"The Longest Yawn"

IT HAD BEEN BILLED AS THE GRAND BATTLE OF THE Yitzhaks: a robust election campaign pitting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir against the toughest foe he has faced -- the former and newly returned head of the Labor Party, Yitzhak Rabin. Instead, the fight has shriveled into what the Jerusalem Post last week called "the Longest Yawn." Voters are so overcome with ennui that the major parties are canceling campaign events for lack of attendance. Posters and banners can hardly be seen in the streets. And Shamir's Likud is moaning that the Venezuelan soap opera Crystal is drawing the party's natural constituency away from the nightly dose of televised party propaganda.

The principal source of the rampant indifference is that nobody expects the June 23 voting to really change anything. For some time, the opposition Labor Party has been running well ahead of Shamir's Likud in the polls; the latest surveys give the parties, respectively, 42 and 33 places in the 120-seat Knesset. But because neither organization has anything close to a majority, some kind of coalition is inevitable, as has always been the case in Israeli elections. And when the big two parties are grouped with their natural alignment partners, they are running neck and neck.

The result may be another national-unity government, with Labor and the Likud sharing power, as they have already done twice in the past, after tight elections in 1984 and 1988. With Labor likely to be the larger grouping, Rabin may replace Shamir as Prime Minister. But the two men's policies are so similar that such a prospect elicits little excitement. No wonder many voters are more interested in knowing whether Victoria, the Caracas fashion mogul, will discover that her new model, Crystal, is actually the daughter she conceived with a priest-in-training and gave up for adoption long ago.