Israeli Foreign Minister and Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni speaks at an election campaign rally in the southern city of Sderot. Photograph: David Buimovitch/AFP/Getty Images

With less than a week to go before Israel holds elections, the rival candidates are locked in fierce debate not about whether the devastating war in Gaza went too far, but whether it went far enough.

Once again the challenge of national security will dominate the vote at a time when, as far as opinion polls predict, the country's political mood has shifted dramatically to the right. Binyamin Netanyahu, leader of the opposition Likud party, is ahead in the polls and widely predicted to be the next prime minister.

Three years ago the public elected the centrist Kadima party to head a government that talked boldly of drawing up final borders for the Jewish state. It was to be a decisive, unilateral act that would allow Israel to embrace its major settlement blocs, effectively colonies in the occupied West Bank, while dividing itself off once and for all from Palestinians.
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Instead the government has led two wars, Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza. The centre has lost support and the right has emerged resurgent - epitomised by the recent rise of Avigdor Lieberman, a hardliner and critic of Israel's Arab minority.

Promises of negotiations towards a peace deal now pale in popularity compared with combative talk about defending Israel and its Jewish character.

"Reality is the explanation," said Abraham Diskin, a political scientist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "The Arab-Israeli conflict is an existential problem both on a personal and a national basis. That is the most important issue and the policy and the promises suggested by Kadima failed."

The interpretation of the past few years most widely accepted by Israelis is that when Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew Israeli settlers and troops from Gaza in 2005 rather than bringing calm, it brought more trouble. Within months Hamas was elected, rockets continued to be fired at southern Israel despite a series of heavy Israeli military incursions and eventually the crisis culminated in last month's three-week war. Even the death and destruction of Palestinian life that the war entailed has not stopped the rockets - yesterday militants fired a long-range rocket at the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon.

The Gaza stalemate, combined with the war in Lebanon which followed Israel's withdrawal from an 18-year occupation in 2000, led many Israelis to believe that unilateral withdrawals did not work and that at the same time a peace deal with the Palestinians was not possible.

Ari Shavit, a commentator for the left-leaning Ha'aretz newspaper, argues that the Israeli majority has found itself caught between wanting to end the occupation and not trusting the Palestinians.

"It recognises that the occupation is futile, but is looking for a safe way to end it. It recognises that the Greater Israel vision is finished, but fears having a Hamas state on the outskirts of Kfar Sava," he wrote, referring to a popular city in central Israel. "The real reason many Israelis will vote for the right in 2009 is their deep disappointment with the centre."

Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister and leader of the Kadima party, must have hoped the war in Gaza would have done more to build her support in the final days before the vote. In a key speech on Monday she spoke sternly about Gaza, promising more attacks and ruling out any chance of a negotiated settlement with Hamas. "If by ending the operation we have yet to achieve deterrence, we will continue until they get the message," she said.

Those words make her sound little different from Netanyahu. However, and this is where she stands apart, Livni also held out the continued possibility of a broader peace deal with the Palestinians.

That promise, says Diskin, is something she does believe is possible. "The question is whether you can achieve real peace with the other side," he added.

It is in that area of doubt where Netanyahu and his tough words prosper. "Strong leadership for Israel's security and economy," is what his campaign promises.