Voting for Sharon, Hoping for the Best.(Ariel Sharon)

Oded Doron has a queasy feeling about Ariel Sharon. The 44-year-old carpenter has voted for the Labor Party all his life, and regards the old Likud general as a bellicose egomaniac who could easily plunge Israel back into full-scale war. But the four-month-long intifada has hardened Doron against both the Palestinians and the Israeli leader who tried and failed to make peace with them. One night last week, when Arabs fired a shot at his catamaran off the Mediterranean coast, Doron became even more certain that Prime Minister Ehud Barak was the wrong man for the times. "When there was a fight in the neighborhood, the kid who usually won wasn't the strongest. He was the craziest," says Doron, relaxing on his boat in the harbor of Jaffa, a mixed Jewish-Arab suburb of Tel Aviv. Now, Doron says, he's holding his nose and voting for Sharon this week. "In my opinion he's crazy and irresponsible, but I think he's the only option we have left," Doron says.

Count Doron as one more bearer of bad news for Ehud Barak. As the lackluster campaign for Israel's next prime minister drew to a close last week, polls showed Likud candidate Sharon beating Barak by as much as 20 percent, with the gap growing wider. True, Israeli polls aren't always accurate, and there's always a chance that the genuine prospect of a Sharon victory could cause many nervous voters to change their minds at the last moment. But a tour of the country conducted by NEWSWEEK on the eve of the election revealed that the disappointment of many former Barak supporters far outweighs the dread they feel about Sharon. From kibbutzniks in the Jordan Valley to Russian immigrants in the capital to Arab Israelis around the Sea of Galilee, Labor Party stalwarts say they want drastic change. They're fed up with the man who came in promising peace but who presided over the worst outbreak of Palestinian-Israeli violence in a decade. "Barak keeps trying different medication, but nothing is working," says Arieh Partuk, 42, an entrepreneur who lives in a prosperous Tel Aviv suburb. "We need major surgery."

For many, Sharon represents a drastic but necessary remedy. Moscow-born Alexandra Aronin, 30, immigrated to Jerusalem in 1992. Like almost all members of her family and friends in the Russian-immigrant community, the environmental engineer embraced the Labor Party as "more European, more logical and more intelligent" than Likud. She voted for Barak in 1999. "I was impressed by the stability he seemed to radiate," she says. But Aronin's anxiety has deepened since the shooting erupted last fall. Her younger brother is a soldier serving in the violent West Bank town of Hebron, and her father works in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Atarot, where an Orthodox Jew was shot to death in his car by snipers last week. Aronin doesn't really understand the reasons for the intifada, but she blames Barak for failing to control the violence. "I will vote for Sharon, but I will do so with a heavy heart," says Aronin. "No one knows what lies behind Sharon's slogans, and I realize I may have to pay the consequences of this decision."

Barak's perceived weakness has doomed him in some of Labor's most reliable strongholds. Kibbutz Kalia, an oasis of date palms and irrigated gardens on the northern edge of the Dead Sea, has voted almost unanimously for the Labor Party since Golda Meir's ...