Nonetheless, it is no simple matter to dislodge Netanyahu from power after he has won three general elections over the past decade on his security record.
He did so on previous occasions by vanquishing the country's founding Labour party, which has traditionally presented itself as centre-left. Over time, faced with an unassailable Netanyahu, Labour leaders stopped paying lip service to the Oslo peace accords they signed a quarter of a century ago.
Instead, they began to champion illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory nearly as vociferously as the ruling Likud party.
This time, there are no left-leaning parties in the running. This is a straightforward slugging match between the right wing (Gantz) and the even more right wing (Netanyahu).
For most of the campaign, the two parties have been neck and neck. To form the next government, Netanyahu or Gantz must forge deals with much smaller parties in the 120-member parliament to gain a majority.
Netanyahu will need a mix of the far-right and religious-extremist factions he has previously relied on to clear the 61-seat threshold. To help, he has invited into a future coalition Jewish Power the rebranded fascists of Kach, a party that was outlawed more than 20 years ago.
Gantz, on the other hand, is caught in an electoral trap. He will either have to out-right-wing Netanyahu to win over these same extremist parties, or secure the backing of Jewish centre-left groups and parties representing Israel's Palestinian citizens, a fifth of the population.
Bearing in mind his military career, Gantz risks alienating his core support if he suggests a readiness to enter into a deal with the Zionist left or with the country's Palestinian minority.
Netanyahu understands Gantz's bind. At the last election, in 2015, the Israeli prime minister warned on polling day that "the Arabs" Israel's own Palestinian citizens were "coming out in droves" to vote. He added that the Jewish left was supposedly "bussing them" to polling stations.
Throughout this campaign, Netanyahu has fanned similar flames. During a recent TV interview, he accused the Palestinian parties of supporting terrorism. He has even characterised the possibility of loose, informal support from Palestinian legislators for a Gantz-led government as "working to eliminate the state of Israel".
In a recent interview Gantz also said the Palestinian leadership in Israel "speaks out against the State of Israel, so I cannot have a political discourse with it". He has said he will sit only with parties that are "Jewish and Zionist".
Meanwhile, Yair Lapid, a former TV news host and Gantz's electoral partner, voted along with Likud to ban two Palestinian parties already in the parliament from running in the election. The decision was overturned in the courts.
None of this has been lost on Israel's Palestinian voters. They have had to sit through an allegedly ironic campaign video by the current justice minister, Ayelet Shaked, of the settler-allied New Right party, in which she sprays herself with a perfume labelled "Fascism".
They have also seen Oren Hazan, a legislator in Netanyahu's Likud party, emerging from a bubble bath, in a James Bond parody video, to shoot dead a lookalike of a leading Israeli-Palestinian politician.
In Nazareth, the largest Palestinian city in Israel, it has been hard to discern that an election is just around the corner. There have been few posters or rallies, and no excitement. According to a late poll, half of Palestinian voters in Israel intend to stay home.
In part, that reflects a protest at the Nation-State Basic Law, passed last summer, which made explicit Israel's self-definition as a Jewish state: that Palestinians can never properly be Israeli citizens and that they will always be viewed as unwelcome interlopers.
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