in a broadcast beamed to 15,000 people attending Kadima’s final major rally in the northern Israeli city of Kiryat Motzkin, Mr. Olmert used a favorite metaphor to describe his recently formed party of technocrats and veteran political pros, and how it differs from its two old established main rivals.

“Kadima is like Israel’s national soccer team, drawing many talented players from old defunct parties,” Mr. Olmert said.

Kadima’s founder, Prime Minister Sharon, has been comatose since the beginning of the year. Yesterday, the Labor leader, Amir Peretz, created a firestorm by, for the first time in the campaign, evoking the memory of the center-left party’s slain icon, Yitzhak Rabin.

Final polls predict that between 35 and 37 seats in the 120-member Knesset will go to Kadima. Labor is expected to hold on to 20 seats, while Likud’s numbers are down to 15. The wild card is Yisrael Beiteinu, an anti-Arab party formed by Russian immigrants and led by Avigdor Lieberman, which favors a welfare economy and which some polls say will get between seven and 15 seats.

In an interview yesterday on Israel Radio’s popular morning show, Mr. Peretz attacked former Laborites who have moved to Kadima. Most of his anger was directed at a former prime minister, Shimon Peres, who, he said, serves as “a fig leaf to a cart full of rotten apples” of former Likudniks – “the same people who were on that Zion Square balcony.”

In the mid-1990s, when the Oslo Accord was negotiated, Likud leaders, including Mr. Olmert, conducted a heated anti-Rabin campaign from a balcony in that square in central Jerusalem and many on the Left have accused them of using overly-heated rhetoric that directly led to Rabin’s 1995 assassination.

“In all my talks with Yigal Amir, he never said he was incited or otherwise influenced by any politician – he acted on his own,” attorney Ari Shamai, who represents the extreme right-winger, told me last night during the soccer game. The most notorious political assassin in the country’s history, Mr. Amir is currently serving a life sentence, and the mere sound of his name makes most Israelis shiver.

Kadima leaders believe the Amir-versus-Rabin rivalry belongs firmly in the past. Evoking it will be as unproductive for Labor as the own goal that a Hapoel Tel Aviv player shot minutes after gaining the lead, which resulted in the game being tied.

“This ploy by Labor’s strategists will backfire,” said a longtime close aide to Mr. Peres, who asked not to be named. “It is worth several more votes for Kadima.” The aide similarly dismissed attacks led by Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who accused Mr. Olmert of collaborating with the likes of Mr. Peres, a longtime stalwart of Israel’s dovish camp.

Stressing further the new political paradigm, other political analysts pointed to the company Mr. Olmert kept while watching yesterday’s soccer match on TV. If Mr. Olmert can watch the game alongside Haim Ramon, they say, what do old political rivalries mean anymore?

Like his New Yorker friend Rudy Giuliani and his passion for the Yankees, Mr. Olmert, a former mayor of Israel’s capital, is the best known Beitar Jerusalem fan. The former Laborite Mr. Ramon, on the other hand, loves Hapoel Tel Aviv so much he once served as the chairman of its Board of Directors.

Secular Tel Aviv represents Israel’s liberalism, while Jerusalem is at the heart of its national aspirations. Like much else in the life of the pre-Israel Jewish community in Palestine, sporting clubs were formed along party and ideological lines.

Beitar – an acronym memorializing an early nationalist hero, Joseph Trumpeldor, who died fighting against Arab assailants despite having lost an arm in an earlier war – is synonymous with the rightist camp known as Revisionists. The clubs of Hapoel, Hebrew for “the worker,” were traditionally run by the Socialist-Zionists of the Left and their powerful Histadrut union.

Now, the former Hisadrut leader, Mr. Ramon is in Kadima, representing a new brand of politics, which also could clearly be seen in the crowd at Bloomfield stadium.

When he is not defending notorious killers in court, Mr. Shamai runs a successful website for Hapoel Tel Aviv fans. “My mother was close to the right, while my father was a diehard Laborite,” Mr. Shamai said, between bellowing at the referee for decisions he disagreed with. “She always told my dad, ‘I’ll teach the kid about politics, you teach him about soccer.’ I still know old Beitar songs better than all those Jerusalem fans.” But he plans to vote for the anti-Zionist far left.