Yehuda is too young to vote — the voting age here is 18 — but he was deeply invested in the outcome of this week’s election, which Netanyahu went on to win. Handing out the mock ballot slips was more than a stunt, it was an act of devotion to the prime minister who has been in power for more than half of his life.

“There’s no one like Bibi,” he said, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “The Likud is like family and friends.”

Yehuda’s enthusiasm isn’t unusual. It’s part of a significant trend in Israel: young people love Netanyahu. And they most probably played a significant role in his reelection. Though we don’t yet know the breakdown of election results by age, a pre-election poll revealed Netanyahu’s popularity with young and first-time voters.

The survey, by the Israel Democracy Institute, showed that 65% of Israelis between the ages of 18-24 preferred Netanyahu while just 17% wanted his rival Benny Gantz. Among Israelis over 65, Gantz was much more popular — 53% preferred him, while 35% wanted Netanyahu.

Broadly speaking, Jewish Israeli youth like Netanyahu because they tend to be Right wing, the dominant ideology in Israel. Here, as opposed to Europe, the Right-Left divide is not related to social issues and economics but to security, defense, and the peace process.

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More than half of the population, according to Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, would identify itself as being on the Right. Among religious Jews, a growing sector of the population given the high birth rates in the orthodox communities, that tendency is even more prevalent.

“Keeping in mind that first-time voters are greatly influenced by their family and home environment,” said Plesner, “and given the disproportionate demographic growth of the ultra-Orthodox population, the logical conclusion is that the current rightward trends are expected to continue.”

But religious demographics are only part of the explanation. These young voters are a generation of sceptics when it comes to the idea of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. They support Netanyahu because they believe his message that Israel must live by the sword. “The hope or yearning for peace is foreign to them,” said Plesner.

They were born in the late 1990s or very early 2000s, in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of a Jewish extremist who opposed territorial compromise with the Palestinians. They were raised in the shadow of the bloody Second Intifada, and were just starting school when Israel evacuated Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005. They have lived through three wars between Israel and Hamas in Gaza — in 2008-2009, in 2012, and in 2014. And now most of them are in the Israeli army, with many enforcing a 52-year-long military occupation.

On Election Day in Har Homa, a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, a 20-year-old named Roni was sitting at a table inside a polling station in an elementary school. She is a soldier in the Israeli military’s home front command and had spent the day helping with the ballot. She had already cast her first ever vote. Her pick? Netanyahu.

Roni said she didn’t care that Netanyahu was facing corruption charges in several cases, pending a hearing. She was impressed by his diplomacy, and especially his close relationship with Donald Trump. Like many Israelis, she was also voting on security. “The security we have had in the past decade is the best we have ever had,” she said.

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Roni lives in Maale Adumim, another settlement in the West Bank. A few days before the poll, Netanyahu promised that he would annex these settlements if he were reelected. It was an idea that resonated with her, even though she conceded it would be “problematic” – since most countries reject Israel’s occupation. Netanyahu is “the only one that would be able to do it,” she said.

In her view, peace between Israelis and Palestinians is impossible. “I don’t think there is ever going to be peace,” she said. “We both want the same thing. We want Jerusalem, they want Jerusalem. They want to have a country but they want it on our land. It is like two babies wanting the same candy. One will get it one, one won’t. We got it.” Sharing the land is not an option. “I think that would be a disgrace for the soldiers that died protecting the country,” she said, “the soldiers’ blood that was shed all over Jerusalem, all over the West Bank, all over the country.”

Nor does she believe that the Palestinians will give up their fight even if a compromise is reached.

Israel’s youth weren’t always so Right wing. Roby Nathanson is the director of the Macro Center for Political Economics in Israel, which polls the attitudes of Israeli youth every six years. When the survey began, in 1998, its respondents were the “generation of peace”, he said. But attitudes shifted to the Right over the years as the peace process floundered.

A critical point was the Israeli evacuation of settlements from Gaza in 2005, which was followed by repeated wars between Israel and Hamas. There are many reasons for this turn of events — Israel’s siege, Hamas’s militancy, and other regional developments — but many bought a simple story, believing that Israel gave up land and got rockets in return.

In the 2010 survey, the first one following the Gaza withdrawal, Nathanson said he noticed more extreme attitudes from the youth than ever before.  “We identified racist opinions among the youngsters,” he said. “We were very astonished about these positions.”

Today, these opinions are no longer surprising. In the 2016 survey, the most recent one, 40% of Jewish teenagers (15-18) and 44% of Jewish young people (21-24) said they “think that Arab citizens of Israel should be prohibited from being elected to the Knesset”.

According to Nathanson, Netanyahu is particularly appealing to first-time voters because his party invests in their development. Bibi may be notorious for elbowing out competitors within his own party, but in the lower ranks of Likud, young people feel encouraged to take on leadership positions. The populist party “gives many young leaders opportunities to grow into politics and be leaders of the future”.

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Nathanson contrasts this with Likud’s historic alternative, Labor, which is more calcified when it comes to growing the next generation of leaders. Labor are set for a historically low six seats in this election, compared to Likud’s projected 35. One of Labor’s few young stars, Stav Shaffir, did not come from within the party but was courted by it after leading a social justice protest movement in 2011.

It all marks a radical shift away from the Left’s vision of Israel – one that upholds human rights, the justice system, and works toward a negotiated solution with the Palestinians. “If you look at it statistically, the perspective for the secular, liberal, open-minded democratic society is not very rosy,” Nathanson says.

Instead, the future looks bright for the Right’s ideal: an Israel which prioritises the Jewish identity of the country over its democratic one, to the detriment, according to critics, of religious pluralism, the welfare of Israel’s Arab Palestinian minority, and the two-state solution. With demographics on his side, Netanyahu will be steering the country down this path for some time to come.

It’s a scene of late winter Mediterranean idyll, but to hear Lifshitz tell it, darkness looms on the horizon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is running for a fifth term in office, defiantly continuing his campaign in the face of pending indictments in several corruption cases. Should Netanyahu win, it will spell in Lifshitz’s view a “catastrophe for Israeli democracy.”

That’s why Lifshitz is voting for Benny Gantz. The former chief of the Israel Defence Forces, Gantz burst onto the political scene in late December. He has no political experience. But that hasn’t stopped Netanyahu-weary Israelis like Lifshitz from investing their hopes in him.

“The necessary thing is to replace Bibi,” Lifshitz says, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “I would say no matter who, but the one who can do it is Gantz.”

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Up and down Rothschild Boulevard, the heart of Israel’s most liberal city, Gantz supporters are easy to find. And most have the same reason for backing him.

“He has a chance of replacing Bibi,” says Noam Ahituv, a 43-year-old web programmer who was smoking a cigarette on the street.

“He’s just not Bibi,” echoes Lihi Ben Arie, a 36-year-old product manager sitting on a bench with two friends, one of whom piped up with another reason to vote for the tall, blue-eyed candidate: “He’s hot!”

For the past decade, Netanyahu has had a virtual lock on power. After first serving as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, he was again elected in 2009 and has maintained the position ever since. Today, there’s no figure more divisive in Israeli politics than Netanyahu.

To his supporters, he is Israel’s peerless statesman and protector, defending the country from, on any given day, journalists, Leftists, Israel’s Arab citizens, and the attorney general who seeks his indictment. To his detractors, he is a crook leading the country into a moral abyss, in which maintaining the status quo comes at the expense of Israel’s democratic institutions, its standing in the free world, and the country’s ability to make peace with the Palestinians.

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And yet up until recently, Netanyahu’s continued rule seemed like a foregone conclusion to most in Israel. With no credible alternative on the horizon, Netanyahu banked on an easy win when, in December, he called for early elections.

Back then, Israel’s attorney general had not yet announced his plan to indict Netanyahu in several corruption cases. By winning yet another election, Netanyahu reasoned, he would thwart the potential charges by renewing the lease on his leadership.

But then along came Gantz.

Israelis recognise Gantz from his tenure as IDF chief between 2011 to 2015, in particular his leadership during Israel’s 2014 military operation in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge. In January, Gantz kicked off his campaign with a speech that took aim at Netanyahu, comparing his administration to a “French royal house” and promising to return the Israeli government to the people.

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Next Gantz merged his party, Israel Resilience, with two other parties to form the Blue and White alliance, a centrist mega party named for the colours of Israel’s flag. If elected, Gantz plans to serve two and a half years as prime minister before switching with Yair Lapid, his Blue and White co-head.

Blue and White made a strong showing in polls after Israel’s attorney general announced his intention on February 28 to indict Netanyahu in three different corruption cases, pending a hearing. But now the race is narrowing. Blue and White still outpaces Netanyahu’s Likud in the April 9 election, but by a slim margin. In Israel’s electoral system, the head of the party that wins the most seats is given the first chance to assemble a coalition out of a majority of parliament seats. As of now, it remains unclear whether Blue and White will be able to convince enough smaller parties to form a government.

In an election that is ultimately a referendum on Netanyahu’s fitness to rule, the most attractive thing about Gantz, as Lifshitz and his fellow citizens soaking up the sun on Rothschild Boulevard show, is that he’s not Netanyahu. The second most attractive thing is his military background.

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In a country where service is mandatory for the majority of citizens, Gantz’s army pedigree projects an image of strength to the security-obsessed public. It’s an image that he has heavily campaigned on. In early video advertisements, he bragged about killing terrorists and showed footage of the vast destruction of the Gaza Strip during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war. (In fact, Gantz is facing legal action for his conduct during that war; a Dutch-Palestinian is suing Gantz and another ex-general for the bombing of his family home in Gaza, which killed six relatives. A Dutch court is deciding whether to hear the case.)

For Michael Freedman, a 39-year-old British immigrant to Israel, Gantz’s security credentials are one part of the reason he is “90%” sure that he will vote for Blue and White. “I know Gantz only from the media and from his performance as chief of staff, but he seems to be a genuinely safe pair of hands,” he says, standing in the lobby of a Tel Aviv hall after an event featuring Gantz’s Blue and White co-leader Lapid.

Gantz “ran Israel’s largest and most prestigious institution, I would argue,” Freedman continues. “Does that qualify him to be prime minister? I don’t know but you have to take the candidates you have. Bibi’s current behaviour absolutely disqualifies him from any public offices. [Gantz] is the alternative we have, let’s hope he’s as good a prime minister as he was chief of staff.”

To Freedman, this election is as high stakes as it gets. “This is really a battle for the soul of what Israel is supposed to be,” in terms of the country’s approach to rule of law, democracy, and the validity of the courts. Netanyahu, he says, is undermining them all.

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Predictably, Netanyahu’s line against Gantz is that his former military chief is a Leftist. He even claimed that Gantz attended a ceremony honouring Hamas militants killed in the 2014 war. Israel’s liberal newspaper Haaretz fact-checked the assertion and found that the event in question was actually an Israeli peace event near the Gaza border, calling for reconciliation between the two sides.

Gantz is hardly Left. Along with Lapid, he is campaigning with two other military men, former defence minister Moshe Yaalon and former IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi. Yaalon is an outspoken supporter of the settlement movement. The Blue and White party’s platform is an ideological medley, with nods to security, religious pluralism, and equality, but with a diplomatic program that no Palestinian government would accept. (For one, it claims Jerusalem, where Palestinians hope to build a capital, for Israel alone.)

“It is a kind of supermarket party,” says Ofer Kenig, a researcher with the Israel Democracy Institute.

According to Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin, a political pollster, part of Gantz’s test will be whether he can reach Israelis disillusioned with Netanyahu on the moderate Right.

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In Jerusalem, Amir Elfassy is taking such an ideological leap, although he started from a more extreme position than many would-be Gantz voters. The 34-year-old owner of the Butke bar, Elfassy previously voted for the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party, which calls for Israel to annex parts of the territory Palestinians claim for a state.

Now he’s with Gantz’s Blue and White.

“It is the first time I’m not voting Right,” he says, standing inside the bar, a small brown box of a building in Jerusalem’s First Station, a commercial strip in a converted Ottoman-era train station.

Elfassy’s political shift is idiosyncratic. He used to align himself with the hardline rhetoric of the Right. As a former soldier, his first encounter with Arabs was on the other side of his gun. But since moving to Jerusalem and opening a bar, he has made friends with Arabs. He even has Arab employees, like “my little brother Muhammad,” he says, gesturing to a skinny young man with a pony tail, Muhammad Zaghal, who is rolling a spliff on the bar top.

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Now Elfassy has a “live and let live” attitude — albeit one that has its limits. It’s not like he’d approve of his daughter dating an Arab, he says. He knows Gantz agrees with that approach. “Benny Gantz has these ideas at the top of his mind, and security.”

And what about Zaghal? Unlike most Jerusalem Palestinians, he has Israeli citizenship, which means he has the right to vote in national elections. At 21 years old, this will be his first.

Packing leaves into a cigarette paper, he says he’s not sure yet if he will vote. “I don’t really like politics.”

But among many Israelis, politics is addictive these days. With about a month to go until the election, Israelis are glued to their smart phones, following every minute development ahead of April 9, when their country might face its biggest political upheaval in years.

It all depends on whether a centrist general turned politician can convince the country to take a chance and buck the status quo.