ON THE main roads and side streets of East Jerusalem, where the walls were plastered until recently with the anti Israeli graffiti of the Intifada, the plump, bespectacled faces of the various Palestinian election candidates now gaze out benevolently from row upon row of campaign posters.
The enterprising campaigners have even stuck up posters on the pillars outside the big, modern Israeli post office on Sultan Suleiman street. There some of East Jerusalem's voters will cast their ballots in the first democratic Palestinian elections next Saturday.
Supporters of Hamas, the radical Islamic movement which violently opposes the peace process with Israel, have been doing their best to urge an election boycott. And the Israeli security forces, and Mr Yasser Arafat's Palestinian security apparatus, are fearful that Hamas will actively attempt to disrupt the election campaign as it gathers pace this week - by bombing an Israeli target, to avenge the recent assassination of the chief Hamas bomb maker, Yihya Ayash, in Gaza.
But though tens of thousands of West Bankers and Gazans have attended memorial rallies for Ayash in recent days, and many observed a Hamas ordered three day trade strike in mourning last week, Palestinian analysts believe a high proportion of the million plus Palestinians with voting rights will cast their ballots on January 20th. And though Hamas's opposition will have an impact, a bigger enemy of the democratic process may turn out to be voter confusion.
Belatedly realising that many of these first time voters are somewhat baffled by the logistics of voting. Mr Arafat's Palestinian Authority has been printing and feverishly distributing tens of thousands of explanatory leaflets, taking out full page ads in the Palestinian press and repeatedly airing how to vote commercials on radio and TV. And, in truth, there's quite a lot of explaining to be done - what with separate votes for president and for candidates to the 88 seat Palestinian National Council, and the added confusion of some seats being safeguarded for Christian and other minority candidates.
Many candidates report that, rather than quizzing them incisively on their personal platforms, voters are more often asking questions about the procedures for actually casting their votes. When Mr Abu Khaled, a veteran PLO fighter running for election in the Bethlehem district, arrived to address a rally in the Dehaishe refugee camp on Saturday, he was asked several times by anxious locals whether, by casting ballots in the camp, they would be forfeiting their claims to return to village land confiscated by the Israelis.
Given the prevailing confusion, and the difficulties many candidates are experiencing in publicising their campaigns, it's no surprise to find some resorting to that low political trick: scattering empty campaign promises. One Gaza candidate, Mr Sami Abu Obeid, says that a vote for him is a vote to replace the donkey carts that provide a main means of transport in his Rafah border town with cars and motorbikes "just like in Switzerland"; this changeover is to be funded with unlikely vast infusions of US and Israeli aid.
Another candidate, Mr Harbi Bdeir, promises a Japanese style economic boom and offers the novel idea of taking over the international airline food business. Unfortunately, Gaza currently lacks what would seem to be a basic requirement for cornering the airline meals market: an airport.