The forthcoming, March 28th elections in Israel were supposed to be different. The surprising takeover of the a disintegrating Labor party by the populist Amir Peretz, representing the privileged public monopoly unions, focused attention on his socialist economic agenda, especially in the sympathetic, left-leaning Israeli press. All agreed that it was to replace security as the central theme of the elections.

But as usual in the Middle East, reality mugged those expectations. A “surprising” Hamas landslide victory in Palestinian Authority elections and a renewed wave of terrorism have forced the debate back to security.

If one can call it a debate. Despite the life and death issues facing the Israeli electorate, the interest shown by the public, and especially the young, in these elections has been minimal. Polls expect about a 65% voter turnout, this in a country where people are intensely involved in politics and where past election participation reached 85%.

The reason is that Israelis are simply exhausted. They are exhausted by the hundred-year struggle against Muslim terrorism and the feeling that they have been deserted by most Western countries that instead of sympathy show them an almost pathological enmity. These pressures by themselves would constitute a burden few nations could bear. Israelis have managed to shoulder them without losing their humanity; despite terrible terrorist acts, Arabs still can safely enjoy Israeli cities without being molested, and Israeli governments keep extending humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.

But in addition to these burdens, most Israelis have to struggle to make ends meet on their salaries of around $1,200 a month, when consumer prices are often double those of America’s. The combination of all these burdens is just too much.

There is another reason for the curious combination of apathy and blind trust that characterizes these Israeli elections. It is the general disenchantment of voters with the democratic political process that can inflict all democracies, the conviction of some citizens that all politicians are irredeemably self-serving and corrupt and that there is little meaningful choice between them. So why bother to vote?

The leftist Israeli press, more cynical and nihilistic even than its Western counterparts, has only one obsessive criteria for supporting candidates. It is whether they will make Israel withdraw to its 1967 borders and facilitate the establishment of a Palestinian state, no matter how criminal, oppressive, or dangerous. The press presented Kadima as the only viable alternative, covering up any alleged wrongdoings by its leadership and its vague plans. Concurrently, it engaged in a no-holds-barred campaign against Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud’s candidate.

In times of national emergency people tend to rally around leadership, even when it is not the best. Exhausted Israelis naturally yearn for a strong leadership. Once Ariel Sharon announced that he was determined to withdraw from Gaza and to uproot Jewish settlements, the hated Sharon became the press’s darling. “We must protect him like a treasure,” a prominent leftist TV commentator openly declared. The press convinced a significant portion of the Israeli public to follow Sharon’s new party Kadima, despite the fact that it has no clear program, except the promise to continue unilateral withdrawals, and that it is composed of an odd assortment of Likud and Labor politicos who have a long history not only of sharp political disagreement but of personally detesting each other. Kadima has appealed apparently to a very deep and irrational desire to simply get rid of the conflict, to somehow make it disappear behind an impregnable wall. So that even when Sharon’s stroke removed him from leadership, and when he was replaced by Ehud Olmert, who would not win an Israeli popularity contest, people kept giving Kadima the largest number of votes (enough to elect 44 Knesset members at its peak). It is only this last week that Kadima’s fortunes are starting to decline after it seemed immune to several dramatic developments such as the Hamas landslide victory in the PA elections.

Two of Israel’s most respected journalists, the veteran Ha’aretz columnist Ari Shavit and Ha’aretz’s economic editor Guy Rolnik, both left-leaning supporters of the peace camp and of Israeli withdrawal from the disputed territories, were almost alone in sounding an alarm about Kadima’s ascendancy.

Shavit says that unconditional withdrawals that will cede territory to a Hamas-dominated PA, will bring Syrian and Iranian policies and agents closer to Israel, and may threaten Israel’s existence. He therefore considers Olmert so irresponsible that he is unfit to be prime minister.

Both Shavit and Rolnik claim that a Kadima victory is a serious danger to Israeli democracy because many Kadima politicos, Olmert chief among them, are actually the peons of Israel’s oligarchs. So Kadima’s victory would represent a total takeover of control of all the central institutions of the state by the 18 families that already control most assets in Israel. “The new governing party will be very useful in achieving our objectives,” Shavit wrote in a mock memo from a strategic advisor to the 18 families, “it will enable us to gain total control of the Israeli government, the police, the justice department, the treasury and all the regulators. The debased 20th century democratic system will be replaced by a centralized oligarchic regime.”

Both Shavit and Rolnik, though no Netanyahu fans, charge that the press, also a monopoly serving similar interests, marked Netanyahu for political demise because he was the only one who dared take on the oligarchs, and did so successfully by breaking their greatest hold on economic power, the bank duopoly.

But even such dramatic charges, coming from journalists with high credibility, did not wake up the election campaign or stimulate a debate. So those worried about the fate of Israel will just have to wait and see what a dysfunctional Israeli democracy has in store for the future.

Mr. Doron is a president of the Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress, an independent public-policy think tank based in Israel (www.icsep.org.il).