(May 18) - Modi'in, the country's City of the Future, participated in its first national elections yesterday. Residents started moving in right after the 1996 elections; now there are 23,000 people in town.

As of mid-afternoon, rival campaign volunteers had torn down each others signs, and there had been a few shouting matches between them, a policeman said. No violence. Nothing serious.

Near the Green Line, midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Modi'in is a young, middle-class town clean, green, meticulously planned, overwhelmingly secular, and with an Ashkenazi majority. In other words, Barak Country.

Sitting at One Israel headquarters, local council head Moshe Schechter, a veteran Labor man, said he anticipated a 60 percent vote for party leader Ehud Barak. This seemed a surprisingly low figure, since Labor and Meretz hold 12 out of 13 seats on the council, with the National Religious Party in the remaining one.

Yet Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's forces seemed to be putting up a respectable show. Until about three weeks ago, Netanyahu seemed to be winning the war of the election posters on Modiins balconies. But then Barak's campaign just covered the stone walls of the city. My neighbor put up a Bibi poster, and after awhile the whole street surrounded him with Barak. About two weeks ago his wife took down the poster.

That's what you call peer pressure, said Kobi Or, 47, an Education Ministry social worker.

It was hot and crowded inside the Hayovel School voting station, but nobody pushed, cut in line or even raised his voice. A few political debates ensued.

Mordechai knew all along he was going to drop out of the race. And he has the nerve to tell Bibi to look him in the eye, said one man. Bibi's the last person to preach to anybody about credibility, retorted the man in front of him.

In the front yard of One Israel headquarters, a volunteer said, Look at that, and pointed to the water tower atop a ridge in the distance. Barak workers were spreading a giant-sized Barak poster across the base of the tower. They had conquered the ridge. Barak's visage took a commanding view of Israel's City of the Future.

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