National Agenda : Old Faces, Weary Voters : Israel’s Yitzhak Shamir is being challenged by longtime rival Yitzhak Rabin. Neither seems to be a channel for change.

A look at the kickoff television election ads for the ruling Likud Party and the Labor Party, its main challenger, might lead viewers to believe that Israel is mainly a garden of ruddy farmers happily toiling in a generous land.

Likud’s promo shows a strong-armed worker baling golden hay on a well-manicured field. Oddly enough, so does the ad for Labor. Its farmer looks remarkably like the Likud’s, all forearms and heavily tanned.

The twin images of rural bliss are meant to evoke one of the basic national symbols of Israel: the new Jewish Man at home with the land. Never mind that these days, a farmhand is just as likely to be an underpaid Palestinian day worker as an Israeli, or that masses of Russian newcomers have no intention of shoveling manure on some kibbutz. You would never guess that Israel is rapidly moving toward a high-tech economy encased in air-conditioned laboratory complexes.

If there is anything that marks the uninspiring campaign leading up to the June 23 election, it is the reluctance of the leading candidates to confront the problems and prospects of Israel: a slowing economy and unemployment--in a consumer culture--and a massive influx of new citizens from Russia. Parties prefer to make hay with symbols such as the joyful farmer--not to mention a heavy use of the blue-and-white Israeli flag. The voters are confronted with two old warhorses of Israeli politics--Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of the right-wing Likud and longtime political and military fixture Yitzhak Rabin of the left-of-center Labor--in a battle of nearly spent ideologies.

The main difference between the two men centers on how to treat the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the 1.7 million Palestinians who live there. Shamir has rapidly expanded Jewish settlement there and rejects the so-called land-for-peace formula. Rabin is willing to give up land--a position that pleases Washington and could free up more U.S. economic aid.

Although the election outcome will have an impact on U.S.-Israeli relations and, probably, the Middle East peace talks, the average Israeli voter finds the subject tedious. “The choice used to be whether to talk peace or not. Now, Israel is talking peace, and Israelis want to get onto other subjects,” said Avishai Margalit, a leading political scientist.

There is an unsettled quality to the election season that Israel shares with some other democracies in the Western world. In the United States, voters are flirting with upending the traditional role of political parties in a search for new and decisive answers. Voters in France, Germany and Italy have also signaled dissatisfaction with parties in power.

In all the cases, there is dismay with the way politicians address the new post-Cold War environment.

Shamir, 76, has been prime minister longer than anyone other than founding father David Ben-Gurion. He appears blind to the swirl of events around him and focuses almost exclusively on building settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a preoccupation that forms the basis of his party’s decades-old ideology.

Challenger Rabin, 70, was prime minister in the mid-1970s and has been a fixture in Israeli political and military life for 40 years. While expressing the need to get on with new business, his party is caught in a tangle of special interests that hark back to Israel’s socialist days.

The choice has left Israeli voters with attitudes ranging from boredom to hostility. They have largely switched off the TV ads. Parties are canceling rallies for lack of attendance. When crowds do show up, they have sometimes been surly. Shamir visited Beersheba a few weeks ago and was met by a hostile crowd in what has been a safe, working-class Likud district.

Beersheba is beset by high unemployment among its large North African population. Hundreds of houses have been built for Russian immigrants, but they stand empty because the newcomers don’t want to live there permanently. A temporary camp of mobile homes is slowly turning into a slum.

When Rabin visited Beersheba later, the greeting was more subdued, although a Likud committee called the “Young Guards” sent a group of hecklers to blow whistles while Rabin spoke. Throughout much of the campaign, Rabin has benefited from standing in as a symbol for change, but not everyone is convinced.

“Do you have a job?” he asked a passer-by in a shopping mall.

“No, and I doubt you can do anything about it,” came the reply.

The disaffection is deep and widespread, even within the main parties. “The great issue (before Israel) is political and economic reform. Unfortunately, this campaign is not fought on those issues,” argued Binyamin Netanyahu, a Likudnik, frequent spokesman for the government and an aspirant to the prime minister’s post.

In this age of uneasiness, Netanyahu sounds like an American politician. “There is a general disaffection with politics-as-usual, and Israel is no exception. But there is no channel for change. The parties are too much the same,” he said.

Such feelings haunt the Labor Party, as well. Rabin shot into prominence with the birth of Israel and in the early 1950s, when the state filled with immigrants. It was the socialist heyday in Israel with grand economic plans, government ownership and ideals of equality. Now, there is general agreement that Israel cannot afford to maintain the trappings of socialism.

But is Labor, in fact, ready to jettison its support for socialist programs such as communal and subsidized farming and large state industries? Speaking of the communal and cooperative farms, the Labor magazine Spectrum wrote, “The Labor Party is . . . ideologically committed to the two types of settlement.”

Younger Labor leaders appear ready to give up the socialist past and view Rabin as the last of his breed to head the party.

“Socialism is a dinosaur in a world that is drying up,” said Avraham Burg, an up-and-coming Labor Parliament member. He is an oddity in Labor: a religious Jew in a herd of secular politicians.

Like Likud’s Netanyahu, Burg notes that Israel is safer from serious attack than it has ever been. “There are individual threats, but no existential threats,” he said. Both Likud, with its hyper-nationalist ideology, and Labor, with its statist past, offer little to young Israelis, he asserted.

“We have been stuck in a gray hole of gray leaders. We are men of the world, not just the state,” Burg said.

Adapting to a changing outside world is fast becoming a priority for Israel.

Israel is being asked to come to terms politically with its neighbors and psychologically with ideas and trends taking shape far from its borders. “It is time for Israel to join the world,” said Jacob Frenkel, the head of the Central Bank and one of the prime behind-the-scenes promoters of change. He was talking about the need for economic reform, but he might just as well have been referring to the world of diplomacy, security and ideology.

The world is creeping into Israel in a variety of ways and at an accelerating pace. Almost half the country is wired to a cable television network that brings in Turkish melodramas, nude German quiz shows and news programs that originate everywhere from Atlanta to Hong Kong to Moscow. Even if the languages are not well understood, the images have expanded Israel’s visual landscape enormously.

Consumer products from abroad have begun to infiltrate the Israeli market as trade barriers fall. Italian spaghetti fills supermarket shelves; a full range of Japanese cars dominate showrooms. Pepsi-Cola made its debut in Israel with an advertising campaign that suggested its drinkers have arrived at the highest form of evolution. (Orthodox Jewish leaders raised a protest because, in their view, the ads supported Darwin’s theory of evolution rather than biblical accounts of creation.)

The massive immigration from the former Soviet Union has injected a heavy dose of pragmatic, less religious thinking into a country that had been seen drifting toward a heavily ideological, right-wing, religiously orthodox society.

Meanwhile, the world stage has changed so much that Israeli leaders have been hard-pressed to define a role for their country. On the one hand, Israel has expanded its diplomatic relations broadly to include such giants as Russia, China and India. On the other hand, the end of the Cold War stripped Israel of its key role as a “strategic asset” in the Western united front against the Soviet Union.

The kind of world conflict shaping up--economic competition between the main economic powers--seems to leave Israel on the sidelines. In any case, Israel’s declining military value, emphasized by its spectator role in the Persian Gulf War, has reduced its diplomatic clout, at least in Washington.

The Bush Administration sees itself as neutral referee in the Middle East; for Israel, this represents deterioration in its position. The American stewardship is being played out in the Middle East peace talks, in which Washington insists that Israel give up territory in return for peace and security agreements. The formula cuts into Likud’s hope of keeping all the land conquered in the 1967 Middle East War and occupied ever since.

A military buildup in the Middle East has forced Israel to take a greater interest in multilateral arms control. Keeping a technological advantage over its adversaries is proving more and more costly--and may not be possible--as off-the-shelf advanced arms become widely available.

“Israel had made arms control proposals in the past, but the possibility was considered far off. The rapid buildups make it a topic for the here and now,” said Dore Gold, a government adviser.

American influence on Israel is far from limited to the diplomatic sphere.

The kind of pressures for reform being put on former East Bloc countries are being thrust on Israel. The Shamir government has asked Washington to underwrite $2 billion in economic development loans each year for the next five years. The backing would make the loans cheaper and easier to obtain. Approval has been held up, primarily because of the dispute between the Bush Administration and Israel over Shamir’s settlement policy. Bush wants construction frozen. However, there are other factors at work.

The slow pace of economic reforms--the selling off of state-owned businesses, a reduction in the welfare state--has become an issue, with Washington pressing for free-market reforms much like those being imposed on Eastern Europe. Frenkel, the Central Bank head, resists suggestions that the loans will be conditioned on reform, but he strongly suggests that Israel should clean up its house.

“We will have to design a clear policy that will make it worthwhile to increase debt. The loans are only good if we are prepared to use them properly,” he advised.

Likud, as the party in power, suffers from a lackluster economic performance punctuated by corruption in several ministries. Horse trading for votes in Parliament to keep the support of religious parties has riled secular voters.

Many traditional Likud voters--a good number of whom are entering the middle class--are looking for a place to put their trust. The so-called floating votes, along with the ballots of new Russian immigrants, are the keys to the election.

Shlomi Halabani, a former police officer and Likud supporter who now owns a restaurant and parking lot, is reluctant to vote Likud again. “They’ve been in power for too long. They spend money and no one knows what they do with it,” he said.

Would he give Labor a try? “Rabin is all right,” he said. “But they don’t make clear what they’re going to do.”

Historically, it is not uncommon for Likud to trail as election day approaches, and polls indicated that up to one-third of the voters are still undecided.

Harry Wall, who heads the Anti-Defamation League office in Jerusalem, tells of a taxi driver, who during a $5 trip, floated from Likud to Labor to a minor party and back again. “Now that’s a floating vote,” said Wall.