What's at stake in the Israeli election? Everything and nothing.  Start with the nothing. The battle to be prime minister comes down to two candidates, former PM Binyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu of Likud and current foreign minister Tzipi Livni of Kadima.  As the race between the two has tightened, with the last polls showing only a two-seat gap between them, the pair have scrambled to define themselves more sharply. "Livni at last let the word peace come out of her mouth," says Aluf Benn of the liberal daily Haaretz, while "Bibi planted a tree in the Golan [Heights] and went for a walkabout in East Jerusalem."  In those moves, Livni and Netanyahu were both acting out age-old roles, the peace candidate doing battle with the hawk. But no one seriously believes that Livni is about to deliver an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty, just as no one kids themselves that Bibi is going to realise the now-fading Likud dream of Greater Israel. Instead, in the words of one senior Israeli official, "Whoever wins, it will be more of the same: convergence on the pragmatic centre." If Livni were somehow to pull off a double upset, emerging with both the most seats and a presidential invitation to form a government  and the latter does not automatically follow the former  she would continue in the same vein as the outgoing Olmert administration she served: more talks with the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, more of the Annapolis process started in November 2007 and more isolation of Hamas.  Netanyahu's rhetoric has been different, ruling out any compromise on Jerusalem and still refusing to accept a Palestinian state. But were he to return to the prime minister's office, few believe he would maintain that hard line. First, he will look leftward for coalition partners, preferring to be the hawk in a centrist government than the centrist in an ultra-hawkish one. He knows that his relationship with the US  which matters more to Israeli leaders than almost anything else  will be doomed if he becomes the prisoner of rightist parties, constantly demanding settlement expansion and the like.  The result will be that Netanyahu, too, will stay on the Annapolis track, continuing to negotiate with the PA. The tone will be different from Livni's  though some say Netanyahu might even end up yielding more than she would. First, because he will be anxious, in Benn's words, "to prove to world opinion that he is not a monster" and, second, because his vision of "economic peace" calls for nurturing prosperity on the West Bank, and that must entail reducing the number of checkpoints that currently restrict Palestinian movement so badly.  Hence the impression that there's not much difference at the top  and next to nothing at stake. And yet, others say something very profound is on the line in this election, their angst stirred by the rise and rise of the man set to claim third place and the role of kingmaker: Avigdor Lieberman. A nationalist to his friends, a racist to his enemies, the Russian-born Lieberman poses as an Israeli Putin, the strongman saviour Israel is crying out for. His signature proposal is to remove the citizenship of anyone who refuses to swear an oath of loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state: his target is clearly the 1.45m Palestinian Arabs who live as citizens inside Israel proper. Many liberals laugh off Lieberman as an opportunist, insisting that his loyalty oath plan will come to nothing. But others tremble at the toxicity he has unleashed.  Asked what's at stake in this election, one scholar at Tel Aviv University answered instantly: "Israel's soul.