Israelis convinced themselves that this was to be the dull election, the one marked by record low turnout and apathy. A people who complain they live in a land with too much history seemed in no mood to make some more. But make it they have. On Tuesday they voted to reject once and for all the ideology that had dominated the state for more than three decades, the belief that somehow all the territories conquered in 1967 could be absorbed into a Greater Israel. That maximalist version of Zionism had been under assault since early 2004, when former prime minister Ariel Sharon announced his plan to withdraw from Gaza, but the Israeli public had never formally voiced its view.
On Tuesday they did. The Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, who had campaigned as the keeper of the Greater Israel flame, said this election would be a referendum on the future of those conquered lands. In which case Israelis gave their verdict with a clear voice: It's time to let go of most of them.
For Likud was outpolled by the combination of Kadima and Labour, two parties committed, in different ways, to pulling out of most of the West Bank. Both ran on platforms once associated with the peace movement, arguing that Israel could not rule over another people, that the attempt to retain all of the West Bank would destroy the country from within. On Sunday I heard Haim Ramon, one of the key strategic brains behind Kadima, describe the occupation as a "cancer." Language once confined to leftist intellectuals is now the argot of Israel's rulers.
You can see how much has changed when you meet those who stand to lose most. On Monday I visited Psagot, a settlement in the heart of the West Bank that, from its hilltop perch, looms over Ramallah. It falls on the wrong side of Israel's security barrier, or wall, which most assume will mark the boundary between those bits of the West Bank the new government will seek to keep and those it will give back to the Palestinians. The word of the hour is hitkansut, a warm, rather cuddly term that translates as convergence or consolidation, but which has a sense of ingathering, even huddling together. Ehud Olmert uses it to describe what he wants to do with the Jewish presence on the West Bank: To consolidate it into a few large settlement blocs behind the new boundary, dismantling the rest of the settlements and evacuating their residents. That will be some 70,000 people, nearly 10 times the number Sharon removed from Gaza last August.
In Psagot I sat with Pinchas Wallerstein, mayor of a regional council that represents 40,000 settlers. His office wall was covered with a single giant map -- one that confirms Psagot's place on Olmert's list for removal. Wallerstein's words were bullish. Olmert will never be able to carry out his plan, he said; Kadima will soon break up; the Israeli electorate will not tolerate more scenes like those last month, when troops and settlers clashed violently during the forced evacuation of the West Bank outpost of Amona.
optimistic
Still, his mood belied those words. Was he optimistic that places like Psagot would survive?
"We're going to have to work very hard," he said.
Trying to sound upbeat, he insisted that, at a minimum, 40 percent of Israelis were on his side. But there's the rub. There was a time when the settlers would have claimed not only to speak for the Israeli majority, but to be heroes to the rest of the nation. Now they are regarded as wild-eyed extremists who stand between regular Israelis and a quiet life.
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