Distortion in Jeremy Bowen election diary

In this diary entry, the BBC Middle East Editor claims that Israelis are against a two-state solution. Dozens of opinion polls over recent years have consistently demonstrated that a firm majority of Israelis support the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as a solution to the conflict. The assertion is therefore extremely misleading to readers.

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'Jeremy Bowen election diary'

BBC Online, by Jeremy Bowen, 11 February 2009

Some cities are designed for the winter, and some, like Tel Aviv, are best in the sun.

So on a wet Tuesday night in February, with the surf crashing in from a stormy Mediterranean sea, the place to be was somewhere warm with a warm someone, not tramping Tel Aviv's streets looking for the meaning in this election.

But that's what reporters are paid to do. Tel Aviv does not look like a city gripped by election fever, because it isn't.

As I drove down an empty boulevard towards the Likud election night HQ, a big poster of the Labour leader Ehud Barak was tearing itself to pieces in the wind whipping off the beach.

He has admitted that the best he can hope for is to keep his job as defence minister in a new coalition. Mr Barak, Israel's most decorated soldier when he was uniform, seems to have reached his ceiling as a politician.

By mid evening no leading Likud politicians had turned up at their HQ, a scruffy pavilion at Tel Aviv's exhibition centre. That felt like a sign of worry.

Likud and its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, have been in the lead in the polls for months, but at the very end of the campaign Kadima, led by Tzipi Livni, had almost drawn level.

Israelis define their politics according to their views on the conflict with the Palestinians. They have traditionally believed that the Arabs are not to be trusted, and that occupied land captured in the 1967 war is Israel's by right.

In other words, they're against a sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel - which is the so-called two state solution.

During the campaign Likud's leader Mr Netanyahu has often sounded ideologically rigid. But some believe that if he returns as prime minister he may be more flexible.

Kadima's Tzipi Livni supports the two state solution, and says she's the one to deliver it.

But even if Kadima get a few more seats than Likud when all the votes are counted, it may not be able to form a government.

Israel's system of proportional representation leaves smaller parties holding the balance of power. The electoral arithmetic predicted by pollsters suggests that Mr Netanyahu will end up with more potential coalition partners in Israel's parliament than Mrs Livni.