Tel Aviv - It was just three years ago that the Likud crashed as Israel's ruling party, losing more than two thirds of its 38 mandates in the Knesset.

That was shortly after Israel's unilateral pullout from the Gaza Strip. At the time, many Israelis still supported the withdrawal and voted for the new centrist party founded by Ariel Sharon, who had initiated it.

Sharon had broken away from the Likud, where hardline rebels opposed to the pullout had tied his hands, to form Kadima. The new centrist party won the March 2006 elections even after the popular hawkish leader turned pragmatist fell into a coma following a stroke and was succeeded by Ehud Olmert.

But three years on, Netanyahu's Likud is making a flamboyant comeback. The 59-year-old former premier is leading in the opinion polls. Even if against all expectations he does not win, his Likud expects at the very least to double its current 12 mandates in the 120-seat Israeli parliament.

"The explanation is called Hamas," Reuven Hazan, a professor in political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, states simply, asked to explain the hardline party's comeback.

"There's no (peace) partner and the Palestinian people are split. One half doesn't recognize Israel's right to exist and that is the half that is strengthening," he says of the radical Islamist movement ruling Gaza. The other half - moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas now only in control of the West Bank - is too weak.

"The policy of the left to conduct negotiations - the public is seeing it as not realistic," he explains. "The policy of unilateral withdrawal is now seen as dangerous."

Netanyahu has missed no opportunity to remind Israelis of his warnings that the unilateral pullout from Gaza would backfire. Although he does not use the words "I told you so," he does not have to.

Today, many regard the pullout - which is seen as allowing Hamas to take-over and only witnessed an increase in rocket attacks from the strip - as a mistake.

"When they (Palestinian militants) fire, there is a tendency to move to the right," says Hazan.

Not only Kadima is identified with "the policy of unilateral withdrawal," so is Defence Minister Ehud Barak of the left-to-centre Labour Party, who unilaterally pulled Israeli troops from a self- declared "security zone" in southern Lebanon when he was premier in May 2000.

Many in Israel now believe that the attacks against Israeli soldiers in Lebanon by the radical Shiite Hezbollah movement served as the inspiration for Palestinian militant attacks seeking to drive Israel from both the West Bank and Gaza.

The rise of Hamas, which won legislative elections held in the Palestinian autonomous areas in January 2006, just three months before the last Israeli elections, has weakened the left-wing bloc in Israel.

Kadima's response to the Hamas victory was to promise another unilateral withdrawal from parts of the West Bank and to draw Israel's final borders without negotiations.

But with that no longer regarded by many Israelis as a viable solution based on the Gaza experience, many former Likud voters who supported Kadima in the past elections are returning to their previous home.

Asked if they are not afraid their vote for Netanyahu would dash any hopes for progress in the peace process in the coming years, given his hardline stance, many counter: What peace process?

Centrists also point at the conventional wisdom in Israel that it takes a dove to sell a war, but a hawk to make peace.

It was former premier Menachem Begin of the Likud who signed the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt. And of course it was Sharon, previously regarded as the father of the Israeli settlement movement in the occupied territories, who pulled Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, they point out.

Meanwhile, not only the Likud, but the right-wing bloc in general is gaining in strength. While a minority with 50 seats in the outgoing Knesset, the bloc is now expected to become a clear majority.

Profiting most from the shift to the right after the Likud is the extreme-right Israel Beteinu (Israel Our Home) of Russian- immigrant Avigdor Lieberman. For the first time, it could according to opinion polls become the fourth-largest party in the new Knesset - or even the third-largest ahead of Labour - apparently drawing from the traditional protest vote against the more mainstream parties.

Asked to explain his choice, Danny, a construction worker in Tel Aviv, sums up what many Likud supporters feel. As he takes another bite of his sandwich in a diner in the centre of the city, he shrugs:

"He is strong." (dpa)